How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves

Barbara Kruger once defined art as "the ability to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive." Testing that claim,How It Feels to Be Alivebraids criticism with personal narrative to consider art's intimate effects and how it might help us find clarity in an uncertain world.

When Megan O'Grady was a teenager, she saw a photograph in a museum that changed her life. At the end of an early marriage, art stoked new ways of thinking about connection and transfor...