My Art World: Recollections and Other Writings

When John Seed first glimpsed the art world, as a Stanford student in the late 1970s, he knew he had found his future. Mentored by Nathan Oliveira, introduced to collecting by Hunk and Moo Anderson and invited over by Richard Diebenkorn, Seed thought he had entered a world of sophistication and grace. Things got messy fast in the early 80s when painter Joan Brown told Seed “You need your ass kicked,” and Seed’s encounters with a young dealer named Larry Gagosian and his bad-boy protégé Jean-Michel Basquiat soon offered a walk on the wild side. Two years of working at the newly-opened Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles wised Seed up even more. Filled with first hand-glimpses—of artists as diverse as Robert Mapplethorpe and Rufino Tamayo—“My Art World” combines Seed’s recollections of his art world coming of age with his later acclaimed critical writings. It concludes with profiles of Bo Bartlett and Margaret Bowland, two contemporary artists whose sense of purpose Seed admires. Free of jargon and conversational in tone, “My Art World,” opens up a noted writer/critic’s private world of art and artists to the broader public.