The Imaginary Museum


August 2020
TLS Books

Published6 August 2020 in a print edition, as an audiobook and in a Kindle edition. Click here to buy via the Harper Collins website.

– “The Imaginary Museum is the most inventive writing on art I’ve read in a long while. By inviting us into his made-up institution, Ben Eastham opens up a space for reflection on how contemporary art helps us make sense of ourselves and the world around us. This is a brilliant book – a museum in the form of a parable.” (Lauren Elkin)

– “Ben Eastham is a critic with intelligence, verve and delirious wit, and in this essay he makes a lovely experiment with art criticism: proposing contemporary art as a charmed space for us all to explore a radical and comical subjectivity – flâneurs freed from the illusion of connoisseurship.” (Adam Thirlwell)

– “The Imaginary Museum is a brilliantly funny and enlightening wander through the often-baffling corridors of the contemporary art world. I loved it.” (Jennifer Higgie)

– “A splendid journey through the brilliant thought-constellations that deftly gather shape and luminosity in the mind of a young art critic.” (Chloe Aridjis)

– “There’s no place I’d rather visit now than Ben Eastham’s Imaginary Museum.” (Jennifer Kabat)

Past

My Life as a Work of Art
with Katya Tylevich
September 2016

– “Mr. Eastham is the star of the show … a terrific, ferociously self-effacing writer … achingly funny.” (Wall Street Journal)
– “Passionate, original, perceptive.” (The Art Newspaper)
– “A witty and intelligent defence of contemporary art.” (Hans Ulrich Obrist)