Quick Facts About the Book
- Title: The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing
- Author: Adam Moss
- Published: 2024
- Publisher: Penguin Press
- Format: Visually rich, large-format hardcover with full-color illustrations
- Content: 43 interviews with artists across genres + personal footnotes + hundreds of sketches and process images
- Design Features: Talmudic footnotes, memoir fragments, typographic layering, documentary visuals
- Scope of Artists: Writers, painters, filmmakers, designers, sandcastle builders, puzzle masters
- Distinction: New York Times Bestseller, critically acclaimed for originality and depth
- Intended Audience: Artists, creatives, cultural thinkers, and lovers of form-breaking nonfiction
Some books arrive with the quiet clarity of inevitability. The Work of Art, Adam Moss’s first and deeply personal venture into authorship, is one of them. Written after leaving behind a storied career as editor-in-chief of New York magazine, the book explores not only the nature of creativity, but the moment when a curator of brilliance becomes the seeker of it.
Moss, long known for shaping what culture looks and sounds like on the page, found himself haunted by a question that had eluded his career in criticism: what does it actually feel like to make something truly from nothing? In search of an answer, he did what editors do best: he asked others. The result is a dazzling, polyphonic exploration of creativity across 43 disciplines and artists from Tony Kushner to Sofia Coppola, Barbara Kruger to Moses Sumney.
But The Work of Art is not just a compendium of interviews. It is, first and foremost, a work of vulnerability: Moss’s own unsuccessful attempts at painting serve as the emotional architecture for the entire project. In his self-deprecating introduction, he admits, “It didn’t go well,” and confesses the obsessive spiral of artistic frustration that led him to pose the book’s central question not just to the artists, but to himself.
Visually, the book is a feat of form. With hundreds of process images, coffee-stained sketches, incomplete outlines, scribbled notes, and layered footnotes, it is a tactile journey through the chaos and symmetry of the artistic mind. Moss’s editorial finesse shines in the orchestration of this chaos. His voice, rather than dominating the narrative, seeps in through footnotes that range from humorous to meditative to self-exposing, forming a kind of Talmudic conversation between artists’ answers and the author’s internal dialogue.
The physical design of the book reinforces its thesis: that creativity is messy, often unfinished, rarely linear and still always worth the work. It feels as though the reader is being led through a beautifully disordered studio, one where each canvas speaks, each note hums, and each stain carries significance. Half museum, half confessional, the book is a sustained meditation on the labor, fear, futility, and rare moments of transcendence that make up a creative life.
The charm and weight of the book come from its refusal to simplify. There is no single process, no universal “Eureka” moment. There is, instead, work glorious, obsessive, sometimes tormented work. And in that labor, Moss finds an answer to his original question, one he didn’t expect: the act of making itself is the meaning.
Adam Moss – A Life Built from Culture
To understand The Work of Art, one must first understand its author: a man whose entire professional life has been about other people’s brilliance. Adam Moss began his career humbly, as a copy boy at The New York Times in the 1980s, eventually climbing through the ranks at Rolling Stone and Esquire before launching his own ill-fated but respected magazine, 7 Days, in 1988. It was in the editing room that he found his métier: a kaleidoscopic curiosity, a love of fragmented formats, and a genius for visual storytelling.
From 2004 to 2019, Moss transformed New York magazine into one of the most celebrated media platforms of its era. Under his tenure, it won more National Magazine Awards than any other publication. He was known not only for editorial vision but also for the daring visuals and inventive formats that prefigured the layered, artifact-rich structure of The Work of Art. His time at New York was not just a chapter, it was a masterclass in curating culture with agility, nuance, and boldness.
Yet, when Moss left that world in 2019 to pursue painting, he was met not with peace, but paralysis. What had come so easily in editing taste, clarity, judgment evaporated when the brush was in his own hand. His disillusionment as a painter became the raw material for his book. This tension between being a master presenter of artists and a struggling artist himself animates every page.
In candid footnotes, he writes of his avoidance of writing, of fearing the solitude it required, of the “little monsters that come out in your head” when left alone with the page. And yet, it is precisely this reluctant, wounded vulnerability that makes the book such a human document. It is not a lecture. It is a confession of sorts, written by someone who has curated greatness and now seeks to understand how it is born.
His interviews are not cold journalistic documents, but warm, disarming conversations. His status as a “fanboy,” as he self-effacingly calls himself, allows the book to become a safe space for artists to speak not as icons but as people. And in this intimacy, Moss bridges the gap between the myth of the artist and the reality of creative labor.
Ultimately, The Work of Art could only have been written by someone like Moss: a man who has spent a lifetime surrounded by genius, only to discover that the most important insights come not from presentation, but from participation. His transition from editor to creator, from observer to seeker, forms not just the premise of the book but its most beautiful truth.
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