Sign-In
Cart
Randall: or The Painted Grape
Paperback
Publisher Price: $17.95
ISBN13: 9781966218029
Publisher: Tivoli Books
Published: Jan 15 2025
Pages: 296
Weight: 0.75
Height: 0.67 Width: 5.25 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Originally published in Britain, Randall is quite simply one of the shrewdest and most outrageous art-world novels in the English language. The eponymous artist at the book's center is a provocateur, a manipulator and a vandal-but also quite possibly a genius. Seen through the eyes of Vincent, his finance bro friend, admirer and rival in love, Randall is an artist for whom art is less an aesthetic challenge than a marketing problem, an act of aggression and a spoof (if also a consuming passion). Readers will be fascinated and appalled, but also faced with profound questions about art, commerce, and our debts to one another. As Vincent eventually discovers after his friend's death, there is a lot more to Randall than showmanship, and a lot more to his art than the funhouse mirror he holds up to the vanities around him. British reviewers raved. Now Americans can see what all the fuss was about.
Writing about the visual arts is usually as risky as sharing needles . . . But Gibbs has produced the sort of novel you pray for as a reviewer.
Tibor Fischer, The Guardian
An extremely funny satire of the dirty business of art curation, archiving, buying and selling . . . Slowly reveals itself as a moving account of friendship, love and loss . . . relayed in Gibbs' charming voice, rich in depth and confidence and as knowingly precise as the deftest of brush strokes.
Lee Rourke, The New Humanist
Gibbs's novel is more than mischief: as with all the best lampoons, it dissects things that really matter and have gone awry - in this case the relegation of artistic innovation to banal shock value . . . The characterisation is disarmingly sympathetic and the prose fluid and inventive, right up to the final, playful revelation.
Toby Lichtig, The Telegraph
Gibbs has worked a double shift, disguising a well-turned tale of family secrecy as an acerbic essay on recent cultural history without short-changing the demands of either.
Anthony Cummins, The Observer
Long awaited and worth the wait.
Geoff Dyer
Also from
Gibbs, Jonathan
Also in
Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales Vol. 1 (Loa #26): The Pioneers / The Last of the Mohicans / The Prairie
Cooper, James Fenimore
Hardcover
The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I: American Tabloid, the Cold Six Thousand; Introduction by Thomas Mallon
Ellroy, James
Hardcover
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk
St Aubyn, Edward
Paperback