Time changes everything.
The players in most narratives stack their memories vertically, musing nostalgically on a linear past, clawing their way to the present and pontificating on some vague future. Despite its own chronological ordering, Challenging Art reveals how there are, in the end, only simultaneous layers of reality, arranged horizontally. Amy Newman has collaged a massive tome. She's more editor than author. In compiling interviews of 32 artists, critics, editors, curators and academics who were involved in this mammoth literary icon of the art world, she's lured us down circuitous roads.