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  • Published: 3 October 2024
  • ISBN: 9781802062526
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

Poor Artists




A moving, eye-opening journey through the world of contemporary art from one of the most innovative voices in the field

At a moment in which working as a professional artist is an increasingly unattainable luxury, art criticism duo The White Pube investigate why so many artists try anyway. Labelled "the Diet Prada of the art world" by British Vogue, in Poor Artists writers Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad ridicule a contemporary art world that has turned art into artworks, art schools into art universities, and creative expression into cut-throat competition.

Poor Artists follows aspiring artist Quest Talukdar as she embarks on a surreal journey into the creative industry, where she must decide whether she cares more about success or staying true to herself. Featuring dialogue from anonymous interviews with real people who have all had to ask themselves the same question – including a Turner Prize winner or two, a recluse, a Venice Biennale fraudster, a communist messiah, a ghost, and a literal knight – The White Pube tell the story of art like never before.

  • Published: 3 October 2024
  • ISBN: 9781802062526
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

Praise for Poor Artists

Praise for

The White Pube

Female duo the White Pube have the energy and opinions to liven up an art world full of stale, male voices … their frank political stance is clearly resonating with a younger audience in a way traditional art publications aren’t able to

Kate Goh, Guardian

Their genre of "embodied criticism" aims to redefine what we consider worthy of our aesthetic attention … making judgements about art with their guts rather than their heads, with feelings rather than facts

Kitty Grady, Vogue

The White Pube presents one of the first truly new voices in British art criticism in the twenty–first century … informal yet stylistically innovative, art historically rigorous without the staid academicism or florid pomposity of much established writing, the pair’s mix of reviews, essays, podcasts, and social media posts are bound together with a singular critical voice grappling with contemporary issues of race, gender, sexuality, aesthetics and ethics

Morgan Quaintance, e-flux

Their criticism verges on storytelling, and not only makes art approachable but offers a refreshingly current model for interacting with it

Akash Chohan, SSENSE

Reviews, essays, and podcasts on contemporary art that break down power structures within the industry, injecting the stuffy, exclusionary language of criticism with some much-needed personality (and lols)

Lexi Manatakis, Dazed 100

The art world memoirs for our Internet generation that none of us knew we needed but now we can’t live without. An indispensable read giving insights on an ‘art world’ at the edge of collapse. Living for it

Legacy Russell, author of <i>Glitch Feminism </i>

This book might change the way you look at art, or change the way you feel it . . . I love the energy, deep humour and alive thought in Poor Artists, which zooms through galleries, universities, a hospital ward, and a spaceship, capturing what is tragic, and what’s glorious, about art and the world right now

Daisy Hildyard author of <i>Emergency </i>

Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad have crept in through the back door of the artworld and left it open for the rest of us. This is a landmark for art writing — a treatise on the difference between art’s right to mystify and confound, and the crimes of an industry that discriminates and excludes

Nathalie Olah, author of <i>Bad Taste </i>

'I was surprised, challenged and affirmed - everything I love in a book . . . There are a lot of superlatives I could throw at Poor Artists, yet I finished the book overwhelmingly grateful that it exists. The White Pube continue to be a duo that add such a refreshing, thoughtful and critical but fun voice to an often stale art world. Poor Artists is that in tenfold

Travis Alabanza, author of <i>None of the Above</i>

The self-styled cowboy critics shaking up the art world establishment . . . TWP illuminates the way art institutions alienate large swathes of the population, and magnify the structural inequalities of the wider world

Kitty Grady, Vogue

The White Pube have the energy and opinions to liven up an art world full of stale, male voices ... their frank political stance is clearly resonating with a younger audience in a way traditional art publications aren't able to

Katie Goh, Guardian
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