How It Feels to Be Alive

A vital testament to how art makes us who we are—and offers new ways of seeing our world and our lives. Barbara Kruger once defined art as “the ability to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive.” Testing that claim, How It Feels to Be Alive braids criticism with personal narrative to consider art’s intimate effects and how it might help us find clarity in an uncertain world. When Megan O'Grady was a teenager, she saw a photograph in a museum that changed he