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I received a copy of the book from Netgalley to review. Thank you for the opportunity.
I didn't really understand or enjoy this book as it felt disjointed and it lacked flow.
An OK book.

An innovative and creative narrative of art and Latinx identity, told through a range of formats - while it is an "acquired taste" of sorts, I really enjoyed it.

So hard to write a review of this, as I'm very much in two minds as to how I feel about this book. I found myself making endless notes and google searches whilst reading this and can only imagine the sheer volume of research / passion that must have gone into this book. I learned about and discovered some amazing art on the way.

I did however struggle to read it to the end. I found the story dragged a little for me which probably wasnt helped by attempting to read this during several covid lockdowns, etc. I think it's very much a case of "it's not you it's me". The writing style was pretty experimental, told through a series of essays, contested wikipedia entries, first person narratives and social media posts.

I will definitely be returning to this when the world is a little less crazy. After searching Yxta Maya Murray, I plan to pick up some of her short stories, which I have read so many great things about.

The right book for the right reader, not for me. I read about ½ of it before going to a more traditional book, which suits me better. I did love this author's book of short stories, but this one didn't work for me.

This is by an author who has written an uneven set (mixed quality) of novels. This is one is written in an unusual style that may take some getting used to, and will turn off some readers. The style matches, in many ways, the performance art that is the main character's career. I give the author a lot of credit for her creativity and imagination. For those looking for something different, and potentially challenging, this may be worth a try.

I really appreciate the ARC for review!!

Art Is Everything is a novel about art, creativity, relationships, sexual assault, gender, and race, written in an experimental style combining online essays, rants, and reviews along with search history. Amanda Ruiz is a performance artist in L.A. with a successful girlfriend, Xochitl, and plans for residencies and films to further her creative work. However, when Xochitl wants them to have a baby—which isn't compatible with Amanda's artistic plans—and Amanda's father dies, things start to fall apart, and it turns out that doing art and not selling out is much easier when you have people around you.

This is likely to be a divisive novel due to its style, with chapters that are rejected Yelp reviews and Instagram essays and no straightforward part of the narrative to return to between these. Personally, I found the structure worked really well, and there was plenty of the story built into Amanda's various online posts, meaning it felt like a clever way of playing with the amount people share online, even in unusual forums like reviews or things posted online for work. The art and philosophical criticism built in was interesting and gave a further sense of Amanda's mental state, in terms of distraction and looking for comparison with her own life. However, I found the actual story, and the lack of connections to any characters who aren't Amanda, harder to engage with, which was disappointing.

Art Is Everything is witty and imaginative, written in a distinctive way that tracks a breakdown through online posts, building a real portrait of the protagonist, a bisexual Chicana artist. I found my attention waning nearer the end of the book and the way the story is told leaves a lot up in the air (as you only get what Amanda posts online), but it is an enlightening read, even if just for what you learn from Amanda's rants and art reviews.

Art is Everything is one of the most experimental books I have ever read. At first I found it difficult to get into, but eventually, when I accustomed myself to the style, I began to enjoy it. I struggled to relate to Amanda in many ways, mostly due to her online rants (being more of a bottle-it-up person myself); however, those essays were (ranting aside) full of incredibly interesting information. For example, I had never heard the story of how dark the original Pretty Woman script was. This morning, I Googled it and discovered everything mentioned about it in Art is Everything is true. So, it was certainly an informative read as well as a thought-provoking one. On the latter side of things, the book explores many issues from the nature of art and the artist to dealing with sexual assault. In conclusion, I would say this is not a book that is going to appeal to all readers, but if you are willing to try something completely different and come at it with an open mind, Art is Everything is a book that will leave you with a lot to contemplate. It was a 3.5 star read for me.

Experimental novels much like experimental art so heavily featured in this one are very much an acquired taste. It might explain why I’m the first person rating and reviewing this novel on GR. I wasn’t sure about this book going in and took some chapter to get into it, it goes well beyond unconventional straight into the idiosyncratic territory. Told through a multitude of ranty essays, this is a story of a Mexican American (mostly) performance artist as she progresses creatively and personally, taking her from her mid 30s to early 40s. That’s fairly straight forward. The structure though is nowhere near that. The essays are somewhat disjointed, although kindly enough, chronological, in fact it appears they have been previously published one at a time and only now gathered into a novel. And so this novel experience (yes, that is a double entendre) is already unconventional, consisting of posted social media commentary, failed Wikipedia entries, business proposals, etc. all mainly on the subject of art, but all heavily interspersed with profoundly personal information as their author eagerly overshares with the world about her father’s death and the dissolution of her relationship with the love of her life among other things. On top of that all of these essays are done in a very much hyperverbal stream of consciousness fashion. So yeah, maybe a tough sell to general population, but the thing is…this book was kind of genius. After you get used to its unconventional style and its manic narrator, you have this magnificent plethora of information. Random knowledge, from great thinkers to, of course, great (and otherwise) artists, to movies, books and industry, it’s a work of a prodigiously erudite viciously intelligent hypercritical mind and it hits like a tornado, an unruly and undeniable force. Above all, it’s just so freaking smart, the kind of smart one might only aspire to in their only humble writing. It’s a strange thing, because the protagonist is someone I wouldn’t enjoy on a personal level, she’s much too much, exhaustingly so, as the love of her life learned in their 6 years together and subsequently did the only rational thing and left. The protagonist is an artist consumed with art, she pushes envelopes and people, self sabotaging and tilting at windmills and also perfectly legitimate glass ceilings, she cannonballs through life with a manic energy that is difficult to appreciate for those outside her and her art, fraught with meaning and message as it is, is controversially exclusive to only a certain type of art appreciation, but…but her mind is a thing of undeniable beauty in all its fiery misfires and luminous interconnectivity of thoughts and notions. I’m kind of in awe, which is, of course to say, I’m in awe of the author of this book, who is actually a law professor…what? You’d think for sure an art professor, but no, law. Mind you, she can teach art, based on this book, not just because of her vast knowledge of the subject, but because of how she explains it and makes it shine. Seriously, I don’t even actually like performance art and this book gave me an entirely new level of appreciation for it. Murray’s didactics make the featured art come to life and display relevance and significance that isn’t always obvious otherwise. Plus her use of language alone, the cleverly crafted sentences, the aggressive sapience of the ideas, the vocabulary, all of that…awesome, awesome, awesome. This book was so smart, it made the world seem all the dumber by comparison. It also had the same effect on other books I read subsequently. And, of course, our library has no books by the author. You’d think in their recent and quite rampant quest for inclusivity they’d grab something so ethnically and culturally diverse, but no. So at any rate, for all the things I loved about the book, it isn’t a perfect book and here’s why not…at some juncture the protagonist, who previously was against having babies so much she drove her beloved away, just a few years later finds herself pregnant and, despite a proper support network, source of income, partner, etc. decides to have the baby, which promptly turns her into a proper grown up with a proper job and all that. So fundamentally here, despite all its undeniable intellectual antiestablishment excellence, you have a novel about a woman who just needed a baby to complete her and turn her into a properly functional, more or less conventional adult. And that’s just…trite. And too f*cking easy by far for a novel about a person who has made an art out of avoiding the easy ways. So there’s that. Not great. But nowhere near enough to overshadow all that the novel accomplishes so spectacularly otherwise. And so (mostly) awesome it stands. For art education alone this was great. All the other edifying heavily opinionated ingeniously curated delights have tipped it into the awesome zone. Thanks Netgalley.