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A review by lizshayne
A Spectral Hue by Craig Laurance Gidney
4.0
Today's episode of "what did I just read?" but in a good way.
Bold of Gidney to write a book about the imaginative use of color among a centuries-spanning collection of artists where all you're ever doing is trying to imagine what's going on. (Granted, that's also the point and the impossibility of the color is not just its place on the spectrum - in the sense that magenta doesn't exist and that's it's just your brain trying to cope with two wave-lengths that ought to add up to green but are definitely not green and I'm quite sure Gidney knows that - but that the whole speculative element of the story relies on what can and can't be seen. So of course it's a book.)
The whole thing is unnerving like that, although Gidney is extremely careful to keep the story within the realm of the narratively comfortable even as the premise and the scenery gets more uncomfortable. But art about art is just...like that and this is, for all its incisive observations about what constitutes art rather than craft and knowledge (and its production) and queerness as it intersects with race, is art about art. And it's just like that.
Bold of Gidney to write a book about the imaginative use of color among a centuries-spanning collection of artists where all you're ever doing is trying to imagine what's going on. (Granted, that's also the point and the impossibility of the color is not just its place on the spectrum - in the sense that magenta doesn't exist and that's it's just your brain trying to cope with two wave-lengths that ought to add up to green but are definitely not green and I'm quite sure Gidney knows that - but that the whole speculative element of the story relies on what can and can't be seen. So of course it's a book.)
The whole thing is unnerving like that, although Gidney is extremely careful to keep the story within the realm of the narratively comfortable even as the premise and the scenery gets more uncomfortable. But art about art is just...like that and this is, for all its incisive observations about what constitutes art rather than craft and knowledge (and its production) and queerness as it intersects with race, is art about art. And it's just like that.