Book reviews: ‘One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This’ and ‘How to Be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art’

‘One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This’ by Omar El Akkad

Omar El Akkad’s new best-seller about the war on Gaza is “damn hard to put down,” said Dina Nayeri in The Guardian. “Powerful, angry, but always compelling in its moral logic,” it’s the anguished cry of a celebrated novelist and disillusioned U.S. citizen who has followed the daily horrors of the war from afar and couldn’t remain silent about the West’s complicity in the carnage. El Akkad, who was born in Egypt and raised in Qatar and Canada, worked as a foreign correspondent for Toronto’s Globe and Mail before he wrote the acclaimed novels American War and What Strange Paradise. Though he thoroughly condemns Hamas for its massacre of 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, he characterizes the response as eye-opening proof that the humanist ideals championed by the West have always been lies. I finished the book in two short sittings, and “by the end, my heart was drumming.”

Even at just 200 pages, “it is a demanding read—not for its prose but for what it asks of us,” said Lawrence Hill in The Globe and Mail. While writing, El Akkad monitored the war daily and wants us to face the realities engendered by Western support of Israel’s indiscriminate war: Children mutilated. Others starved to death. Parents burying limbs. Cities razed. Tens of thousands of noncombatants dead and almost all of the region’s 2.2 million residents displaced. And “El Akkad is right. The genocide is happening before our eyes.” He’s asking readers to demand an end to the violence, arguing that to succumb instead to the pressures to remain silent is to fail not only the war’s direct victims but also one’s own soul. “You are being asked,” he writes, “to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice.”

The book isn’t all polemic, said Fintan O’Toole in The New York Times. The personal memories El Akkad shares, “of family, of displacement, of being a suspect Muslim outsider in North America, of his years as a journalist covering, among other things, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” benefit from the time he’s had to reflect on them. They’re “wonderfully evoked.” But while his anger about Gaza leads him to portray the West as more hopeless than it is, his book is never just a one-note manifesto for the kind of U.S. voters who cited Gaza as a reason to sit out November’s presidential election. “One Day is much more than that. At its best, it is a probe into the murky depths of a collective consciousness shaped by the need to evade the daily evidence of political and environmental catastrophe.”

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‘How to Be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art’ by Morgan Falconer

Art historian Morgan Falconer is bored with contemporary art, and it’s easy to empathize, said Michael Patrick Brady in The Boston Globe. “Where once artists sought to disturb the complacency of polite society, today they seem more inclined to cater to it,” producing work that flatters elite sensibilities and sells to the elite at exorbitant prices. In a book that seeks a better path forward by looking toward the past, Falconer “takes readers on a tour of last century’s most radical avant-garde movements in search of inspiring examples that he hopes can shake us—or, maybe just him—from this torpor.” Revisiting futurism, surrealism, dada, Russian constructivism, and more, his “engrossing” survey is “full of colorful characters and winning personal touches.” And “like all good art, it ultimately raises more questions than it answers.”

“Falconer’s complaints will ring true for How to Be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art by Morgan Falconer (Norton, $33) many readers,” said Max Norman in The Wall Street Journal. “But his treatment of contemporary art is cursory.” He blames the art market for ruining art but never deeply examines how the art we do get has been distorted by money. Instead, he focuses on early avant-garde movements and how their ambition of abandoning art as traditionally perceived was quickly defeated. While “nothing is more emblematic of the avant-garde” than Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, the urinal the avowed dadaist presented on an exhibition pedestal in 1917, Falconer argues that the work failed because rather than erasing the wall separating art from everyday life, it reinforced it. Only because the urinal was labeled as art did the sight of it shock the world.

Though Falconer claims to love art, he seems “inexplicably exasperated by it,” said Orlando Whitfield in The New York Times. And when he looks to history, he “clearly finds it easier to write about people than ideas.” He does at least find evidence that avant-garde figureheads such as Duchamp often engaged in art-making that had nothing to do with art sales, and this reinforces his suggestion that the aspiration to “end art” could be the key to setting it free. Otherwise, he “never quite makes clear” which other ideas championed by past art rebels should galvanize today’s creators.