Hilton Als on the Way We Live Now

Staged at The George Economou Collection in Athens, a new show co-curated by the author captures a sense of our fledgling but already turbo-charged century, featuring works by David Hockney, Jenny Saville, David Hammons and Louise Bourgeois and more

“To look through the work they built together is to understand what the great collectors call grace,” says Hilton Als, on the contemporary art assembled by Greek art collector George Economou, his daughter Alexandra and collection director Skarlet Smatana. For Als, their work brings to mind the great 20th-century patrons John and Dominique de Menil, whose love of art and artists was like “an act of faith”. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author is in Athens for the opening of an exhibition which he co-curated with Hammer Museum director emeritus Ann Philbin alongside Smatana to capture a sense of our fledgling but already turbo-charged century. Taken entirely from works in the collection, The Way We Live Now is titled after Anthony Trollope’s 1875 anatomy of a society drunk on the pursuit of capital and enthusiastic to unravel. “It’s a great book, a book about the smallness of man, and I wanted to use the title to talk, in a contradictory way, about the bigness of man,” explains Als. “Despite the smallness of the characters, something amazing happens that becomes bigger. One of the things that I really wanted in the title here was to talk about the ways in which things become bigger and resonate – and art has that great ability to take us to places that are bigger than ourselves.”

Structured around three loose themes – Intimacy, Politics and Being – the show opens with an arresting selection of recent paintings by Ellen Gallagher, Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Victor Man. Drawing the eye immediately on entering, though, is a large-scale painting from 1971 by David Hockney of his soon to be ex-lover, Peter Schlesinger, gazing out over a lush green vista from the terrace of a Marrakesh hotel. Though it was painted half a century ago, the work is freshly poignant in the wake of Hockney’s passing. “To me it’s the beginning of the show,” says Philbin. “The grief is not there yet, but the grief is coming on.” Book-ending the show is a sculpture in solid stainless steel by Charles Ray of a solitary unshod man bending to tie a non-existent shoelace. “It was always going to be a show that ended where it began, which is this idea of how artists express the feeling of wanting to be close to someone or wanting to be close to the medium. And how does the medium express love?” Als says.    

“Art has that great ability to take us to places that are bigger than ourselves” – Hilton Als

Known for devastating insights delivered in beautifully wrought sentences, Als brought his profound emotional acuity to bear on the selection of works, which range from a Louise Bourgeois sculpture of a giant vanity mirror with an audience of two empty chairs to a lovingly coiffed Rock Head by David Hammons. Belonging is the thread that winds through the show, with works that speak of the individual alone or trying to connect, in couples and family structures, across time and within a people. A witty sculpture by Katharina Fritsch of two men staring into their phones, oblivious to each other, stands close to a Jenny Saville painting of an intertwined couple haunted by their own forms. “How would you even define loneliness now? Is it an individual, or is it two people together not speaking to each other?” Als muses. “What is togetherness? That’s the question, I think, that the show opens up. And that might be a little bit frightening. It’s not a show about comfort to me, it’s a show that is about descriptions of loneliness and ideas of togetherness and the desire to connect.”    

Though he kept it to himself while working on the show, Als reveals that Susan Sontag’s 1986 story The Way We Live Now was another lodestar as he digested the works in the collection. “The other person that used this title was Susan Sontag for a story about AIDS, and the story structure is you never meet the person who’s suffering, it’s all people on the telephone, saying ‘I saw Jimmy today, and he’s getting a little bit better,’” Als elaborates. “That to me was also an emotionally guiding principle. I didn’t want anyone but me to know that at the time, because it wouldn’t have helped where we were as collaborators, but now that it’s done, it’s in there.”  

“I love when artists tell us who they are” – Hilton Als

It’s another fitting literary reference in light of Als’s forthcoming book, I Don’t Remember, a memoir of a significant friendship that developed in New York in the 1980s. “It’s about a friendship that I had with a great person – some of it was in The New Yorker – and the great thing about that experience was that his sister wrote to me and said, ‘You brought him back,’” he says. Working on the show was a welcome distraction from the process of writing, which was non-linear, but a lesson in what he tells his students: “It takes a long time to tell the truth.” 

While the works in the show tell us about our time, they also tell truths about the artists who made them. “There’s a great profile that was in The New Yorker years ago about David Hockney,” Als says, wherein its writer Anthony Bailey is told by Hockney’s family that the artist “can’t do feet.” It’s something Als himself couldn’t help remembering when faced with the painting of Peter Schlesinger, whose right boot is just noticeably off-kilter. “I love when artists tell us who they are,” he says. 

The Way We Live Now is on at The George Economou Collection in Athens until March 2027.