Poor Artists

By: The White Pube, Gabrielle de la Puente, Zarina Muhammad

Narrated by: Gillian Kearney

Brought to you by Penguin.

'Let me stay there, let me paint. Let me go to bed when the sun comes up. I don't want life to sharpen me.'

Why make art? Faced with a capitalist system that has turned art into artwork and creative expression into cut-throat competition, why do so many artists try anyway?

In this eye-opening journey through the bizarre world of contemporary art, criticism duo The White Pube tell the story of art like never before. Poor Artists follows aspiring artist Quest Talukdar through childhood obsessions, art school lessons and her professional debut. In surreal encounters with other artists, Quest learns profound truths about money and power, and must decide whether she cares more about success or staying true to herself.

Blending imaginative storytelling with dialogue from anonymized interviews with real people in the art world who have all had to wrestle with the same decisions – including a Turner Prize winner or two, a few ghosts, a Venice Biennale fraudster and a communist messiah – Poor Artists is a powerful testimony to the emotional, existential and financial experience of artists today.

'A landmark for art writing' Nathalie Olah

©2024 Gabrielle de la Puente, Zarina Muhammad and The White Pube (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

The art world memoirs for our Internet generation that none of us knew we needed but now we can’t live without. An indispensable read giving insights on an ‘art world’ at the edge of collapse. Living for it (Legacy Russell, author of Glitch Feminism )

'I was surprised, challenged and affirmed - everything I love in a book . . . There are a lot of superlatives I could throw at Poor Artists, yet I finished the book overwhelmingly grateful that it exists. The White Pube continue to be a duo that add such a refreshing, thoughtful and critical but fun voice to an often stale art world. Poor Artists is that in tenfold (Travis Alabanza, author of None of the Above)

This book might change the way you look at art, or change the way you feel it . . . I love the energy, deep humour and alive thought in Poor Artists, which zooms through galleries, universities, a hospital ward, and a spaceship, capturing what is tragic, and what’s glorious, about art and the world right now (Daisy Hildyard author of Emergency )

beautiful and uncomfortable

hard to listen to realities but written so beautifully i could not stop. im so happy there is a podcast

If you are an artist, you must listen to this

I was unsure about getting this book at first. I was aware of the podcast but had not listened to it.

My trepidation was soon swept aside as I listened to - and resonated with - a story I was all too familiar with as a "poor artist" myself.

This is not a "how to" or an outright biography, but a clever work of art itself that really puts creativity and the need to be a genuine artist in in the spotlight.

I wish I heard this earlier in my career.