A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World

I bought this book for a class and enjoyed reading it. Marcia Tucker was a fascinating individual in the museum world. The book arrived on time in the condition described by the seller.

I stayed up most of the night reading this book the day it arrived at our house, and the next day my partner did the same. If you are a woman professional in your 60s interested in the arts, I bet you will have the same response. I assume just about everyone else will enjoy this book also. With none of the proper credentials in a time when a woman, even with those credentials, could expect little from the patrician New York art world, Tucker simply forged ahead, determined to follow her own interests and with a flair for developing friends and mentors with the money and power to enable her to realize her vision. As John Baldessari quips, only Marcia when fired by one major museum [the Whitney] would respond by starting her own museum. To thine own self be true has become a hackneyed phrase. Marcia in this always amusing memoir reminds us that this need not be true. A passion for a subject and a determination to pursue that passion despite not knowing where it will lead provides the basis for the memoir and her life. The book ends as she dies of cancer at a relatively young age, but even this ending is not particularly sad. She led a full and challenging life right to the end. How many of us can really say that?

Brilliant. Philosophical and personal, touching, funny, sexy, eye-opening, compelling. Anyone interested in women, or in art, or in women in art will find a treasure here. If you didn't know Marcia, you will after reading this extraordinary memoir. If you did, as I did, you'll be reminded once again how much you miss her.

I tend to be an escapist in literature and rarely venture into non-fiction, so I was surprised by how engaging this book was for me. I was fascinated by the personal depiction of a very exciting time period--especially in the art world and in the early struggles of feminism. Most of all I was delighted to experience this vibrant, gutsy, indomitable personality. Recommended definitely!

After being fired from the Whitney Museum of American Art, Marcia Tucker (1940-2006) founded the New Museum of Contemporary Art, where she was the director from 1977 to 1999. She was also a frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, Art in America, Art Forum, and ARTnews, among other publications. Tucker was known as an artistic rebel. In the 1980's it was rumored that she belonged to the gorilla-masked Guerrilla Girls, a feminist watchdog group of the art world. No stranger to artistic controversy, she organized major exhibitions including The Time of Our Lives (1999), A Labor of Love (1996), and Bad Girls (1994), and exhibited a boulder from the World Trade Center site. In her engaging memoir, A Short Life of Trouble, Tucker describes a vibrant period in the New York art scene from the mid-1960s to 2000, including her friendships and encounters with famous artists like Bob Dylan, Marcel Duchamp, James Rosenquist, Lee Krasner, Andy Warhol, Joan Mitchell, and Bruce Nau. Tucker's memoir is candid, witty, saucy, spirited, and insightful. Recommended. G. Merritt