Sally Eckhoff

What would you give to shoot the moon in the greatest city in the world?

F*ck Art (Let’s Dance) is a chronicle of ten slam-bang years in a very slam-bang part of New York City, and of one young painter's crusade to make that place her own.

This memoir, by a former Village Voice writer and critic, starts in 1977 with the Summer of Sam and ends with the Tompkins Square Park riots—two notorious incidents that defined an age. After a last, desperate summer in the beach towns of Long Island, the naive young wannabe artist borrows her dad’s El Camino, finances a trip to Manhattan with the change on his cufflink stand, and rents an apartment on East Tenth Street with a floor so crooked that everything that falls off the kitchen counter rolls under the bathtub. And then she begins to paint, eat, dance, and feel her way around New York.

F*ck Art might remind you of what it feels like to be a beginner in a land of crooks and geniuses.