Arts Agenda - French connections

Essayist Adam Gopnik appears at Art Papers Live!

Oscar Wilde once wrote that all good Americans go to Paris when they die. Adam Gopnik didn’t wait that long. In the fall of 1995, Gopnik, an art critic and essayist for The New Yorker, departed Manhattan with his wife, Martha, and infant son, Luke, fulfilling his lifelong dream of settling in the City of Lights. His experiences as an expatriate and struggling parent in a foreign city are documented in Paris to the Moon, published late last year by Random House.

Now on tour to promote the book’s recent paperback release, Gopnik comes to Atlanta Oct. 17 as part of Art Papers Live!, a series of lectures sponsored by Art Papers magazine. He’ll be conversing with David Moos, curator of contemporary art at the Birmingham Museum of Art, on the rather daunting and altogether Parisian topic of “Art and Society.” He’ll also sign copies of Paris to the Moon and offer a brief reading.

A collection of 23 essays, Paris to the Moon may remind readers of the author’s award-winning “Paris Journal” series for The New Yorker, though Gopnik notes early on that this work largely omits his previous writings on the subject. The author even includes a few “pensive and pessimistic” private journal entries, making the book a wholly personal, albeit intellectual and humorous, take on modern Parisian life.

-- TRAY BUTLER

Art Papers Live!, featuring a conversation with Adam Gopnik and David Moos, takes place at 7 p.m. Wed., Oct. 17, in the Rich Auditorium of the Woodruff Arts Center, 1280 Peachtree St. $5; free for students and Art Papers subscribers. 404-588-1837.??