bound to please
A
seminar on American bookbinding history will occur next Friday at Bryn Mawr.
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Minsky in Iowa
The Third Life avatar of
Richard Minsky decended from a bizzard sweeping the vast wastes of the continental prairies with a bushy greybeard and checkered red wool visor cap. “Meet me at the Silver Car.” We were both standing there with phones, next to each other not recognizing each others apotheosis.
His lecture was magnificent! Object. Image, Metaphor and the kinetic/esthetic vibrations these elements of art encite and the elements that the artist, curator, critic must weigh and balance. Some fine art is decorative emphasizing object and image embodied in pattern. Some art is packed with metphor, just as Artworld Market, the attractive Second Life Minsky avatar knows as she adventures in a polynesian glade of Manhattan bringing book art to real communities that lack physical gravity. Just read her
SLArt magazine (second life art journal), the first rag on the streets there.
Richard sweeps across all the roles of practice; book arts professor, exhibit curator, rare book collector, printer, bibliographer, bookbinder. He has accomplished his expertise through diligent study, attentive production and political advocacy (he does not believe in “talent”). Yet he never simply challenges us in terms of the conventions of practice. He challenges us to excell in our own inventions.
blank look
Publishers are captive of the 20th century (not the 19th which was the inventive era of paradigm shift in communication technologies). They are captive of the time of the advent of screen based reading when print and screen differentiated themselves well. This was a golden age when the attributes and functionalities of both modes were clear.
The complexity of the current situation is the ability of screen transmission to mimic any reading mode or publishing mode without regard to inherent advantages or disadvantages. Mimic print is pretty dumb, but it can be done. One clue to the future of screen based reading is to see the screen, not as a print surrogate, but as a BLANK book with live connection to content occurring in the presence of the reader. I have a dozen ideas about this scenario, and I am an advocate for print reading!