When book becomes art
Author compilations now becoming lavish home decor items
We’re long past the moment when books would be purchased merely for their content and well into an era of book as objet — an adornment, decor feature, or even the hub from which a room’s esthetic might flow.
That’s a lot of expectation to tuck between two covers, but many publishers have risen to the challenge of meeting the need. Boutique houses such as Taschen and Rizzoli specialize in the luxe edition, making bigger and more lavish books on anything from home design to the complete works of Hieronymous Bosch, every season.
And then there are those that don’t so much cross the line as wing past it with such speed that they vanish beyond the horizon — and along with it goes the price. In some cases, fair enough: this isn’t a book, it’s a symbol, whether of taste, style or in some cases, wealth, and bigdollar published efforts cover both ends of the spectrum, from a completist’s commitment to higher learning to lavish empty spectacle.
In the former camp is the Catalogue Raisonné. Literally a published volume of every single known work to exist by a single artist, the catalogue in recent years has become a fetish object for the learned to display as a symbol of their learnedness.
Catalogues Raisonnés from such icons as Mark Rothko typically stretch several volumes (Vol. 1 alone of Rothko’s was more than 700 pages and cost more than $200) and feature full-colour plates of works alongside exhaustive scholarly context. Their cost represents not just the labour-intensity of producing it, which takes years of research and acquiring publication rights for each and every work, but the limited print run (even for a giant like Rothko, those with a need to know every detail of every stroke of brush, outside academia, are few). They are, in their own right, relatively rare objects, and the price reflects it.
On the other end of things, you have the garish spectacle: Taschen’s SUMO-sized series, which includes such things as a table-sized tome of Annie Liebowitz’s photographs (at $3,300, complete with its own Marc Newson-designed tripod), or a similar-scale volume of Helmut Newton’s (complete with Philippe Starck stand), weighing in at 30 kilos — and $26,000. (The publisher also offers megavolumes of photography of the Rolling Stones, ranging from $6,500 to $26,000.)
Granted, without some exclusivity attached, the price could scarcely be justified, and all are limited editions of 10,000, each of them numbered and signed by the author. Whether or not it’s worth it depends on how you view it: book, or art object? The line gets hazier all the time.