The Art of the Book

The process of digitalizing artwork is occurring everywhere.  Not only are entire museum archives present online, but I can personally attest to obsessively documenting and backing up my own images to the extent that both two hard drives and two flash drives would have to crash, as well as the original artwork be destroyed in order for the work to disappear.  Now, in the case that this great misfortune was to happen, this process is certainly a positive advancement.  However, let’s say that only the original work was destroyed.  How much have I lost?

Throughout my reading of Jeffrey T Schnapp and Adam Michaels’s “The Electric Information Age”, I found myself dwelling on the physicality of the book as an artistic object.  Schnapp and Michaels provide an interesting perspective on the relationship between design and the written word, making the book seem an important and relevant artistic medium, rather than a simple home for the novel, or any standard literary publication.  As the term “typophotography” is discussed, coined by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to describe an image dominant integration of visual and text, emphasis is placed on graphic elements, as each turn of the page becomes an aesthetic experience.

Whether the assumption that printed word will become obsolete is a myth or not, one thing is certainly true: the book does not gain enough credit as a canvas.  Although a page may seem easily digitalized, is the possession of a bound book akin to the possession of a literal work of art?  What do we loose if every uniquely designed, or even simply uniquely written page occurs on the same screen at the press of a button?  Depending on your paranoia of digital dominance, responses will vary.  I do know that a few hours browsing the Met’s online catalogue certainly could never replace the trip uptown to spend the day among the unparalleled energy of tangible works of art.