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For years, artists’ books have remained one of the last zones of artistic production that doesn’t have an organized culture of gate-keeping. The vetting of artists’ books is done by earnest curators or passionate collectors who acquire according to instinct and budget, trying to set useful parameters if they are stewards of institutional collections or to create a solid repository along lines of individual vision if private. But a handful of knowledgeable individuals doesn’t constitute a critical field, even though they might usefully contribute to a larger project if engaged in a productive conversation about how they assess the merits of books made as art works. That conversation is long overdue. Because the field of artists’ books suffers from being under-theorized, under-historicized, under-studied and under-discussed, it isn’t taken very seriously. In the realms of fine art or literature elaborate mechanisms exist for sorting and filtering work. But the community in which artists’ books are made, bought, sold, collected, hasn’t evolved these structures. I’d even go so far as to say that the conceptual foundation for such operations doesn’t yet exist, not really. We don’t have a canon of artists, we don’t have a critical terminology for book arts aesthetics with a historical perspective, and we don’t have a good, specific, descriptive vocabulary on which to form our assessment of book works. These three things are needed, even though each has its own problems and will raise hackles and objections. This article proposes the framework for describing artists' books and book works, including a document type definition (DTD). |
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