Book Fetish?

Internet Book Fetishists Versus Anti-Fetishists : The New Yorker: " . . . Alongside the fetishists and anti-fetishists, Internet literary culture has also seen the flourishing of a third group, one that celebrates books neither as precious physical objects nor as utilitarian vessels but uses them as the raw materials for works of art. The forms are varied—some are sculptures made from individual books, others use books as the building blocks for larger structures, while still others make books the canvas for paintings or drawings—but these projects have in common a way of playing off the near-spiritual aura that many of us associate with physical books, both augmenting books’ specialness by using them to make something beautiful, and undercutting it by ignoring their original purpose. This genre of work, known as “altered-book art,” is not a new phenomenon. The British artist Tom Phillips's page-by-page transformation of a Victorian novel, beginning in the nineteen-sixties . . . "

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