Contrary to that hoary old adage, a book is often judged by its cover. Whether that’s right or wrong, is unimportant, that’s just how it is. Indeed, it’s far easier to dismiss a book by its cover because so many books today look stupid. Once book covers were discussed, considered and only then created by a team of whizz kid artists and designers. Nowadays, it’s easy to find three or four books by different authors on different genres with exactly the same black & white or color stock photo. It’s bad economics and lazy design. Even at their worst though, pulp covers are aesthetically interesting. Some artist has invested time and effort into creating a cover that would (hopefully) bring readers to the pages. Not all pulp covers work—but at least they show some intelligence at play rather than just an editor indifferently picking a stock pic of a snowy street out of a catalog to save money. This selection of covers for pulp fiction and nonfiction books on LSD and other psychedelic drugs give some idea to the variation in style book designers once had. Not all of these covers hit the...
Jonathan Jones: From Kenneth Anger's visual orgy of the occult to Hew Draper's sorcerer's graffiti, here are the most spectacular spectres in art
American pop artist Kenny Scharf’s solo exhibition “Super Pop Universe,” which launched Wednesday at the Lotte Museum of Art in Seoul, opens up a whole new universe for viewers and encourages them to reflect on reality.A visual celebration of the daily lives of people and the world they inhabit, Scharf’s paintings and sculptures are colorful and witty -- for the most part. The world that the artist presents requi...
Photography A fine wind blows into the heart, And you fly headlong on, While love within the roll of film Holds the soul east by its sleeve. Bird-like she steals grain by grain From oblivion-and no…
Photography's monochrome master Henri Cartier-Bresson famously snubbed colour, yet his style lives on in the work of colour photographers around the world today, as shown by a new show
Lovely sets of photos by Saul Leiter was published in the Andrey Zeigarnik’s and Dasha Kuzmina’s blogs. But I want to share with you my favorite pictures. It’s amazing but true – …
Art, design, and visual culture.
