The Art of the Artist's Book

Excerpt from essay by Dick Goody: Artists’ books, produced as an ancillary form are often more privately subversive than an artist’s primary oeuvre. This is because they are not generally meant for public scrutiny. Their scale and personal nature makes them the exclusive domain of one pair of eyes at a time. With works by more than thirty artists, including Matthew Barney, Anthony Caro, R.B. Kitaj, Donald Lipski, Kiki Smith, and Kara Walker, this survey, chiefly of one-of-a-kind books, features contemporary artists’ books from the last two decades, a time when the artist’s book has come of age. Books by artists are no longer viewed as eccentric oddities; they are a genre all their own.