Erica Baum’s Art (Garfunkel) of the Book

This is a photograph by Erica Baum, from the lovely, intelligent group show at Murray Guy gallery in New York. Baum’s image is nothing more than an edge-on view into the pages of a partly opened book, revealing a leaf with a photo of the “Garfunkel” half of the folk duo Simon and Garfunkel. Baum does a wonderful job of getting at the materiality of books, and of culture in general, in the pre-digital age – at their haptic as well as informational affordances, to use the language of Gibsonian psych. Her method also yields the wonderfully punning, almost allegorical title of today’s Daily Pic: Art.

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