Art I Wish I'd Made Myself: A Fool For God & Magical Books

Webs New Inner Diction, 200

What is this stunningly beautiful thing you're looking at here? Why, it's an altered book sculpture by the artist Brian Dettmer, whose work is really so extravagantly and exquisitely extraordinary and gorgeous that I have to go and look at pictures of the things he makes in little quick dips over the course of several days because they're so beautiful it hurts me. If I'm going to have a Museum of Joy, this is going to be the kind of thing it's full of -- because I have yet to meet anyone who doesn't react to book sculptures like this one with a kind of deep, weird, yearning pang of rapture. I don't know what it is about books that does this to us. Maybe I'll understand once I've finished writing my novel...? (Insert jeering laughter here.)