Okay, we admit, we went a bit crazy this year, following the dictum that the best kind of gift to receive is something that you’d never buy for yourself — something a bit outlandish, a bit over-the-top in concept and maybe even price. So why buy a $12.95 paperback of MAD artist Don Martin when you can have it all — 1200 pages in two volumes, $150. To be fair, there’s also the relatively modestly priced, revelatory Punk House, not to mention the one-of-a-kind book-length photo essay Confidential, and the downright bizarre Pierre et Gilles and Gothic & Lolita. And if you’re looking for something a bit higher-minded, there’s always Edward Hopper (in one of the darker coffee-table modern-master art books you’ll see this year) and the ever-rewarding Herodotus — with lots of maps! Enjoy.
Related:
Local color, The Completely Mad Don Martin by Don Martin, Graphic Traffic, More 
- Local color
It’s an art-world misconception that, to champion local art, you have to grade on a curve.
- The Completely Mad Don Martin by Don Martin
Running Press | 1200 pages, 2 volumes | $150
- Graphic Traffic
Comics. Graphic novels. Sequential-art books. Call them what you will, but there are more of them than ever.
- Worth another look
In 2008, real estate and jobs dominated local art news.
- Rock n' Roll saves the day
One way to keep dry, academic art theorizing from getting too, well, dry and academic is to inject some rock and roll.
- Airing it out
New York painter Eve Aschheim has said that she uses geometry in her abstractions "to 'think about' the intersection of nature and cityscape. My works might suggest the chaotic geometry of the city, the expectant stillness of air, the tenuous balance of a wire line against a building."
- War in art heaven
Belying its placid title, “The Clark Brothers Collect: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings” is the record of a collecting war whose energy all but obliterates the show’s eye-popping art. Slideshow: Paintings from The Clark Brothers Collection
- Your tax dollars at work
This isn’t the sort of government-funded art rife with smut, perversion, and blasphemy that sparks legislative hearings — unfortunately.
- Origin of species
When in 1976 Jennifer Bartlett premiered her epic painting Rhapsody, John Russell, the chief art critic of the New York Times, proclaimed it “the most ambitious single work of art that has come my way since I started to live in New York." “Jennifer Bartlett: Early Plate Work” at Addison Gallery of American Art ”50 Photographers of Tomorrow” at Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University
- Flash without fire
The aim of the DeCordova Museum’s Annual Exhibition is to round up “some of the most interesting and visually eloquent” New England artists.
- The ‘business’ of art
You could be forgiven if you sometimes thought that corporations are the root of what's wrong with the United States.
- Less
Topics:
Books
, Culture and Lifestyle, Pierre Commoy, History, More
, Culture and Lifestyle, Pierre Commoy, History, World History, Photography, Patti Smith, Visual Arts, Cultural Institutions and Parks, Museums, John Waters, Less
