SPECK: A Curious Collection of Uncommon Things - Hardcover

Buchanan-Smith, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1568982976 ISBN 13: 9781568982977

Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001

Synopsis

In Speck, Peter Buchanan-Smith, Art Director of the New York Times Op-Ed page, asks artists, designers, lawyers, writers, collectors, and photographers to explore our obsessions with the small objects that loom large in our everyday lives. To wit: Maira Kalman empties people's pocketbooks; Nicholas Blechman and Jesse Gordon trace the history of the oldest piece of dust; David Horrowitz catalogs manhole covers; and Peter Buchanan-Smith unearths a 1966 high school yearbook and transcribes the inscriptions ("To a real sweet and cute guy with a great personality. Remember English III"). Speck also shows how "ordinary" people can fascinate as much as "ordinary" objects: an interview with shoe shiner Harry Kitt, Manhattan's last practitioner of the dry-shine, photographs taken by a blind man on a sight-seeing tour, and a barber's extensive collection of earth, water, and air from around the world ask us to re-think our assumptions about the commonplace.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Buchanan-Smith is Art Director of the New York Times Op-Ed page.

From Publishers Weekly:

Disturbing closeups of lipsticks; a collection of heartbreakingly earnest lost-pet fliers; painstakingly documented differences in the scribbles produced by Eraser Mate or Dynagrip pens all help make up Speck: A Curious Collection of Uncommon Things. Peter Buchanan-Smith, art director of the New York Times Op-Ed page, presents various odd obsessions of 25 artists in various media, and the result is this set of 200 color and 50 b&w illustrations of "projects" that come dangerously close to drawing charges of haphazard artmaking and are all the more engaging for it.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1568982976
• ISBN 13: 9781568982977
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224