Encounters

“Art is art and everything else is everything else.” With this quotation after Ad Reinhardt, Wolfgang Felten hit the nail squarely on the head: art obeys its own rules. The author and photographer have joined together in a unique illustrated book to show this without surrendering the visual to the argumentative.

People who know something about art also know how irritating talking about art can often be. In this book the connoisseur Wolfgang Felten undertakes to reveal artworks as areas for experience. From a Khmer Buddha statue or an African mask to the photograph of a façade or a drawing by Alberto Giacometti – the artist’s very personal commitment is to explaining the phenomenon: how it can be that inanimate material can bring forth something that is alive, that inspires and moves, and to understand why this happens. He appeals to our willingness to see; independently, intensively and in a way that remains open for new experiences.