Art Appropriation: Book Autopsies

I've been thinking more about where our understanding of Art is headed. As mass media integrates rapidly with fine arts, we are forced to allow the skewing of what's left of the dividing lines between what we've been raised to categorize. Recently, society has stumbled upon some major projects that have guided our conscious melding of textbook silos and artistic paradigms: The Post Secret project has spanned the gap of private and public art; Shepard Fairey's propaganda-influenced shopping bags for Neiman Marcus have taken a new look at the role Art plays in our human consumerism. Art, in its traditional sense, has begun to appropriate areas of our lives that are traditionally held separately from what we've come to understand as Art. 

Brian Dettmer's "Book Autopsies" have moved this idea from a contextual sense, into a quite literal artistic appropriation of a non-arty medium - books, in the most tactile, three dimensional sense of the form. Carved like a block of marble to reveal an institutional knowledge organized in an entirely new schema of intellectual understanding, Dettmer's "Book Autopsies" are like nothing I've ever seen before - an allegory for our new sense of cross-pollinated understanding of the world around us.