There’s been a sharp increase in “every” projects lately – folks photographing everything they ate in a year, taking a picture of themselves everyday for a year, and – yes – my own contribution. It’s a neat phenomenon that reacts to the contemporary deluge / devaluation of images by using the tools (affordable digital photography) that make image saturation possible to create these more personal and intimate mass archives.

Being a fan / observer of these sorts of projects, I ordered a copy of Jason Polan’s “The Every Piece of Art In The Museum of Modern Art Book” and I recommend it highly.

Polan’s book does something for me that many of the others don’t. They’re drawings, all made over the span of two weeks, and you can almost see the gears in Polan’s head as he swiftly reduces each work to it’s essential lines. It’s an oblique sort of art criticism – how many lines do I need to recognize a Gerhard Richter painting? – and it’s interesting to see one person’s opinion about which elements of these artworks “matter.”

Of course Polan’s rendering of the MoMA’s photography collection are my favorites, and I’m amused at how vividly I can recall some photographs based on a few lines of ink on paper.

Link: “The Every Piece of Art In The Museum of Modern Art Book” by Jason Polan