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Next time you’re at Van Pelt, strolling through the fifth floor stacks on your way to isolation, take a look at the books that line the shelves. Yes, VP actually has books and they’re available to be checked out. Although to the untrained eye the titles of these books are just titles, Nina Katchadourian’s clever artistry turns these titles into so much more. Katchadourian has taken a cue from artists like Marcel Duchamp and decided to make art from things she comes into contact with everyday — some may call her lazy, others call her genius. As part of “The Sorted Book Project,” she finds the bindings of famous book titles like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Charles Bukowski’s Women and creates philosophical, humorous and witty sentences and stories out of them. Each cluster is created by sorting through collections of books and finding titles that create a theme. The spines in sequence create stories and wild imagery, like “A Day at the Beach, The Bathers, Shark 1, Shark 2, Shark 3, Sudden Violence, Silence.” Katchadourian usually displays her works in the library where the books are found, in attempts to show a sort of cross-section of the library’s collections, while pointing out the multitude of crazy titles that they possess. Her work has inspired many other artists to follow this concept, turning “The Sorted Book Project” into a phenomenon of sorts in the art world. So next time you’re feeling down on yourself, thinking you have no artistic talent or skills to offer the world, take a look around you. Why not start “The Solo Cup Project” and make sculptures out of the red cups found lying on the chapter house floor on a Sunday morning? Remember, kids, anything can be art.
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