Art This Way

The approach to this sturdy and little-finger-friendly book is to reproduce images (in very high resolution) of innovative and eye-popping art, inviting twists, turns, flaps, colors, and offering some basic informative text. The cover art looks the same upside down, and the authors' opening directive is to"Walk around, open up,look down, and upand in and out,look close,look behind,and keep looking."Each reproduction can be explored through lift pages, flaps, mirrors, shifts in dimensions, and brief text prompts.The works include sculptures, photography, mobiles, screeenprints, and compilation installations. The final double spread repeats miniature images of each piece of art with attribution to the modern artist and the media. All are from the Whitney Museum's collection, featuring art by Calder, Christa, Herrara, Levitt, Lichtenstein, Marison, Sherman, and Warhol.If you are skeptical about the appeal of such a topic to the youngest audiences, just flash back to the way infant eyes and hands love to explore curls of ribbon, empty boxes, and sticky labels during the recent holidays. The impulse to explore, examine, contort and consider the world around them is a universal fact of infancy. One that is welcomed by this board book.One that, sadly, diminishes rapidly with age (and with obsessive screen time.Think about it.Screens require interactivity, but it is all dictated by the machine, not the child! If a device is reoriented, it straightens itself. Random twists, turn, flips produce nothing meaningful. Only preprogrammed actions and responses are productive.The child in your lap and arms has unlimited potential to CREATE ART, to IMAGINE possibility, to view the world from every angle. Whether or not their work is ever displayed in a gallery is not the question at stake. The crucial question is:Are we encouraging (or limiting) their development of individual insight into, appreciation of, and curiosity about the physical world, and their internal world, too. Books like this one are better than screens by any measure.

book arrived scratched and bent