Judging Books by Their Covers with Dieter Roelstraete
Dieter Roelstraete, Curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society and Lecturer, Division of the Humanities, Contemporary Art, doesn’t restrain his curatorial skills to the gallery. On his Instagram account, Roelstraete shares selections of his favorite book covers with his followers, treating what could be an endless scroll in an app as an opportunity for sharing personal reflections and aesthetic musings. We’ve selected five posts from his Instagram to share below, along with an introduction to the project from Roelstraete himself.
Dieter Roelstraete. Photo: courtesy of the artist.
“I am all for judging a book by its cover. In these times of severely curtailed access to the physical experience of culture, the look and material quality of a book matters greatly, and I have found myself doubling down on my long-standing interest in the semantics of book design.
A couple of years ago, this interest lead to my curating the exhibition Kleine Welt at the Neubauer Collegium—a project born from a seemingly banal observation concerning the enduring popularity of a handful of artists and artworks in the titular small world of academic publishing (in particular, Paul Klee for existentialist and post-war German philosophy; Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog for anything even remotely related to the history of German romanticism and the “birth of the modern”). Starting last summer, I have been using Instagram as a platform for diaristic musings of all kinds, and books—that is to say, pictures of book covers—feature very prominently in the resulting “diary of a plague year.” Here is a selection of some of these book titles—all of which make for really poignant and riveting reading, and all of which are also really beautiful objects—and the insights they’ve sparked.”