The postcard as you’ve never seen it before. This appealing book collects the best of these mail-able, miniature works of art by the likes of Yoko Ono and Carl Andre.

The accessibility and familiarity of a postcard makes it an artistic medium rich with potential for subversion, appropriation, or manipulation for political, satirical, revolutionary, or playful intent. The inexpensiveness of production encourages artists to experiment with their design; the only artistic restriction: that it fits through the mailbox slot. Unlike traditional works of art, the postcard requires nothing more than a stamp for it to be seen on the other side of the world. Made of commonplace material, postcards invite handling, asking to be picked up, turned over, and shown to friends―to be included in our lives.

The World Exists to Be Put on a Postcard features postcards, several reproduced at actual size, designed by notable modern and contemporary artists, including Carl Andre, Eleanor Antin, Joseph Beuys, Tacita Dean, Gilbert & George, Richard Hamilton, Susan Hiller, Richard Long, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Dieter Roth, Gavin Turk, Mark Wallinger, Rachel Whiteread, and Hannah Wilke, many of which are published here for the first time. Organized thematically into chapters, such as “Graphic Postcards,” “Political Postcards,” “Portrait Postcards,” and “Composite Postcards,” this book demonstrates the significance of artists’ postcards in contemporary art.

100 color illustrations

This is a good book to read if you're interested in late 20th-century/early 21st-century contemporary artists. It's a bit more scholarly than playful, and is actually super comprehensive about situating the artists it features within the context of the period they worked in, their galleries and dealers and shows, and their collaborations. So if you're interested in this particular slice of modern art history, you're in luck. I'm a former early-'80s art student and followed a lot of these artists, plus I love postcard/mail art/arte povera, so it was really interesting to see how the format intersected with what they were doing. But also being a former early-'80s art student, the type was really damn tiny for my old eyes. Well, that's what we have reading glasses for—and I liked this little mini–art history class. ( )