Painting, as a genre, is utterly intertwined with human civilization, yet modern culture has shunted the form to a niche concern: ours is a landscape of careful neutrality and traffic flow, and distinctiveness is often exiled. The very use of the term painter often leads to semantical confusion with commercial uses of suspended pigment; a person who uses paint on a canvas these days is an artist—a broad description that still carries social stigma.

Nonetheless, there are places to go see paintings, specific houses of art. Beyond this physical reality, paintings—and all art forms now—can be view remotely; most established of these views is the art book. The art book is perhaps the most traditional means to view art from a remove, as humanities classes relied upon such texts for the past century or so. Art books themselves, at one time, were seen as decorative—as signs of affection for a world where art matters, as displays of class aspirations or alliance—and were often deliberately large and heavy. […]