Jeremy Frommer and Rick Swartz (eds), The Mind's Eye: The Art of Omni (2014)

When I was growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s, and loving Science Fiction, Omni seemed to me just about the most sophisticated and coolest magazine in the world. This was partly because it published prose by William Gibson's ("Burning Chrome" and "Johnny Mnemonic" both first appeared there), William S. Burroughs, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Carroll and others. But it was, I can be honest, mostly because of the jaw-dropping visuals, art by H. R. Giger, De Es Schwertberger and Rallé amongst many others.

So this handsome coffee-table book of 'The Art of Omni' (just out: here's a link to the US amazon page) is an absolute delight. These are images you can pore over; a succession of beautiful and estranging and striking and memorable pieces of visual art. The stuff in here runs the aesthetic gamut, from intriguing visual pun to full-fledged Boschian panorama, from Magritte-y surrealism to all out Prog Rock Album Cover Splendour. Just wonderful.

That reference to Magritte, up there, is no throwaway, you know. Far from it:

Nor do I just randomly drop-in references to 'prog rock album covers', my little cultosaurs. No indeed!

Did you know that was first published in Omni, that image? [Update: I'm corrected on this point in the comments.] I've always wondered how that particular megabeast eats. Are those cheesestring-like mouthparts thin teeth? Or is it a baleen-ish grid?

It’s interesting, pondering the appeal of this sort of thing. To my early teenage mind, untutored in the traditions of ‘fine art’, and (if you’ll pardon the pun) omnivorously—that is, indiscriminatingly—hungry for aesthetic experiences that made the hairs tingle at the back of my neck, or gave me that curious involuted twist in my stomach, or made it seems as if the universe (or perhaps the inside of my skull) were simultaneously receding and approaching very fast … for that youngster, images like these worked. They seemed to me strange and beguiling and poetic. It's not only a kind of naivety that informs such judgments, I think; and it's not only the strong residue of those earlier aesthetic experiences in the adult me that means I'm still very drawn to it. I am now tutored in the traditions of fine art, and of literature too; and I recognise the naff and the kitsch when I see it. It's just that art like this (as does science fiction as a whole) demonstrates an important truth about these oft-derided varities of art: that there is good naff and bad, good kitsch and bad, and that the best kitsch approaches truths and intensities unavailable to the more sedate modes of culture. Those things have to do sometimes with a youthful energy, a kinetic force and verve, even a crassness; but they also connect with the more reputable discourses of the Sublime -- of sense-of-wonder, of transport.

All in all, this book is a keeper. Wonderful stuff.