This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Revisionist Art: Thirty Works by Bob Dylan at Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York. A keen observer of everyday phenomena, Dylan remixes elements of popular culture to create his “revisionist” paintings. Appropriating covers of popular magazines from the last half century that have somehow escaped history’s notice—from Rolling Stone and Playboy to TV Guide, Baby Talk, and Philosophy Today—Dylan transforms their imagery, cover lines, and other elements to produce new conflations of image and meaning.

Critic and historian Luc Sante’s introduction offers a fanciful account of revisionism, observing that Dylan’s works “suggest magazine covers from a world just slightly removed from ours, a world a bit more honest about its corruption, its chronic horniness, its sweat, its body odor.” An essay by B. Clavery, identified as editor of Sluggo: A Magazine of the Transformative Arts, considers the series in the context of the “hurricane” of high and low culture. The catalogue reproduces the works from the exhibition on glossy insets interspersed by pages that reprint the texts by Sante and Clavery from the front of the book in scaled-up form. It also includes a section of vivid commentaries on the works (re)acquainting the reader with such colorful historical figures as the Depression-era politician Cameron Chambers, whose mustache became an icon in the gay underworld, and Gemma Burton, a San Francisco trial attorney who used all of her assets in the courtroom.