As much a work of publishing art as a retrospective of Karl Fritsch’s jewelry, this book is the perfect introduction to the sheer plethora and spectacle of Fritsch’s cunning combination of the most reactionary and most revolutionary elements of contemporary jewelry. The texts, by various luminaries of the contemporary jewelry scene, are not translated into other languages, which is a disadvantage for the reader who cannot speak German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, French or English. But in some ways, it doesn’t really matter, since this hefty tome reveals its wonders without the requirement of knowing what others might think. (Captions are, helpfully, translated into English at the back of the book.) A great example of contemporary jewelry at its most ambitious.
