BLACK VELVET: The Art We Love to...

BLACK VELVET: The Art We Love to Hate by Jennifer Heath (Pomegranate Artbooks: $17.95; 95 pp., paperback original). Heath’s attempt to present painting on velvet as “truly cross cultural, transcending place and social identity. . . . At its best, it is a heroic, epic art form that expresses sociomythic concerns and ethnic pride” is undercut by the sheer awfulness of the illustrations. The clumsy draftsmanship, garish palette and trite subjects of these often mass-produced images suggest the artistic equivalent of a pratt fall. Hilarious, but hardly heroic.