Max Hooper Schneider’s Planetary Vitrine: Max Hooper Schneider’s Art Journey is the fourth book in the BMW Art Journey series (the third to document a specific journey). In a joint initiative of Art Basel and BMW launched in 2014, chosen artists are afforded opportunities to undertake journeys of creative discovery to destinations of their choice, with their efforts chronicled in art book form. Hooper Schneider’s ambitious project consisted of the journey, the exploration, and the documentation of coral reef sites. He spent three months investigating the coral landscapes and associated cultural environments, collecting living and dead specimens and artifacts. Along the way, he left behind a series of acrylic vitrines to be retrieved years later, when the flora and fauna of the reefs have subsumed them, evidencing nature’s irrepressible productivity and abundance.

Hooper Schneider’s pilgrimage to far-flung marine habiatats is indeed a unique and intriguing concept for an Art Journey but his uber-scholarly essays that provide most of the written content are pretty much incomprehensible to a layman. Rather than pulling the reader in, his text oddly serves only to push the audience away rather than reach out to it. The book is lavishly produced and profusely illustrated, largely with photos from the destination environs. Only at the end, on the final glossy pages, do we see Hooper Schneider’s highly creative art, and it is indeed strangely beautiful and enchanting. If only the text’s academic impulses had been tempered... ( )