This Instagram artist's mock self-help books are honestly too relatable
How to make dysfunctional love last forever is a self-help book I'd personally be very, very interested to read.
Unfortunately, it's not a real self-help book, and it can't help solve that problem.
That's because it's really a work of book cover art by Instagram artist @JohanDeckmann, who's page is dedicated to taking the most relatable thoughts and ideas and printing them into fake book covers, which he shares with his nearly 85,000 followers.
His mock self-help titles are so relatable, it's actually a crying shame they're not real books (though they are printed on old books from antique stores).
Johan Deckmann, a Copenhagen-based artist, psychotherapist, and author, came up with the book-cover art format when he read a beautiful old book, much like the fake ones from his Instagram.
"I was reading a beautiful old copy of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and I realised that this would become my artistic expression -- my profession as a psychotherapist combined with the authority of the book," Dickmann tells Mashable. The result is a lot of fake book covers that aim to be "a portrait of the modern human condition and self-sabotage."
Deckmann tells Mashable that these mock self help-books are just manifestations of whatever is at the top of his mind. And even though his work comes off as very relatable for many of us existentially confused millennial Instagram scrollers, that's not the real aim of Deckmann's work. "Whether it’s relatable to others is out of my hands," Deckmann says.
The comments on Deckmann's Instagram, though, have a lot of people chanting "same," and "my life in a nutshell."
Deckmann insists that most of his works are not autobiographical. "I get inspired by anything from human behaviour in general to situations in connection with my practice to the horrible condition of our world," Deckmann says. "Not to mention pure fantasy."
One of Deckmann's own favourite pieces on his Instagram is a book cover featuring a child on a swing, with the title: How to feel the way you felt before you knew what you know know.
"It describes the loss of innocence, which I think everybody experiences whether they perceive it or not," Deckmann explains.
Reading these universally relatable book titles, it's hard not to start wondering what such a book would actually say on the inside. But Deckmann says he can't even begin to imagine that. It's not a part of his work.
"I leave that to the viewer to imagine," Deckmann says. "That’s your story, your work of art, and that’s way more interesting than anything I could ever come up with."
If these books were to come out, we're pretty sure they'd be instant bestsellers.
Topics Books
