Leonard Koren, who trained as an artist and architect, was a founding member of The Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad, a wall-painting collective. In 1976 he created WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, an avant-garde publication seminal in the development of postmodern aesthetics. Koren has subsequently written numerous books about art, design, and aesthetics. among them are Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (the classic volume on the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete), What Artists Do, and Musings of a Curious Aesthete.
"""Indeed, you could say that Koren has spearheaded the design equivalent of the slow food movement.""--The New York Times ""In a prominent spot near Square's welcome lobby stands a communal bookshelf. . . Most titles lining the shelves cover subjects you might expect at a high-flying tech startup. . . And then there are books placed on the shelf by [Twitter and Square co-founder Jack] Dorsey. He offers up Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers --an explication of the Japanese concept of serendipitous beauty."" -The Wall Street Journal"