ABOVE: Left to right: Oprah, Dr. Phil, Rembrandt. They have more in common that just using one name, notes the New York Times, reviewing Roger Housden’s self-help book How Rembrandt Reveals Your Beautiful, Imperfect Self: Life Lessons From the Master

What The Da Vinci Code did for airport thrillers, Roger Housden appears poised to do for self-help books, with his atrociously titled How Rembrandt Reveals Your Beautiful, Imperfect Self: Life Lessons From the Master— i.e., plunder the works of a great artist for the purposes of selling an aircraft carrier-load of insipid and aesthetically bankrupt books. Apparently, since Rembrandt pulled a couple of boners in the 17th-century stock market and juggled a few emotionally crooked and financially devastating romantic entanglements, he’s fodder for a book aimed at needy, impotent Nebraskan day traders because he, you know, took a real hard look in the mirror from time to time, and couldn’t we all benefit from that?

Carol Kino surveys the psychological wreckage in Sunday’s New York Times, and if the article is to be believed, it’s not as bad as all that. But we are not convinced. As Kino points out early on, the book is filled with the typical brand of East-meets-West imitation Buddhism that is the stock in trade of the contemporary self-help oeuvre, “like ‘Open Your Eyes,’ ‘Troubles Will Come,’ and ‘Keep the Faith.’” Apparently museum gift shoppes across the land are stocking up on the book and Housden is now lecturing and signing books in L.A. as part of the Getty’s current Rembrandt show (which, by the way, opens today). Why get some dusty old tweed-wearing art history prof in to talk about Rembrandt when you can get a bestselling author, and not just any author: The author of Ten Poems to Change Your Life and its dynamite sequel, Ten Poems to Open Your Heart!

Sickening, top to bottom.

LINK: New York Times > Portrait of the Artist as a 17th-Century Oprah