"Heavy Load," from 2009, takes the cover of Mr. Salter's best-known novel, "A Sport and a Pastime," from 1967, reproducing it three times, underneath a simple outline drawing of a woman, shown below the neck and with her arms crossed.
Whether he can reproduce it over five sets in a slam, nobody knows, not even him.
It further depends on the kind of artwork you wish to reproduce: Is it two- or three-dimensional?
Children who had not yet learned to read and write were presented with a letter or a shape on an index card and asked to reproduce it in one of three ways: trace the image on a page with a dotted outline, draw it on a blank white sheet, or type it on a computer.
This was then shipped to Osaka, Japan, where the master woodworker Yuboku Mukoyoshi and his apprentices spent four years reproducing it in Japanese cypress.
But last year, he carried out a weeklong trial with nearly a hundred participants that revealed their potential: "Even when Bob had a similar hand size as Alice and was able to watch an animation of her customized gesture and practice tracing it on the screen, his chance of successfully reproducing it was only one in ten," Memon says.
A conservatory-trained musician, Cowell has a full, lush, and nuanced piano sound (and ECM reproduces it vibrantly); he composed all six tunes on the album, and they cover a wide musical range, from the polytonal ballad "Emil Danenberg" (named for a piano professor at his alma mater, Oberlin) and the intricate funk of "Miss Viki" to the hard-driving post-bop of "Cal Massey".
In the end, just two scenarios could reproduce it.
"I could listen to the six o'clock news, and reproduce it word-for-word at 11pm.
To be honest, I wish they'd reproduced one or two letters in full, rather than create such a hybrid.
