"Elaborate narated" is perhaps one of the best descriptions of artist Dan Graham's body of work that I've yet heard and comes from Roberta Smith's New York Times write-up on the exhibition, Dan Graham: Beyond.

Currently at the Whitney, the show was previously at MOCA LA (where I caught it) and on its way to the Walker Art Center this fall. It's a good show, and Smith largely thought so as well. What I thought was particularly interesting in her review though, and what I totally missed in my visit to the show, was that Graham wrote "half of the show’s text labels". Of course, out of a combination of laziness and self-preservation I almost never read labels, so it's no real surprise that I missed out, but I'm sorry for that policy now. I was also sorry to find that Smith didn't quote from them in her review, and the museum sites (neither the Whitney nor MOCA) haven't put any of them online. Too bad.

Though it doesn't seem to include the label texts either, you can get the exhibition catalog which contains a couple of essays by, among others, Graham. But whether or not you can get to the show, I can also recommend Graham's 1999 book of essays Two-Way Mirror Power which, like the catalogue, was published by MIT Press. This is is my brief write-up on it from Hol's fall catalog (pdf/scribd):

Following stops in New York and Los Angeles, this comprehensive survey of the work of conceptual artist/writer/sculptor Dan Graham, finished its run in Minneapolis this fall.

Since starting work in the sixties with a group of artists interested in exploring the boundary line between word and art, Graham’s writing has always been integral to his artistic practice. Like those artists, Graham started out using writing as art, but he soon turned to writing on art as his primary form. This practice culminated in the publication of his book, Rock My Religion, in 1993. The book was Graham’s collected cultural criticism on art, film and performance of all kinds. In his 1999 book however, Two-Way Mirror Power, the focus is on Graham’s writing that is either about or for his own work. Though even then, when it came to distinguishing his commentary from his art, Graham and many others would be hard pressed to precisely define a difference.

As artist Jeff Wall bandies in the closing lines of the book’s introduction, “Graham’s writing is not writing about art, or even ‘art-writing’; rather, Graham’s art is an art with writing in it, or, maybe more precisely, an art with the writing it contains glinting in the form of texts.”

I have several open browser windows and multiple tabs marking things I've wanted to blog about, but have been a little busy starting up a publishing company. Head over to Twitter though, where thanks no doubt to the 140 character limit I'm doing a tiny bit better keeping up.

In the Whitehouse's official photostream at flickr, there are a few quiet shots of President Obama touring the galleries at the Centre Pompidou. [via]

If this strikes you as unusual, I doubt you're alone. Since the advent of television, presidents have increasingly come to spend most of their time being presidential. And these days it seems, there is nothing particularly presidential about looking at art.

In their rare moments of leisure we expect our leaders to jog or ride their bicycles, spend time with their family or pets, or work at their ranch or ride horses. Regan had his acting career, Carter is endlessly writing books and Clinton played the sax, but I don't believe we much think of our leaders as doing anything very creative, or even spending much time thinking along these lines.

So moments like Obama's brief walk through the Pompidou are rare. And not just in the rarity of the quiet moment the president has reflecting on these pictures, but also of the moment we have reflecting on our own picture of him.

Of course, this rarity was not always the case.

Winston Churchill (Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940-45 and 1951-55) was an avid, if also amateur painter. He also wrote a number of essays on the subject, and these, along with some reproductions of his works, were ultimately published in book form as Painting as a Pastime. He writes: "To have reached the age of forty without ever handling a brush or fiddling with a pencil, to have regarded with mature eye the painting of pictures of any kind as a mystery, to have stood agape before the chalk of the pavement artist, and then to suddenly to find oneself plunged in the middle of a new and intense form of interest and action with paints and palettes and canvases, and not to be discouraged by the results, is an astonishing and enriching experience." The book is sadly out of print (and the Churchill estate wasn't ready to grant Hol reprint rights, though we asked) but it's worth tracking down a used or library copy.

Theodore Roosevelt (President of the United States from 1901-1909) wasn't a painter, but was a prolific and respected writer. While most of his books dealt with the military, the environment and the American West, as editor of Outlook magazine, he once wrote an article on the 1913 Armory Show. The show was one of the most controversial in history, and a pivotal moment in the emergence of modern art. It was the American public's first view of then-unknown Eurpoean artists like Picasso, Matisse and Duchamp. Roosevelt's article, "A Layman's Views of an Exhibition", is just that -- an honest and forthright account of what he thought of the "new" art being exhibited. Coming out clearly on the side of a more traditional home-grown art, he was never condescending or close-minded to the new. We've posted the complete text at Scribd for viewing or download, or it's available in Hol's book, For & Against: Views on the Infamous 1913 Armory Show.

Does knowing these things about Churchill and Roosevelt change your view of them? It certainly does mine and ultimately, though I don't know what it means to have a political leader who also paints, or one that writes and visits art exhibitions, I do feel better knowing it's possible.

From the submission guidelines for The Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program:

"strives to honor and encourage writing about art

• that is rigorous, passionate, eloquent, and precise;
• in which a keen engagement with the present is infused with an appreciation of the historical;
• that is neither afraid to take a stand nor content to deliver authoritative pronouncements, but serves rather to pose questions and to generate new possibilities for thinking about, seeing, and making art;
• that is sensitive to both the importance and difficulty of situating aesthetic objects within their broader social and political contexts;
• that does not dilute or sidestep complex ideas but renders accessible their meaning and value;
• that creatively challenges the limits of existing conventions without valorizing novelty as an end in itself."

From "The Wrong Words," by Tom Morton, Frieze magazine (June-Aug 09):

"In theory at least, wall texts are a powerful method of communication.... spaces where words can enrich the experience of art, and, to this end, could potentially call upon everything language is capable of. Might we imagine a wall text that could make us laugh, or cry, or one so elegant or intellectually surprising that we would recall it, unbidden, months later, in the bath or on the bus?"

For those of you not satisfied simply taking the latest potboiler to the beach for your summer reading, photo gallerist James Danziger recommends Aperture's new collection of essays by Philip Gefter, Photography After Frank. Gefter was a long-time writer for The New York Times, and Danziger calls his new book, a "volume that no-one interested in photography should be without." Much like the Ryan McGinley photo on the cover, Danziger muses, "it’s an exhilarating and breezy journey though modern photography."

In last Sunday's New York Times Book Review, Adam Begley reviews The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy by Rachel Cusk. Cusk is the Whitbread Award–winning author of the novel, Arlington Park. Of this new memoir, her publisher says, "Oppressed by the claustrophobia of domestic life, a family decides to sell up and go to Italy; to search for art and its meanings, for freedom from routine, for a different path into the future."

In admiring review of Cusk's approach to and descriptions of art, Begley writes, "she looks with palpable intensity," and, "she observes carefully, teasing out specific meanings," and finally, "she’s at her best when she broods, when she allows her earnestness to condense."

In fact, in the end, it was Cusk's intense looking at art that captured Begley's interest (and ours) and saved the book: "there’s an awkward tension throughout 'The Last Supper' between Cusk’s intellectual ambitions and the humdrum 'what I did last summer' narrative.... I hope that next time she visits Italy she leaves her domestic baggage at home and concentrates on looking at the art."

Given this I'm tempted to buy the book and only read the art bits. And if they were to prove as rich as the review starts to suggest they are, wouldn't it be sort of interesting to offer an edition of the book that was only these descriptions of the art? Perhaps even as a simple ebook or iPhone app that included some travel guide material? Not the thing I'd expect Farrar, Strauss & Giroux or a Whitbread Award-winning author to jump on, but an intriguing opportunity.

Update on Wednesday, June 3, 2009 at 09:22AM by Hol Art Books

In one of bookforum.com's new daily reviews, Claire Barliant also reviews the book and states, "Each sentence is crisply perfect, binding brilliantly detailed descriptions to sensitive, sharp observations."

A few notable reviews in the latest Rain Taxi online, including:

Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World, Jed Perl
Disorientations: Art On The Margins of the Contemporary, Travis Jeppesen
On Criticism (Thinking in Action), Noël Carroll
Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick eds.

A few notable reviews in the latest Bookforum, including:

Robert Ryman: Used Paint, Suzanne P. Hudson
Picasso and the Allure of Language, Susan Greenberg Fisher ed.
Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait, Michael Peppiatt

And though it's not our usual cup of tea, the other Francis Bacon title reviewed, Incunabula, sounds pretty cool too.

Jamie Camplin, the managing director of Thames & Hudson, writes on the current state of art book publishing in the The Art Newspaper. [via]

One of Camplin's primary concerns, befitting a director from one the world's preeminent illustrated book publishers, is the discrepancy between the cost of producing the traditional art book, and the price consumers are willing to pay. Basically, art books cost a ton and no one wants to pony up.

The fact is though, art lovers are also avid readers, and so should be ready-made customers for eager art book publishers. They’re members of local museums, subscribers to newspapers and magazines, and are extremely active online. They’re also well-educated and of a higher-than-average economic class. This is not a group particularly known for its price sensitivity, and if they aren't paying for art books, I’d propose that it's not because they're too expensive or because they can’t find them in their local store, but rather because they don't see the value in them.

I think the question that really needs to be asked is, What would art lovers value in an art book? Not, How can we recoup an art book’s value from art lovers?

Art lovers (and here I am limiting myself to the broader general public rather than professionals or academics already in the art field) are looking for art books for two reasons: (1) to commemorate the experience of art they have seen in a museum or gallery; or (2) to learn more about art they have seen in a museum or gallery. Only rarely these days—except perhaps in textbooks or for art of a limited mobility, quantity or geographic area—are they buying books on art that they have not seen or are not planning on seeing.

For the commemorators, museum exhibition and collection catalogs, and the single-artist monographs from publishers like Phaidon and Prestel, are going to be the first and best choice. These illustrated books offer a facsimile of the experience of viewing the art on the walls, complete with wall labels in the form of captions and exhibition wall text in the form of an introductory essay. And indeed, if you look at a museum store’s sales figures for its current exhibition catalogue, you might be surprised at the relatively impressive quantity of books that can move from a single venue.

For the learners though, catalogs and monographs are not providing the answer. The learners want to go beyond the experience of looking at the art. By looking for books to learn about art from (rather than taking a class, watching a documentary, or surfing the web) they’re really looking for an engaging, narrative, reading experience. They want art books that do what all books do best: educate and entertain on a textual level. They want books that don't try to act as stand-ins for the experience of viewing art, but rather act as guides to heighten and enliven that experience. Yet the dominant form of the art book is situated to looking and not to reading.

What Camplin dances around, and what all the signs point to, is that it’s time to throw out the old notion that "art book" must equal "illustrated". There is another way. It’s the way of great criticism, narrative non-fiction, biography, artist writings, and even art fiction. Granted, Camplin might brush this aside and point to the current “dearth of good art writers.” But just as he earlier argues that the major bookstore chains are “proving that if you do not display art books, you do not sell them”, I’d argue that the major art book publishers are proving that if you do not publish writing about art, no one’s going to write about art.

If the problems are the high cost of licensing and printing illustrated books, decreasing investment made on those books at the retail level, and the unrecoupability of their costs from consumers, the solution must be to publish art books that are less expensive for publishers to make, for booksellers to stock, and for readers to buy. Isn’t it handy then that this may also mean publishing books that are friendly to approach and rewarding to read.

Camplin says, "the art-book publisher’s first duty… is to encourage people to look at art and help them understand it." With this, I wholeheartedly agree. Let us share our passion for art with our readers. Let us engage them with the material and make them smarter and more confident about it. Then, let us send them merrily on their way to the museum.

Please consider donating $10 to Open Letter, a smart new indie press that does for literary translations what we can as yet only aspire to do for art writing.

On his New York Times blog, filmmaker Errol Morris is writing a multi-part post about infamous art forger Han van Meegeren. As the impetus of Morris's investigations, van Meegeren was featured in two recent books, Edward Dolnick’s The Forger’s Spell, and Jonathan Lopez’s The Man Who Made Vermeers. Given some of the terrific, engaging and in-depth writing on visual art issues Morris has done before (like his examination of Roger Fenton's famous photos of the civil war) this should prove an interesting exploration for those not already worn out by the van Meegeren story.

Book Expo America (BEA) is underway in New York City. I'm disappointed not to be there this year, but also admittedly relieved not to have another thing on my calendar at the moment.

There's almost too much going to follow even from afar, but I did want to point out one fantastic project, Perseus Book Group is going to publish a book from start to finish at the Expo. As reported by PW, their hyper-condensed publication schedule looks something like this:

Friday, May 29th

9:00 a.m. Editorial Meeting
10:00 a.m. Jacket Discussion/Interior Book Design
11:00 a.m. First Pass Pages Arrive
1:00 p.m. Marketing/Publicity Strategy Meeting
3:30 p.m. Foreign Rights/Sales Discussion
5:00 p.m. E-galleys available

Saturday, May 30th

9:00 a.m. Book Website Creation
9:30 a.m. Reading Group Guide Creation
1:00 p.m. First Print Run Meeting
3:30 p.m. Q&A with Participants
4:00 p.m. Book Launch Party in booth.

This is actually a more elaborate version of something I've considered doing as a museum program (and still hope to someday), and if I were at BEA, I'd be glued to the Perseus booth. Probably at the expense of my own.

Read more and follow their progress at www.bookthesequel.com.

Brian Sholis (The Search Was the Thing) reviews Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum, by Michael Gross, online at frieze:

"Rather than pay close attention to the merits of individual exhibitions or examine the public’s perception of the institution, Gross revels in the internecine squabbling among Met directors, board members, curators and New York City officials over the growth, acquisitions and public orientation of the museum. The book, akin to a 500-page Vanity Fair article, is an unabashedly unofficial history…"

Art bloggers everywhere are busy at their keyboards as it's just been announced that New York Times art critic, Holland Cotter won the 2009 Pulitzer for Criticism, with the Boston Globe's Sebastian Smee a runner-up.

Can't resist this terrific quote from Jonathan Jones' blog at The Guardian [via]:

"To get published in an art magazine you need to follow criteria that are almost the total opposite of what you need to write for general publications. Anything that might interest or enlighten the general reader - or any reader - is to be ruthlessly avoided."

I wasn't as taken with the rest of the post, but was pleased to see that he points out two of my favorite magazines as possible antidotes, frieze and Afterall. I don't know that I'd call either particularly friendly to the general reader, but both are undoubtedly engaged with ideas and issues surrounding the field of art writing and publishing -- which of course I appreciate.

Afterall magazine is impeccably produced and consistently interesting, but perhaps best of all is Afterall Books, and particularly their One Work series. Much like Continuum Press' terrific 33 1/3 series on individual music albums, One Work books are each about a single art work. Now with 13 titles, on artists like Joan Jonas, Fischli and Weiss, and Hanne Darboven, they're great little books and a terrific model that I'd love to see expanded.

I've pointed to frieze's Ideal Syllabus feature before, but they also consistently have great book coverage as well an ongoing interest in art writing in general. In fact, they've just announced the second annual frieze Writer's Prize, which awards 2,000 GBP and a commission to write a review for the magazine to the best 700-word "previously unpublished review of a recent contemporary art exhibition". [Full details below]

Not mentioned in The Guardian, my other favorite art mag is Art on Paper. It's too bad that it's more specialist than allowed for top billing on the racks or with readers because it's perhaps one of the most approachable art mags out there. In fact, after a recent and dramatic reduction in the magazine's dimensions (now a mere 6.5" by 8.5") it now embodies approachability in it's very production. On top of that, the magazine has a natural and abiding affinity to all things art book and artist publishing. And my experience has been that the co-publishers are particularly down to earth, and I think it comes across in print as well.

frieze Writer's Prize:

frieze Writer's Prize is an annual international award to discover and promote new art critics. The award will be judged in 2009 by critic and art historian James Elkins, novelist and critic Ali Smith, and co-Editor of frieze magazine Jennifer Higgie.

• Entrants must submit one previously unpublished review of a recent contemporary art exhibition, approximately 700 words in length.
• Entries must be submitted in English, but may be a translation (this must be acknowledged).
• Entrants must be over 18 years old.
• To qualify, entrants may only previously have had a maximum of three pieces of writing on art published in any national or regional newspaper or magazine. Previous online publication is permitted.
• The winning entrant will be commissioned to write a review for the October issue of frieze and be awarded 2000 GBP.
• Closing date is 26 June 2009.
• Entries should be emailed as a word attachment to writersprize@frieze.com. Please do not send images.

And not just on the cover.

First published in August of 2007, Kate Christensen's artist novel, The Great Man, was very well received and even went on to win the PEN/Faulkner Award. But then, as always happens under the pressure of the next big thing, the book fell off the radar. Now, nearly two years later, Harvard Book Store buyer and lit blogger Megan Sullivan has discovered the book and is raving about it and its author (who happens to have a new book coming out this June).

Nice to hear that it's still possible for a book to have a shelf life beyond four or five weeks. Now if only publishing houses could support their backlist more proactively rather than leaving it to chance of someone holding on to an advance copy for two years and finally reading it because, "after reading a fairly fat book... I wanted something a little slimmer."

Our friends at The Art History Newsletter point us to a new edition of The Art of Art History, edited by Donald Preziosi (Oxford University Press). Upon the book's original publication in 1998, Library Journal said, "Ultimately, this book is best suited to upper- and graduate-level collections and to the reference shelf of specialized art collections, as it proposes the discipline of art history itself as an art." Enjoy!

First, from the reading list of Harvard Book Store's own Bookdwarf: The American Painter Emma Dial, by Samantha Peale. While author James McManus calls this first work "a racy, muscular, enlightening beauty of a novel", in an early review Publishers Weekly says "There's a controlled neatness to the novel that feels at odds with the fury and passions of its artist characters, and the quiet late-book revelations aren't exactly inspired. All in all, it's fine, if a bit light." Judge for yourself, the book comes out next month, or read a bit more over at artnet. Lastly, if you're in the L.A. area, you can catch Peale in a reading at Skylight Books on May 13.

Second, from Amazon.com's Omnivoracious blog: Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa, by R. A. Scotti. It's the story of the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, and "on top of an engaging account of the investigation, Scotti treats readers to a tour of turn-of-the-century Paris, the birth of modern forensics, and a biography of the enigmatic painting itself."

I've just updated the project book pages and am excited to welcome three great designers to our teams:

Garrick Gott for Asphyxiating Culture

David Gee for Manette Salomon

Andy Jacobson for The Rape of the Rose