Hol Art Books

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.