Lots of hot, museum book club action

A quick update on our popular Museum Book Club webpage as it has grown quite a bit. The page now includes:

• Links to 32 36 museum book club programs across the country
• 13 special book club discussion guides, online and in PDF
• A LibraryThing catalog of more than 100 recent museum book club books
• 2 features on the very successful clubs at the Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Fine Arts Houston

Most recently, we've added guides for:

• The Unknown Masterpiece, by Honoré de Balzac
• A Painter's Life, by K. B. Dixon
• Visual Shock, by Michael Kammen
• Museum Legs, by Amy Whitaker (a guide written by the author herself)

Whether you're a reader, a club attendee, or a club organizer, we hope you'll find (or continue to find) the site a useful resource. There are lots of terrific books to be read!

Beautiful Art (Books)

"Art books are expensive (not accessible), heavy (not mobile), and no one reads them (not social). Our reverence for them is misplaced. Today, a book shouldn’t be beautiful for the way it’s packaged and sold, it should be beautiful for what it says and for the encounters in creates.  Encounters not only with other texts and ideas, but also with people, places and—for the visual art field especially—objects in the real world. I hate art books, but I love art."

This is description of the presentation I'm giving today at the Books in Browsers conference hosted by the Internet Archive, the theme of which this year is "beautiful books". You can download the e-book, or watch the video it live streaming at http://www.toccon.com/live. The e-book is in EPUB format which works on Apple, Nook, Sony, and Kobo readers (sorry, not Kindle) as well as online with the free Ibis Reader or on your desktop with Adobe Digital Editions, also free.

And finally, the funny image at the bottom is a QR code like the one I mention in the presentation. By scanning it with a QR reader on your smartphone, or by simply entering the short URL into your mobile web browser, you'll get the e-book on the presentation. I can't say at this point that it works on every device, QR reading app and mobile browser, but I know at least that on an iPhone you can use this to upload the book directly to iBooks, Stanza or Kobo and start reading instantly. Cool!

City #1

There's an enormous crossover between people who visit art museums and people who read books. In fact, the more involved someone is in a museum, the more voracious they tend to be in their reading, and vice versa. As a publisher of books about art, I have to ask myself, Where are these people?

To lead me to the best places to find book readers interested in visual art, a few years ago I combined data on public participation in the arts, art museum membership, bookstore presence and other literary activities from several sources. The result was a ranked list of sixteen cities across the country, two geographic areas of interest, and two surprises locales where I thought the crossover would be strongest (all mapped here). Minneapolis-St. Paul was at the top of the list. and finally visiting for the first time myself (this past weekend for the Art Libraries Society annual conference) it's not hard to see why.

At the center of the art scene in Minneapolis-St. Paul there are two strong institutions. First, a very solid, completely thorough, general collection museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Second, a world-class (ie., one of the best in the world) contemporary art museum, the Walker Art Center. On top of that, there's the University of Minnesota's Weisman Art Museum (closed through the fall for a building expansion), a solid gallery scene, and the respected Minnesota College of Art and Design.

And for literature, the field is just as rich, or even more so. There's Open Book which houses the vibrant Minnesota Center for Book Arts, the Loft Literary Center and indie trade press, Milkweed Editions. You'll also find other indies like Graywolf Press and Coffee House Press based in town too, and a great short-run book printer to take care of them all, BookMobile. There are a number of great independent bookstore's Magers & Quinn, Micawber's, Common Good Books and author Lousie Edrich's own Birchbark Books, among many others. And the Twin Cites even has its own dedicated book review magazine, one of the few left in the country and one of my favorites, Rain Taxi.

And for the crossover, just check out the art book selection at the Walker Art Center. Or at Magers & Quinn. Or BookSmart. Or James & Mary Laurie Bookseller…. Needless to say, I came home to Tucson last night with more books than I'd left with. Thanks Minneapolis-St. Paul, you're number one.

(Note: We've also updated our Art/Reading Travel Guide with some Twin Cities highlights. Have more for Minneapolis-St. Paul or elsewhere? Please add them!)

Kathy Halbreich on creativity in museums

Visitors at MoMA. Photo by Amy Whitaker.Just getting into Artforum's single-themed summer issue devoted to "The Museum Revisited". The first inclusion is by MoMA associate director, and former Walker Center director, Kathy Halbreich. For me, some of the most interesting tidbits revolve around a sense of everyday creativity, and how that creativity might be better harnessed and celebrated by museums, which tend otherwise to be essentially conservative institutions. The piece (written as told to Artforum editor Tim Griffin) is well worth a read, but I wanted to pull out a few choice thoughts here:

On her tenure at the Walker Center:

I wanted to see whether some of the class divisions within an institution could be erased, so that, for instance, the extraordinary people who worked in the basement--the so-called crew, many of whom were artists--would know that their voices were important in the galleries. Similarly, I wanted to bridge the gap between administrators and programmers. We were all creative partners, and emphasizing this would, I hoped, make everyone feel deeply engaged in the institution.

Thinking from MoMA:

I'm also interested in people who make expressive things--films or dances or music compositions--on YouTube but who don't call themselves artists. I wonder whether they aren't part of our audience. We're beginning to look at how to engage those folks ... This leads us to new distribution and display systems we need to understand and embrace.

I think as a culture, we really are scared of artists. I think, as a culture, we're not really interested in ambivalence or ambiguity. I think, as a culture, we give no reward to intelligent failure.

And one that sounds good, but that I don't quite get:

... now, in the twenty-first century, I would rather the institution set standards in terms of permission rather than canon. In other words, if the canon is about a kind of certainty, perhaps today permission could usefully be about a kind of fluidity--a different way of constructing reality.