Melville House Books

“Is there a crisis in art book publishing?” asks Jamie Camplin in this report for The Art Newspaper. “Most people who love art — collectors, gallery-goers, curators, critics, dealers and artists themselves — understandably take it for granted that there is an audience for books about it.” But is there?

Camplin notes that art book publishing faces challenges that are “real and substantial, but they are only obliquely connected with the economic downturn that is currently creating problems for the commercial art world, as well as for museums and other cultural institutions.” Among them: reaching its audience when art journalism is disappearing, and the “preoccupation with low prices” that has been fostered especially by Amazon.com. She says it’s had “the pernicious effect of devaluing books in the minds of consumers, with especially problematic consequences for art-book publishers, whose costs — of design, production and copyright — cannot be fully reflected in retail prices.”

Nonetheless, she expresses some optimim: “Art-book publishing is not for dreamers, but there remains a vast potential as an incentive for triumphing over the challenges … If today’s audiences have largely lost the Classical and Christian culture of their forebears, that does not destroy the great western art of the past; it just makes it fresh terrain for the publisher. If eyes have been opened to the whole world via global travel and the movements of peoples, a whole new range of canvases is now revealed to us. If we moan about ‘dumbing down’ in the face of the visual noise that comes our way daily, it only means that we are living in the age of ‘more’ — more that is mediocre, but also more that is astonishingly creative.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.