Results tagged “Wall Street Journal” from Real Clear Arts

It'll never happen here, and it probably shouldn't. But as the publishing business teeters ever closer to failure, with profit margins shrinking and sales declining, it's interesting to look at the situation in Germany.

The Wall Street Journal has the stories in today's paper. First, there's one about Wal-Mart, Amazon.com and Target putting a limit on bulk sales customers may buy of the deeply discounted books they're now selling. At Wal-Mart, it's two copies; Amazon, three, and Target, five. They suspect small booksellers of "scooping up" cheap copies and reselling them. Here's the link.

More interesting is the companion article about Germany, where book prices are set. There, and in most of Europe other than Britain, bookstores and online booksellers must sell books at the price established by publishers. As a result:

Many in German attribute the country's thriving literary and publishing scene to a system that outlaws the discounting of virtually all new books for 18 months. The system protects independent booksellers and smaller publishers from giant rivals that could discount their way to more market share. Along with 7,000 bookshops, nearly 14,000 German publishers remain in business. Many are of modest size, like Munich-based Carl Hanser Verlag, which publishes the work of this year's Nobel laureate, German-Romanian writer Herta Mueller.  

"Come And Join Our Community of Culture Shoppers." That's one of the taglines employed by the new British site, CultureLabel.com, now in beta, which is self-described this way:

Hello! CultureLabel.com is the first online platform to curate and showcase the best artist-designed and limited-edition products from over 60 leading galleries, museums, artists and culture institutions.

Though most brands on the site are British, it has invited cultural institutions from around the world, and it looks as if the Museum of Modern Art has signed up, but isn't present yet. You can read more about CultureLabel in The Art Newspaper, which recently posted an article on its website about it, and the Wall Street Journal, which published an article several days ago.

Sounds like a good idea to me, especially for small museums, but I decided to put Five Questions to an expert on museum merchandising, Rena Zurofsky, who -- as you can see on her website -- has advised clients like Lincoln Center and the Philbrook Museum.

1) How important are store sales to American museums, and how are sales doing during this recession?

Museum stores have become expected amenities. They support educational missions by selling catalogues and books and...they are considered tools for extending the "brand." ... Whether they actually enhance income or not depends on quite a few factors, not least of which is the level of traffic to the institution itself.  Also important will be the popularity or notoriety of a given exhibition. Web sales will enhance the bottom line, but again, generally only if on-line shoppers know to look for that institution. Many shops probably operate at break-even rather than significant revenue-enhancement.

You don't often get to write in newspapers or magazines about works of art that have been in collections for decades -- after all, what's the news value?

That's one reason I love the Saturday column in The Wall Street Journal called "Masterpiece: Anatomy of a Classic." Every week someone describes and details what makes a work worthy of the distinction. Today, I had one about the Alexander sarcophagus in Instanbul's archeological museum; here's the link. (There's one error: the WSJ picture is mis-captioned: that's a side panel, showing the Battle of Gazza, not Alexander at the battle of Issus -- illustrated in the picture here.) 

I've written a handful of these pieces, and they're a joy. My favorite is "Staring Durer in the Face," about his 1500 self-portrait as Christ. (If that's behind the pay wall, it's also posted on my website here.)

These pieces are not just about visual art. Nicely, the WSJ takes a broader view. In recent weeks, the column has examined Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago, Eric Ambler's "A Coffin For Dimitrios,"  and the Eiffel Tower. There've been films, buildings, and musical works, too.

It's always worth a look, even if you don't agree with the choices.

My apologies to Guy Ben-Ner, the Israeli video artist who has represented Israel at the Venice Biennale and whose 2000 video, Moby Dick, was recently acquired by the Museum of  Modern Art. He has a show at MASS MoCA, but when I was there on Saturday, I fled -- not because of his work, but because some young man was in the galleries bleating into his cell phone. Guards are few at MASS MoCA, and no one stopped him from chatting away during the video.

But this is not just a plea to museums to enforce the no-cell-phones ban, though it is that, too.

Rather, the situation started me thinking about art and focus. My one-time colleague at The New York Times, the retired music critic Bernard Holland, used to stir up dozens of reader letters at the mere mention of a cough in the audience. This happened not once or twice, but -- as I found when I just searched his work at the Times -- in 14 articles he wrote over the years touching on the problem. Everyone agreed that coughers should not be tolerated.

A cough is often involuntary. What would Carnegie Hall denizens say about the gallery-goers who nowadays think nothing of pulling out their cells while others are trying to look at art?

In a world in which we are all multi-tasking and suffering from many demands on our attention, looking at art remains different. So should consuming other forms of art. 

This week being the start of the spring bellwether auctions in New York, there's a lot in the art press about the art market. In one entry from WSJ, The Wall Street Journal's quarterly magazine, which arrived with my paper on Saturday, David Zwirner had several interesting things to say. Calling him "the art world's go-to gallerist right now" -- a title others would no doubt contest -- the magazine promised his "unvarnished opinion on a market in free fall." Kelly Crow did the interview. A few choice excerpts:

Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami are going to get tested, and the jury is out. Andy Warhol's market collapsed completely in the early 1990s. He withstood his test. Hirst and Murakami--I'll be curious to see where their careers are in five years.

And:

I'd like a 25-year moratorium on selling living artists' work at auction. It would give artists time to develop their work without worrying about auction prices. Auction houses got greedy and wanted in on selling new work--right up to the infamous Hirst sale when they stepped in and played art gallery. I don't like it, and my artists don't like it. When a piece they've sold is flipped for $1.5 million at auction, they don't get anything out of it--and they're left standing in front of blank canvases worrying about money when that should be the last thing on their minds.