“Times are changing for the traditional exhibition catalogue,” I write in the September issue of The Art Newspaper. It’s a subject I’ve pondered before, but for the recently published feature, I dug much deeper, prying some rule-of-thumb numbers from sources and discovering  several worthy experiments.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, for example, is offering a print-on-demand anthology of articles for its Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins exhibition, rather than a traditional catalogue. (His The Champion Single Sculls is at left.)

The Philadelphia Museum of Art produced no catalogue for its recent Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris, initially thinking it would publish one online, but later deciding to post a “gallery guide” allowing online visitors to “walk through” the exhibition remotely.

And, since 2002, the Brooklyn Museum has produced “mini-catalogues” for smaller exhibitions whose content and budget don’t allow a traditional catalogue. These “grand brochures” are generally 6- by 9-inches, hard-bound, fewer than 100 pages, and printed on the museum’s onsite four-color press.

Behind those experiments are factors like these:

• Production costs – paper, ink, printing, binding and so on – for 10,000 copies of a 250-300 page book typically range from $150,000 to $250,000.
• Add in the time spent by curators on research, writing and editing, the fees paid to outside authors, reproduction rights for dozens of images, design costs, distribution, and so on, and the actual cost per book can reach into three-figures. So they are all money-losers. 
• As few as 2% of people visiting an exhibition usually buy the catalogue. 5% is a big deal.
• The more popular an exhibition is, and the more familiar the artist is, the lower the sell-through rate. That’s because popular shows draw wider audiences, composed of regular museum-goers who may feel they know the artist and occasional visitors whose interest in art is less serious; apparently, neither category wants to shell out, say, $30 to $60 for a catalogue.

It’s pretty clear that museums would like to dispense with these big catalogues, possibly in favor of e-books. They can’t for two reasons — lenders to a big traveling show want a catalogue and reproduction rights for pictures online catalogues are more difficult to obtain.

What’s emerging may be a hybrid, with a printed catalogue where some elements — like the checklist — are left out and available only online.

Or, back at LACMA, for California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way, beginning in October, 2011, a curator’s wish to include a directory of designers and manufacturers in the catalogue led to a different solution: a stand-alone, print-on-demand book, possibly with pictures of artists in their studios, not of objects in the exhibition, is in the offing.

Read the whole article on my website. All of this, seems to me, is good.

Photo Credit: Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Lynn Zelevansky became director of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh about a year ago. I don’t know her, though I believe I spoke with her in her previous job, as curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

That’s a caveat, because I’m about to say that I liked what I heard in an interview she gave to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — yet it’s hard to tell from a distance whether her actions are in line with her words. The P-G says that she’s making small, but meaningful changes, while insisting on quality, attempting to reach wider audiences, and re-evaluating the collection on an ongoing basis. All good generalities.

Here are a few specifics I like: 

She wants to open at noon and stay open until 8 p.m. every day.

She will close food service in the Hall of Architecture in November because it was damaging the architectural casts, which will be restored.

She aims to do more ambitious exhibitions, even though it meant dispensing with the Associated Artists of Pittsburg show in 2011. (Not to diss local artists, she outlined other ways the museum will support local artists.)

She’s looking for a sponsor for free-admission nights.

She wants to let people know how the museum operates, and has begun an e-newsletter “Inside the Museum” (one post, in August, so far) as well as programs to detail what goes on behind the scenes. On Sept. 30, she’ll give a talk herself, talking “frankly and personally” about her museum experiences.

More at the P-G here.

Zelevansky is on the record now, and I hope her various constituencies and board members hold her to these goals. Otherwise, I’ll have egg on my face, too.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of LACMA  

Further to my recent post about the way Americans don’t talk much about art (here), either because they don’t know enough or they don’t care enough or both.

The other day, I was sent the galleys for the forthcoming book, Whiter Shades of Pale, by the author of Stuff White People Like, a 2008 best-selling book, and a website of the same name, Christian Lander. Lander wrote, in one part, about classical music:

There are a number of industries that survive solely upon white guilt: Penguin Classics, the SPCA, free range chicken farms, and the entire rubber bracelet market.  Yet all of these pale in comparison to classical music, which has used white guilt to exist for over a century beyond its relevance.

Though white people do not actually listen to classical music, they like to believe that they are the type of people who would enjoy it. You can witness this first hand by going to any classical performance at your local symphony where you will see literally dozens of white couples who have paid upwards of $80 for the right to dress up and sit in a chair for hours reading every word in the program.

Lander did not mention the visual arts, except in a section on the popularity of arts degrees, which could include “actual art.”

I was eager to see if he took up the subject in the new book, which basically does the same thing broken down “regions” — e.g., Atlanta, “college towns throughout the United States,” Los Angeles, New York.

Nope. Not really. Lander has a few more observations about classical and other music, but the sole entry that refers to visual arts comes in the section on the United Kingdom and refers to Banksy.

Keeping up with art is hard; trips to galleries, enormous books, and costly biannual magazines are just a few of the many expenses you will incur during an attempt to stay current with art. While most of these things would actually attract more white people than dissuade them, the amount of work required to become and remain an expert on art is simply too much for the majority of white people.

…Currently the artist who is both cutting-edge and easy to keep up with is Banksy, and white people love him. He is anonymous, British, easy to understand, and he works in the medium of graffiti! This last part is very important since all white people consider graffiti to be art when it looks like something other than a bunch of squiggles. In every other instance, they consider it vandalism.

Not funny. Lander goes on to explain why your taste would be considered unsophisticated if you say your favorite artist is van Gogh, Escher or Monet, and why it looks like you’re trying too hard if you say Koons, Anderson (Laurie), Hirst or Basquiat. Banksy is “just right.” 

Again, not so funny — and even discouraging that that may be what people think about people who know and care about art.

I’m not getting serious about this, though. It’s just one example.

Jerry Saltz writes about his experience as a judge on Bravo’s Work of Art in this week’s New York magazine, but in many ways he is really writing about the art world — and he’s right on target.

Let me count the ways:

• “The art world has a love-hate relationship with visibility, entertainment, and anything populist. It claims to be open but relentlessly polices its borders for anything as alien as this show was bound to be.” How true. Another example: ArtPrize, which I think was great for encouraging excitement about art in Grand Rapids, and beyond — but which has been pretty much systematically ignored by the art world. This attitude frequently looks, to outsiders, as hypocrisy.
• “A lot of the challenges were inane — telling an artist to create a work based on an experience in an Audi showroom, or to make ‘shock art’ can only produce stupid results.” But, I say, where would producers get such ideas if they didn’t think the contemporary art world was all about commercialism — if, here, an extreme — and going beyond the boundaries of what’s generally acceptable?
• “…the choice of Simon de Pury…as mentor was misguided; …the head of a swanky auction house — which is about making money — shouldn’t advise young artists about anything, ever.” True, but see first item above: just who from the real art world was going to agree to be mentor? The Brooklyn Museum was pilloried for giving over a gallery to the winner for a matter of weeks.
• “…since finishing the show, I’ve caught myself in galleries thinking, ‘This art isn’t much better or worse than the stuff on Work of Art.’ ” Ooops.
• “I failed at practicing criticism on TV. I wasn’t nearly clear or articulate enough about why I liked or disliked things.” At least Saltz usually does better in print… not so for many critics.

Saltz also reveals how frequently he was stopped on the street, and sent thousands of comments — noting that many of these people said they’d never written about art before, but were “as articulate as any art critic.”

Here’s a link to his recap.

UPDATE, 9/15: It looks like Saltz is getting even more popular, probably because of his stint on Work of Art — and that’s a good thing. Today, he announced that he’s starting a new column on New York magazine’s Vulture website, Ask The Art Critic: “anything you want about art, art careers, art dealers, prices of art, why critics write about artists, how critics are edited, what makes a good dealer, a bad dealer, how to get back at snarky critics, how to behave around critics, what’s up with reality TV, what makes a curator good, bad, or worse.”

Send questions to ArtCritic@NYmag.com. Keep them clear, simple, short, and sign them — preferably. The column starts Monday, Sept. 20.

As I wrote Saltz, “congrats — more attention for art.” And I mean it.   

BACK TO THE ORIGINAL POST:    

I never saw the harm in Work of Art, and figured something good may have come of it. Looks to me as if something could, easily.

Photo Credit: Portrait of Saltz by the show’s winner, Abdi Farah, Courtesy New York magazine

 

In many corners of the art world, the cultural event of the fall season will be the opening on Nov. 20 of the much-awaited Art of the Americas wing at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

In late August, I hustled up there, and was surprised to see most of the 53 galleries in the new wing (pictured below) largely installed. (I’ve talked with some museums that, two days before the opening of an expansion, aren’t nearly finished.) This is a well-run museum.

I spent time walking around the wing with, and then talking to, Malcolm Rogers, the museum’s director, for a Cultural Conversation that will be published in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal. The article is about the wing, yes, but also about Rogers’s philosophy for running a museum like MFA.

It’s a rather positive story, and as they say, who’da thunk? Let me recall some history, and add a few things that didn’t make it into the piece.

When Rogers came here in fall, 1994 from Britain to take the job, few people wanted it — despite the museum’s fabulous collections. The museum was adrift, with financial difficulties compounding its problems. Attendance was down, and so were contributions. Rogers got off to a controversial start, cutting staff and exhibitions, and giving a speech called “The M.F.A. Is 125 Years Old: Are We to Hold a Birthday Party or a Wake?”

It worked — finances, attendance, and exhibitions improved (though for some he was accused of dumbing down) — but it wasn’t enough: In 1999, he restructured again, sacking staff like Anne Poulet — who later landed very well as director of the Frick Collection and sending fear through the curatorial community. His move was dubbed the Boston Massacre, though he said he was simply breaking up fiefdoms and making the museum act as one.

There’s an element of truth in both sides, though I think even Rogers’s backers would concede that the way he did things in those early years was rather brutal. 

But in hindsight, Rogers has unquestionably made the MFA a better place. He may have saved it.

Now, maybe he has mellowed. Maybe his results are too good to question. He explains himself well — saying, for example, that he early on courted controversy with some exhibitions, but now doesn’t have to. He still wants to stretch the boundaries of art: “My notion is that every five or six exhibitions, we do something new,” he told me. He also cited his hiring of a jewelry curator — which he thinks will be copied.  

For the new wing, he did not make the mistake so many museum directors have — getting a museum with what he calls “a showy outside” but one that’s bad for the art inside. And he raised money for the endowment ($159 million) as part of the wing’s overall $504 million campaign — not waiting till afterward, as so many other museums did. Bravo.

This fall, he’ll bask in glory, deservedly, I think. What I saw in the new wing looked wonderful, though I reserve final judgment until I see the final product.

And then, if he does what he says he’ll do in my article, he’ll get back to work, because running a great museum is like maintaining a bridge — as soon as you finish painting it, you start all over at the opposite end.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of MFA, Boston