Art publishing & art publics today (1989)
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 01 November 2009
This conference paper was given at the lecture theatre of the Victoria & Albert Museum on 13 May 1989.
2009 addition: My paper for this conference organised by the Wimbledon School of Art seemed to be well received by many in the audience, especially younger people. The convenor of the conference introduced my paper as likely to be ‘controversial’. It seemed that my role was to spice up an otherwise staid event. My remarks about the censorship effect of capitalist market forces and the lack of patriotism on the part of many British art book publishers certainly incensed representatives of Thames & Hudson (who once commissioned me to write a book—Art since Pop) who were present because they later made angry refutations and denials.
In the 1980s I tutored a fine art student who wrote an excellent dissertation on Jeff Koons which I thought could be expanded into a book by the student and myself. We wrote a proposal and submitted it to T & H. Their response— “Who is Jeff Koons?”— revealed how out of touch they were with contemporary art. We replied by sending them copies of a dozen periodical articles on Koons. Still they were not interested. Of course, a few years later they published The Jeff Koons Handbook (1992), a non-critical book.
Now onto the paper I presented back in 1989.
My main concern as a writer on art is with contemporary art and the situation of living artists in Britain, consequently, my talk has been written with this focus in mind. In the 1960s, the American art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote an essay entitled “Art books, book art, art” in which he argued that as the totality of the world’s art expanded exponentially, the only way an individual could keep track of it was by means of a ’material that permits their simultaneous delivery everywhere’. (From pp.196-202 in H. Rosenberg’s The Anxious Object published by Thames & Hudson, 1965). That is, via the reproduction of works of art in the multiple-copy media of magazines and books. Rosenberg acknowledged the drawbacks of a museum-without-walls, a museum of substitute images. And he remarked: “It seems to me that the current vogue for art books arises from an appetite for knowledge which the book is better suited to satisfy than are art works themselves. It coincides with the emergence of art as a branch of learning and as a source of data for other branches of learning”. The implication of his essay was that there was no alternative and it is indeed hard to see how visual art could detach itself from the discourses of publicity, criticism, history-writing and publishing within which it is now imbricated.
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