by Jon Lackman | 30 August 2006 | Books
In the September Art in America, Prestel executive editor Christopher Lyon surveys the “mounting crisis in art book publishing”: “[MOMA's new bookstore stocks] barely one-fourth of the more than 10,000 titles offered before MOMA’s temporary relocation to Queens in 2000 … Over the past 15 years the marketplace for art books has bifurcated [into] a streamline, dumbed-down commercial sector and a delicate hothouse sector for serious books, one that apparently can survive only with instutional care and feeding … The coffee-table book was once the star of bookstore window displyas and an eagerly awaited highlight of newspaper roundups of holiday gift books … such books once served as markers of cultural aspiration … Since the 1980s, there has been a decline in the price that a publisher feels he can assign to a title … print runs have declined by half … A second problem is market saturation … certain subject areas, such as 19th century French art, have been overexploited.”
SEE ALSO Brian Sholis’ write-up of Lyon’s article. “The conflicts in the Middle East are crises; the world’s environment is at a crisis point; the seemingly inevitable eradication of thousands of human languages can be considered a crisis. I have a harder time accepting the term used in relation to subjects like art-book publishing, art criticism, or classical music.”
