by Jon Lackman | 7 March 2007 | Books
The Winter 2006 issue of Art Journal contains a special section on “Publishing Paradigms in Art History,” which includes a transcript of a panel discussion that took place recently at the Clark Art Institute. A couple highlights:
UC Santa Cruz professor Catherine M. Soussloff: “Art history is in transition and has been for a long time. Visual studies or visual culture, whichever you’d like to call it, is not quite as potent as it might have been two or three years ago. There seem to be more questions about it as a concept. Nobody came to any secure solutions or conclusions about what that means. Nobody came to an idea about a ‘new visual culture’ or a ‘new visual studies’ … Publishing in these fields today is, therefore, a work-in-progress.”
Duke University Press editorial director Ken Wissoker: “From a publisher’s point of view, we’re actually happier to have the discipline be indistinct. We always think not about the discipline of the author, but about who might be interested in what the book is about. The more that’s a diverse group of people, the more likely the book is to circulate widely and be influential.”
In an essay in the same issue, Soussloff notes that “representatives of university presses at the Clark Art Institute colloquium appeared to agree that art books were subsidized to a greater extent than any other kind of book, meaning that the presses make up for the inordinate cost of art books not only through an increase in the per-volume price, a reduction in royalties, and passing on costs of photographs and permissions to the authors, but also through the diversion of the income from successful books in all fields on their lists. Somehow, teachers, authors, curators, and librarians in the university and the museum must address this growing burden of costs.”
