Sharon Helgason Gallagher and the Art Book in the Internet Age Reaction Paper

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headline from May 2015. "Picasso's Women of Algiers Smashes Auction Record," is how the BBC phrased it, on May 12, noting that "Picasso's Women of Algiers has become the most expensive painting to sell at auction, going for $160 million" (Gompertz 2015). In the frequently dicey and volatile early twenty-first century economy, it is clear that high art has managed to maintain its value in a way that the mortgage of a Florida homebuyer or the Beanie Baby collection of a midwestern housewife have not. It is now almost eighty years since Walter Benjamin issued his famous meditation on what precisely the value of the visual arts could be under late capitalism, "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction." The subject of what art means in an age where reproductions of art are ubiquitous has been around for a while. But Benjamin had never seen the Internet. When considering a publishing house like D.A.P. / Artbook under the leadership of Sharon Helgason Gallagher, it is necessary to consider the present state of the arts. The record-breaking Christie's auction this month, setting a new high in the monetary value of an original painting, is a good indicator. Something sustains this value, and it is the sense of the artwork's un-reproducible aura. As Benjamin himself noted in 1936, "even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be" (Benjamin 220). If this was the prospect eighty years ago, then it is worth asking -- does the Internet change the game for books that offer high quality artistic reproductions?

For Sharon Helgason Gallagher, there is an important distinction between speculating about the "future of the art book" and direly predicting the "fate of the art book": she noted in 2013 that "all of the trend lines do show an increasing adoption of e-books over print books and of web browsing over sustained reading" (Gallagher 2013). This is the general public perception of what is happening to the book in the digital age, of course -- it has occasioned titles, more concerned with fate than with the future, like Sven Birkerts' 1994 The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. To read Birkerts' work over twenty years later is a chastening experience: when he claims that "already it is clear that the new reading will be technology enhanced. CD-ROM packages are on the way -- some are already out -- to gloss and illustrate" printed books (Birkerts 201). For a millennial college student reading Birkerts in 2015, what is most glaring is that the term "CD-ROM" is already as obsolete as "eight-track cassette." What is not yet obsolete is the printed book.

And what Gallagher presumably knows, even if it is beyond the purview of her comments on the future of the art book, is that the transition to e-reading is not uniform in all fields of publishing. The "trend lines" Gallagher refers may apply to the industry as a whole, but they depend heavily on the fact that some readers became instant adopters of the technology, but not all readers as a whole. The obvious example here is romance novels: this is a readership (largely female) that considers the actual book to be semi-disposable. The whole purpose of a romance novel, for readers of romance novels, is that it is one of a series: perhaps one Harlequin or Mills & Boon title leaps above the rest as being particularly popular with its core audience, but the real issue is that the core audience is mostly responding to the genre in general. The New York Times noted this trend five years ago, along with the salient facts. Julie Bosman reported for the Times that "in 2009, when more than 9,000 titles were published, romance fiction generated more than $1.36 billion in sales, giving it the largest share of the overall trade book market….Romance is now the fastest growing segment of the e-reading market, ahead of general fiction, mystery, and science fiction, according to data from Bowker, a research organization for the publishing industry" (Bosman 2010). Within the publishing industry, romance -- like mystery and science fiction, also noted by Bosman -- is counted as "genre fiction." The general trend of genre fiction is that it attracts readers who are insatiable, and who might have their favorites among authors but who are otherwise relatively omnivorous.

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In other words, these people will read anything -- and in the five years since Bosman reported on the romance trend, this fact has only been amply proven by the phenomenal publishing success of Fifty Shades of Gray, a trilogy of soft-core-porn romance novels cobbled together from internet fan fiction, which read as though L'Histoire du O. had been written on a typewriter by a typewriter. To suggest that the e-reader trend poses a threat to something like art books is disingenuous at best.

The real issue with art books is that, as Gallagher concedes, they always meant something else, something a bit different. Gallagher refers in her address to the New York Public Library to the "broadly shared middle-class cultural aspiration embodied by two shelves of Harry Abrams and Rizzoli art books on a bookcase in the living room of the American home" (Gallagher 2013). Gallagher is perhaps trying not to denigrate the type of book that she publishes by imagining these middle-class purchasers of art books actually placing them on shelves, instead of placing them where the cultural imagination places them -- on coffee tables. The standard term for "Harry Abrams and Rizzoli art books" that Gallagher alludes to is, of course, "coffee-table books." This term itself acknowledges the justice of Gallagher's comments here, insofar as the idea of a coffee table itself -- the idea of a middle-class American wanting to present his or her own aesthetic taste to guests invited into the home, where the coffee table book is both a decoration and an announcement of its purchaser's own cultural affiliations, seems a distinctly twentieth-century phenomenon.

Yet what has not changed at all is the concept of status. That is, after all, the chief function of a coffee table book, and the middle-class desire to assert superior taste: it derives from the desire to assert status. Social media in 2015 seemingly permits a million different ways for a person to announce status. The bewildering popularity of pictures of food on Instagram and Facebook is probably the best indicator of this -- posing with a meal that you just made, rather than with a Picasso you just purchased, is a relatively harmless and unobtrusive way of announcing your tastes, announcing the sort of thing that you value and can afford. But of course the number of friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter are an announcement of some kind of status as well, and so is "liking" things on Facebook or Instagram. Where does art fit into this economy of status announcement? It is only a short step from Benjamin to Pierre Bourdieu, who argued in his great sociological work Distinction that the social function of art is precisely to maintain this idea of status. The ruling classes set the taste for art, and the person who is not from the ruling class must accept this standard of taste, or else feel "disgust, provoked by horror, or visceral intolerance ('feeling sick') of the tastes of others" (Bourdieu 56). We might usefully recollect here the cultural meaning that Picasso acquires in what is arguably the most popular Hollywood film of all time, James Cameron's "Titanic." Early in the film, Kate Winslet's character is represented as having purchased, and brought on board the Titanic, Pablo Picasso's legendary 1907 canvas "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." The painting functions as an opportunity for the film's villains -- Billy Zane as Kate Winslet's fiance and Frances O'Connor as her mother -- to sneer at "modern art," saying that clearly the painter of this savagely nonsensical canvas will never amount to anything. The audience is supposed to understand that Kate Winslet's character is the superior character -- the one who sees the future accurately, whether her purchase of "Demoiselles d'Avignon" is meant to represent a vision of future trends in art history, or merely an astoundingly far-sighted Warren-Buffet-esque financial investment. Within the context of a Hollywood film, these two meanings are essentially conflated: Picasso is good because rich people like Kate Winslet say he's good, and Picasso is good because he is valuable to rich people.

This trend, in which art serves as a token of social superiority, is not going away, no matter how much technological refinement continues to occur in the twenty-first century. Gallagher is at pains to assert the physicality of the art book, in order to demonstrate that, in some sense, our experience of a physical book is necessarily spatial and almost.....

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