The managing director of Thames & Hudson gives a clear overview, in The Art Newspaper of some of the problems in the contemporary publishing of art books. It seems a sound article, but I’d like to pick up a couple of points.

He writes that the…

“preoccupation with low prices has had the pernicious effect of devaluing books in the minds of consumers”

…but seems to imply that Amazon is mainly to blame. He doesn’t mention the effect of near slave-labour printing in the Far East, as a factor that has allegedly allowed publishers to drop prices for huge coffee-table tomes that might have otherwise retailed at twice the price.

He also mentions in passing (and might have said more about) another trend that is, in a different way, “devaluing books in the minds of consumers” — the journalistic hunger to sniff at the dirty-linen drawer of dead artists and thus to…

“appropriate art for contemporary society’s great mass-market fuel: celebrity”