Art Books in the Digital Age: Aura, Status, and Survival

The Auction Record and the Persistence of Aura

A headline from May 2015 captured the moment precisely: "Picasso's Women of Algiers Smashes Auction Record," as the BBC phrased it on May 12, noting that the painting "has become the most expensive painting to sell at auction, going for $160 million" (Gompertz 2015). In the frequently 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 a Beanie Baby collection have not.

It is now almost eighty years since Walter Benjamin issued his famous meditation on the value of the visual arts under late capitalism, "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction." The subject of what art means in an age where reproductions 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, it is necessary to consider the present state of the arts. The record-breaking Christie's auction of 2015, 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 irreproducible 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?

E-Reading and the Uneven Transition Away from Print

There is an important distinction between speculating about the "future of the art book" and direly predicting the "fate of the art book." As one industry observer noted in 2013, "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 — a perception that has occasioned titles more concerned with fate than with the future, like Sven Birkerts' 1994 work The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. To read Birkerts 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), the term "CD-ROM" reads as obsolete as "eight-track cassette." What is not yet obsolete is the printed book.

The transition to e-reading is not uniform across all fields of publishing. The "trend lines" that industry observers cite may apply to publishing as a whole, but they depend heavily on the fact that some readers became instant adopters of the technology while others have not. The obvious example is romance novels: this is a readership that considers the physical book to be semi-disposable. The whole purpose of a romance novel, for its readers, is that it is one of a series — perhaps one Harlequin or Mills & Boon title rises above the rest, but the core audience is mostly responding to the genre in general. As Julie Bosman reported for The New York Times, "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 — is counted as "genre fiction." Genre fiction attracts readers who are insatiable and who are relatively omnivorous. In other words, these readers will read anything, a fact amply demonstrated in the years since Bosman's report by the phenomenal success of Fifty Shades of Grey, a trilogy of soft-core romance novels assembled from internet fan fiction. To suggest that the e-reader trend poses a comparable threat to art books is disingenuous at best.

The Coffee Table, Social Status, and Bourdieu

The real issue with art books is that, as industry observers concede, they have always meant something else — something a bit different. There is a "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). The standard term for such books is, of course, "coffee-table books." This term acknowledges that the idea of a coffee table itself — a middle-class American wanting to present aesthetic taste to guests, where the coffee-table book is both a decoration and an announcement of its purchaser's cultural affiliations — is 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: the middle-class desire to assert superior taste derives from the desire to assert status. Social media in the twenty-first century 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 — posing with a meal you just cooked, rather than with a Picasso you just purchased, is a relatively harmless way of announcing your tastes and what you can afford. The number of friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter is also an announcement of status, as is "liking" things on 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 the 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 James Cameron's Titanic. Early in the film, Kate Winslet's character is shown to have purchased and brought aboard ship Pablo Picasso's legendary 1907 canvas "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." The painting functions as an opportunity for the film's villains to sneer at "modern art," claiming that clearly the painter of this nonsensical canvas will never amount to anything. The audience is meant to understand that Winslet's character is morally superior — she sees the future accurately, whether her purchase of "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" represents a vision of future art history or a far-sighted financial investment. Within the context of a Hollywood film, these two meanings are effectively conflated: Picasso is valuable because rich people say he is, and he is good because he is valuable to rich people.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In Illuminations: Selected Writings. New York: Schocken, 1969. Print.

Bosman, Julie. "Lusty Tales and Hot Sales: E-Books Thrive." New York Times, December 8, 2010. Web. Accessed 20 May 2015.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. New York: Routledge, 1984. Print.

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Second Edition. New York: Faber & Faber, 2006. Print.

Gallagher, Sharon Helgason. "Imagining the Future Art Book." February 12, 2013. Web. Accessed May 20, 2015.

Gompertz, Will. "Picasso's Women of Algiers Smashes Auction Record." BBC News, 12 May 2015. Accessed 20 May 2015.