The Aura of the Art Book

How literacy is giving way to luxury in the art world

I recently bought two art books from Italian exhibitions. One was a small Carlo Crivelli show in Milan, the other the catalogue for the major Fra Angelico exhibition in Florence.

The books are what you could call luxurious. They are large and weighty, the images are printed with crystal sharpness, the Crivelli one glossy like a fashion magazine. They would look very good on a coffee table or a walnut desk. They are not for reading on the Tube.

I realised that art books in general, whether concerned with old or contemporary art, tend to opt for this kind of high-end finish. Obviously good reproductions are useful for books concerned with the visual, but the logic seems to go further than this.

Art books of this kind, I noticed, try to embody and convey in their materiality something of the specialness of their subject. They are souvenirs of exhibitions, perhaps. They are also concerned with things, works of art, that are very expensive, and they do their best to follow suit (the Angelico one cost me €76).

After the exhibitions I was flicking through a glossy magazine at a friend’s flat. It contained pictures of houses around the world which reeked of impeccable taste. What is the point of this? I asked. It’s something to look at idly, to spend time with and be inspired by, the necessary idleness itself a luxury in keeping with the content of the images.

Art history books do similar work to the magazines, but, at an odd tangent to the images’ latent eroticism, they insert scholarly articles, complete with apparatus like footnotes, written by tenured academics who have gone through the literature and thought about the work with a precision that aspires to the photographs’ sharpness and elegance of style. It is academic writing which, against its inherent tendency to dryness, presents itself as sumptuous, slowed, lingering, even longing.

Books that are heavy and expensive, precious and shimmering with colours, where image and text alike invite reverence and the effect is material as much as it is verbal: surely the art book is the descendent of the illuminated manuscript?

The weighty art book, often but not always a monograph, is therefore the afterlife of the pre-Reformation, engaging the senses as well as the mind, where the textual is not so strictly privileged over the visual as it is in the Protestant tradition of sola scriptura.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that in these books the taste for images coincides, as in the pre-Reformation church, with a love of splendour and the affective properties of materials. And, might we add, a profound respect for institutional authority?

It is also perhaps no coincidence that slimmer, smaller art books tend to be more critical. Compare Kenneth Clark’s large and amply illustrated Civilisation with John Berger’s much hungrier Ways of Seeing, which fits in your pocket.

Little books also tend to deviate more from the canonical, the monographic, and the art forms that have traditionally been prioritised, i.e. painting, sculpture and architecture. I don’t think any exist, but imagine for a moment a pocket-sized paperback on Anish Kapoor, Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons. It would be nearly impossible for a lean, cheaply-made book, with at most a few black and white illustrations printed next to the text, to adopt the same tone of adulation as the coffee table monograph. The format would be gasping for a critic to step in and wreak iconoclastic havoc. Whatever the arguments, the book’s material modesty would make them much more compelling.

These convergences are telling. Art in art books is framed as something slow and meditative, something to fill the senses and move the soul, and increasingly fewer physical books seem to adopt the reformers’ stance. As a culture we are enthralled by the art image; we tend not to critique images in general, in the way that, for example, the modernist painters or the Calvinists did.

That does not mean that critical discussion of art doesn’t exist. It lives on, especially online. The online manipulability of images helps to dispel the sacral aura that art history books so effectively maintain. But the siphoning of different voices to different formats has consequences. Critical reviews can flatter or denounce, but the luxurious monograph remains, alongside the solo exhibition, museum acquisitions etc., a principal institutional indicator of artistic accomplishment.

The art world in its present form therefore establishes the artwork as the locus for a form of luxurious contemplation, evoked through crisp reproductions and brilliant, critical-yet-sympathetic text. Only now, unlike the illuminated manuscripts, the text supports the images rather than vice versa.

Is that simply what art is in our modernity? Or will the next process of reformation set in motion by, amongst other things, the internet, change the role of the art image in society?

There is a lot of talk at the moment about the decline of reading. Social media is destroying people’s attention spans, teenagers are unable to read books, literature undergraduates cannot read their course material, we are approaching a post-literate age, etc. The luxurious art book fits into this predicament at an interesting angle. Given their cost and the sheer cultural barriers to their accessibility, these books are principally for wealthy, cultured and leisured people, just as books were before the invention of movable type.

Not only are they exclusive, but glossy art books also tempt one towards a kind of browsing, where the sumptuous image takes over from the critical text, and the book becomes a vehicle for idle revery rather than disciplined attention.

If the art books are their descendants, might we therefore be looking at a strange reversal in the medieval manuscripts’ fortune? With early printing, costly and luxurious manuscripts were made redundant. Today, the proliferation of electronic texts might act in reverse, phasing out the kind of physical books that prioritise the word over the image. The sensory experience of reading a big art history book, however, cannot be reproduced online. Readers reading physical books like these might become a little bit more like their monastic forebears: reverent, sensuous, guided by more than just reason.

For all Walter Benjamin’s talk of reproduction dispelling art’s aura, art publishers have succeeded in preserving it by modern, mechanical means. The internet, however, seems to destroy the sense of the sacred in the way that Benjamin wished for. So will the books preserve it, to be locked away in the libraries of the wealthy? (Seemingly not even the universities: the one I’m attached to has introduced a policy of digital-only acquisitions.) Are we to put our hope for art’s specialness in the books and the art-world edifice or, like the iconoclasts, wage war against the superstitions of an earlier age and change the way we think about art altogether?