I am in Miami, where a cultural sector — contemporary art — is staring into the financial abyss and hearing the hoof beats behind it that may butt it over the cliff. Art Basel Miami, the satellite December art fair put on by its elder Swiss organization, and the many-ringed circus of smaller fairs held at the same time are going forth for the next five days with the hope of the dealers who populate them that, some way, they can hold out against the contracting economy. Anecdotally most people on the money side of the art market — gallerists, collectors, auctioneers, etc. — will tell you that recessions take a good nine months to a year to roll from the economy at large to the contemporary-art coffers. So far, at least, they look right. Though sales were sluggish at best at recent auctions and the big London fair Frieze, I can count the number of good contemporary-art galleries that have shuttered so far on one finger, and ad sales in art magazines, a decent barometer of the health and wealth of the economy, still look strong in the December issues.
Art marketers better buckle up tight, though, if the news from their distant cousins in the cultural trades is any indication. Is this the worst week ever for trade publishing? In the last seven days, a Houghton Mifflin Harcourt executive cryptically announced what seems to be a ban on new acquisitions; yesterday, adult trade division publisher Becky Saletan resigned, effective December 10, and today executive editor Ann Patty was canned. Today Simon and Schuster axed 35 employees. Bleakest of all perhaps was the bloodbath at Random House, where a massive restructuring was announced — with several positions eliminated for “redundancy” along with the people who held them, and with the absorption of numerous imprints. It ain’t looking like a great time to be a publisher, editor, agent, or writer.
Logging on to my computer this evening to read the news coverage of the latest gloomy stories, I was pretty surprised to see the response of readers at The New York Times Web site, which faintly reeked of Schadenfreude over the news. It’s been hard to miss the anger directed at Detroit — but then again, the car makers are requesting money to bail them out. Why the anger at the book industry? Some respondents blamed a good-old-boy network of hiring and promotion that in their view had led to a stagnant and dated approach to marketing; others pointed to a lack of editorial talent and an avalanche of badly written books; still others thought the culprit was the low salaries offered to newcomers to the profession, which made it impossible to make a living within publishing. Only a few who wrote in to comment on the developments talked about the decline in interest in books relative to everything else that competes for the time and attention of consumers. But what was most striking was the tone — which sounded like good riddance in most cases.
It will be interesting to see how the troubles in trade publishing will affect the university-press arena — which obviously hasn’t coughed up the sorts of money-losing advances or seen the overleveraged budget-busting takeovers that have crippled trade publishing. Maybe this will prove to be if not a recession-proof zone, than at least a shelter from the worst ravages of the economy. At least if they do begin to take the hits that trade houses are absorbing, it’s hard to imagine bystanders cheering it on.
