Picture Imperfect

Art-history scholars face narrowing publishing venues and rising permissions costs. But a report signals that help is on the way.

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By JENNIFER HOWARD

New York

If scholarly publishing had an endangered-species list, the art monograph would be at the top. At least that's the perception of many art historians as they struggle to publish their work.

"Between dwindling sales and the soaring costs of acquiring illustrations and the permission to publish them, this segment of the publishing industry has become so severely compromised that the art monograph is now seriously endangered and could very well outpace the silvery minnow in its rush to extinction," writes Susan M. Bielstein in a recent call to arms, Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk About Art as Intellectual Property, published this spring by the University of Chicago Press.

As the press's executive editor for art and architecture, Ms. Bielstein writes from the barricades. She knows that publishing art monographs costs a pretty penny. Art historians need high-quality illustrations to support their arguments, but in most cases, they must shell out for reproducible images, even of works in the public domain. And they, not their publishers, foot those bills. "It's not unusual for a scholar working on the Renaissance to pay $10,000 or $15,000 to illustrate a book that may sell only 400 or 500 copies," she says in an interview. Contemporary subjects still under copyright, and subject to an artist's or estate's whims, can prove to be an even costlier proposition.

Reproducing those images is not cheap for presses, either. A typical art-history book sets a publisher back anywhere from $7,500 for a title with 30 illustrations to $75,000 for one with 150 images. At Yale University Press, the largest scholarly publisher of art titles, the "hard cost" of an art book — including paper, binding, and image reproduction — is $40,000 to $50,000 "at a bare minimum," says Patricia Fidler, publisher for art and architecture there. "And that's a pretty simple kind of book."

"Not to put too fine a point on it," Ms. Bielstein observes in her book, when it come to art-history publishing, "today's picture is about as pretty as a Francis Bacon painting."

Some presses have streamlined their art-history lists. Cambridge University Press, a top publisher in the field, decided last year to trim its offerings in the discipline by more than half, a move that led some observers to conclude that the publisher had abandoned art-history monographs altogether.

"We have cut back our publishing in art history," says Frank Smith, Cambridge's editorial director for academic books, "but that doesn't mean we've discontinued it. We'll be taking on fewer books, and it will be less than half of what we were publishing before" — probably 20 or so titles a year, he estimates, with a focus on classical, medieval, and Renaissance subjects.

Now two leading scholars are poised to issue a major report on the state of art-history publication. In it they assess what has driven unease in the field, even as they soft-pedal notions of crisis.

"We don't see a crisis. We see rather a set of shifts in the field and in the way that field communicates and produces knowledge," says Mariët Westermann, an author of "Art History and Its Publications in the Electronic Age," a report on a study undertaken with a $50,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that is scheduled for release this summer.

Ms. Westermann is director of the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. The report's other author, Hilary M. Ballon, is a professor of art history at Columbia University and editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. They spent the past year canvassing various groups with a stake in art and architectural history, including scholars, editors, press directors, librarians, image providers, and museum representatives.

The authors made some of their findings and conclusions available to The Chronicle in draft form, and elaborated upon them in an extended conversation at Ms. Westermann's high-ceilinged, book-lined office at the Institute of Fine Arts in late June.

Over all the data confirmed that "there did seem to be some sort of vise in which young Ph.D.'s are caught," says Ms. Westermann. "There is a larger field of competition for publication and for jobs and everything else, and a smaller field of opportunity for the publication of traditional monographs."

Yet the two authors also see a developing resolve among scholars, publishers, and image providers to make art monographs easier and cheaper to illustrate and publish. They take heart, for instance, from a major proposal by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, to make images freely available to scholars. And although the technologies of print-on-demand and digital publishing are not yet advanced enough to solve all problems, Ms. Ballon and Ms. Westermann believe that they will relieve some of the cost pressure on scholars and their publishers.

The Influence of Anxiety

A couple of years ago, when Ms. Ballon was chair of the art-history department at Columbia, she and Ms. Westermann compared notes on the rumblings among their graduate students. "What we were finding was that our recently minted Ph.D. students were having increasing difficulty in publishing their first books," Ms. Ballon remembers.

The news that Cambridge, which she says was "the press most welcoming to first-book authors," would curtail its publication of art-history monographs only fueled the fears. A rumor that Princeton University Press would also slash art titles proved to be untrue, but she recalls that "there was tremendous anxiety in the field.

On top of this, you know the longer-term story about the withdrawal of the university presses from the scholarly monograph. General structural forces were converging and heightened in art history."

Initially Ms. Ballon and Ms. Westermann contemplated a digital solution to the problem. "History was already doing this with the Gutenberg-e project," Ms. Ballon points out, "and that model seemed perfectly sensible to apply to art history because there are so many things that books can't do with regard to illustration programs, which, at least in theory, you could do online."

However, when they talked to the Mellon Foundation, which in Gutenberg-e had already found an e-book experiment to support, the two scholars were encouraged to think in broader terms. They realized that in any case they needed "to get a better handle on what the problem was," Ms. Ballon says.

They recruited Lawrence T. McGill, deputy director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton, to corral and analyze data on both the number of doctoral degrees being conferred and the number of monographs published in the field. As that work went on, Ms. Ballon and Ms. Westermann brought art-history editors together for a conference this past February at the College Art Association's annual meeting. They also asked editors to fill out detailed surveys. In March they convened a meeting that brought together top editors, press directors, librarians, and representatives of museums and research institutions. (Most were U.S.-based because many of the issues involved have to do with the specifics of American copyright law.)

Ms. Ballon and Ms. Westermann submitted a final copy of their report to the Mellon Foundation at the end of July. They will publish it on the Web sites of their respective institutions in August. Mr. McGill wrote a section on trends as well as an addendum that details the data analysis involved in the report; Kate Wittenberg, director of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia — which is responsible for Gutenberg-e — contributed a section on libraries.

Boom but No Bust

Although the draft report plays down talk of a "crisis" in art-history publishing, it won't disabuse young scholars of the idea that competition and market contraction have made it tough to publish a book in the discipline. As the authors write in their executive summary, "Over the past two decades, the expansion of art-history graduate programs and the emergence of new fields of inquiry into the visual world have produced steady growth in the population of scholars of art and architecture. In the same period, economic pressures on academic publishers have caused thematic shifts and numerical reductions in the publications of the types of monographs that have traditionally nurtured the discipline."

Mr. McGill's number-crunching revealed that the number of Ph.D.'s granted in art history and related fields had indeed increased substantially over the past few decades.

Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, Mr. McGill calculated the number of doctorates conferred in art history and related fields in the 25 years from 1979 to 2004.

He found that from 1979 to 1993, an average of 156 Ph.D.'s were awarded annually. In the mid-90s, that number jumped to 198; in the late 90s and early 2000s, it climbed even faster, to an average of 236 doctorates a year — "a total increase of 51 percent since the 1980s and early 1990s," the report calculates. "In the most recent two years for which data are available (2002-3 and 2003-4), there were 260 and 259 Ph.D.'s awarded in art history, or over 100 more Ph.D.'s per year than was typical during the 1980s and early 1990s."

Determining the climate for monographs was trickier. Mr. McGill used the R.R. Bowker database, which records every book published with an ISBN number, to track art-history publications from 1985 to 2004 at university presses, paying special attention to eight key publishers that together handle about 57 percent of all art-history titles. (Those top eight comprise the Yale, Cambridge, Oxford, MIT, University of Washington, University of California, University of Chicago, and Princeton University Presses.)

Mr. McGill's analysis makes a strong case that the 1990s were, relatively speaking, boom years for art-history monographs. The top eight presses published an average of 63 titles a year in the field in the late 1980s, a figure that increased 92 percent, to an average of 121 titles a year, by the late 1990s. The number did dip in the period 2000-4, but only to 117 — just a 3-percent drop.

In interviews with editors at several presses, The Chronicle learned that at least one major art list has expanded while others, notably at Princeton and at the University of Pennsylvania, have held steady. Ms. Fidler, of Yale University Press, estimates that "we've probably grown the list over the past five years by about 50 titles a year."

Margins are tighter than ever, she says, "and everything is really scrutinized, from the paper we use to the discount we give bookstores." But even though she says publishing art books "is an extremely difficult thing to do, and we are not able to do things the way we used to, ... we're actually thriving and doing very well."

Mr. McGill, Ms. Ballon, and Ms. Westermann emphasize that the Bowker database is a blunt instrument; it does not identify scholarly monographs per se, so the team had to do some educated guesswork to ferret out single-author scholarly monographs from a list that included multiple-author works, art-history textbooks, and other art-related titles. And although most of the findings in the report apply to architectural history and art history equally, Mr. McGill cautions that the Ph.D. numbers do not encompass architecture degrees, because those raw data did not distinguish between doctorates awarded to working architects and those to scholars.

Still, the numbers give a good sense of the pressure points in the field. As the forthcoming report puts it, the declining ratio of titles published to doctorates awarded contributes "to the sense of 'crisis' reported by scholars." In 1989 that ratio was 1.4 books published for every doctorate; during most years of the 1990s, it reached about 1.8 art-history titles published per Ph.D. granted; and as of 2004, the latest year for which the researchers had both publishing and Ph.D. data, the ratio had gone back down to 1.4, where it was in 1989.

Combating the Crunch

It may be, then, that what feels like an alarming contraction is a return to a historical norm. As Mr. McGill points out in an interview, though, "expectations are conditioned by the rate of publishing during the time that you're studying." Many of today's rising scholars did their graduate work during the 1990s, he notes, so today's ratio "still feels like a squeeze" to them.

Twelve junior scholars — six men, six women — gave their account of that squeeze in a focus-group session with Mr. McGill last October. The scholars' specialities included medieval art, Islamic art and architecture, 20th-century American art, Chinese art, and 19th- and 20th-century architectural history. Whatever their subfield, though, the participants observed that potential publishers saw their manuscripts as too narrowly focused — even as their own tenure-and-promotion committees clamored for evidence of specialization.

Editors agree that some topics are just too specialized to be attractive. Susan Bielstein, of the Chicago press, puts it this way: "I can no longer publish books that are groundbreaking in hair-splitting ways, which is what most first books are. A dissertation is written for an audience of three or four people. I have to have the conviction that any manuscript I publish is going to have an audience of 900 to 3,000 readers."

Ms. Fidler calculates that about 10 percent of the art titles Yale published last year were by first-time authors. But, she adds, "we don't publish revised dissertations, we publish books. They're written for different purposes."

Meanwhile, scholars and publishers have been pushing the boundaries of the field. "Publishers such as Duke University Press, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Hawaii have stepped up and entered niches that are more along the lines of cultural studies," says Ms. Westermann. "There's a cultural turn in art history that really has now produced some very strong scholarship that we might not immediately recognize as art history, for better or worse."

Academic publishers' continuing commitment to regional titles means more chances to publish in certain areas. (Hawaii, for instance, has beefed up its Asian-art line.)

In accepting manuscripts, says Ms. Fidler, "we do respond to the trends that are established in the academic environment." So she pays attention to "areas in which the scholarship is really ripe," like modern and contemporary art, Latin American art, photography, and the history of fashion.

Such shifts in focus help explain why some scholars in "the core fields feel themselves endangered as publishable authors," says Ms. Ballon. She describes this as the latest iteration of "a perennial problem ... the tension between the interests of the publishers and the interests of scholars." Crisis for some, in other words, translates as opportunity for others.

Increasing Access

In their draft report, Ms. Westermann and Ms. Ballon press art history's journals of record, Art Bulletin and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, to "launch electronic extensions ... to capture innovations in digital research and publication, to issue extended versions of articles, and to publish electronic alternatives to the printed scholarly monograph."

They call on the scholarly societies in their field, the College Art Association and the Society of Architectural Historians, to join forces to "form a consortium for the publication of art and architectural history online." The two scholars also urge colleagues and museums to exploit the rich (in multiple senses) potential of museum-related publications, "so that they may become even more productive sites of scholarly collaboration and knowledge production."

And, looking outside the boundaries of art-history publishing, Ms. Westermann and Ms. Ballon urge academe to redefine the mission of university presses as disseminators of knowledge rather than purveyors of books alone.

In that call they echo the concerns of editors like Yale's Ms. Fidler, who argues that "the publishers cannot fix this. It's really going to have to be a larger higher-education resolution. Everybody's got to come a little way in terms of finding new resources and new ways to do things. There's no simple solution to this."

Ms. Ballon and Ms. Westermann state in the report that they have high hopes for "the rapid technological sophistication of digital-image production and of modes of electronic publication." They are intrigued by print-on-demand, although editors remain skeptical. "You basically have, for lack of a better word, a super Xerox machine making these books," says Cambridge's Mr. Smith. Like the Yale press, Cambridge does have a print-on-demand program  — but not yet for art books. "On the whole, the quality of what you get is too poor," he says.

But the most prominent recommendation in the draft report concerns permissions. All parties agree that it is harder than ever to navigate what Ms. Bielstein calls "the ecosystem of rights publishing." What's fair use? Should a museum be able to charge for a reproducible image of an out-of-copyright object in its collection? Most do. And as digital publication tempts more and more publishers and scholars, how will they protect images that appear in an electronic book or an electronic version of a journal article?

The report's authors urge those in the field to "organize a campaign to break down barriers to access and distribution of images, in all media and at affordable prices, for scholarly research and publication." (Ms. Bielstein's book makes a similar exhortation.)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has taken a revolutionary step toward that end with the "scholars' license," which it hopes to have in place by this fall. "We have responded to what scholars needed and wanted," says Doralynn Pines, associate director for administration. "We are proposing, in certain areas, certainly for scholarly purposes, ... that we permit people to use the images with no fee." Under the old way of doing business, a one-time use of one transparency or digital image from the Met set a scholar back $135.

The program will start with 2,000 images — some of the "greatest hits" from the collection — and eventually should include most of the museum's holdings. One catch: ARTstor, the nonprofit image clearinghouse created five years ago with help from the ubiquitous Mellon Foundation, will serve as the Met's distributor under the new program. To take advantage of it, a scholar must be affiliated with one of ARTstor's 650 subscriber institutions. "But the Met's very clear that they would like to make it more broadly available," says James Shulman, ARTstor's executive director.

The Met's scholars' license may well turn out to be the crowbar that pries open the doors of other image repositories. "There have been a lot of eyebrows raised and a lot of interest" at other institutions," Mr. Shulman reports. "I have no doubt that other leading museums are figuring out if they can do it or if they should."

Ms. Bielstein says that "what the Met is doing is of inestimable value," because the museum continues to be "a pacesetter for other museums on matters of policy and professional practice. Still, this is just the beginning. An enormous amount of effort and activism is needed to ensure that the public domain is open and accessible to everyone."

Ms. Ballon and Ms. Westermann have concluded that if art-history publishing is to thrive, gatekeepers of the visual must loosen their death grip on images. "We're quite clear now that the biggest obstacle is the copyright obstacle," says Ms. Ballon. "Until you clear that obstacle away, you can't deal with the other issues."