Toward Sustainable Arts Criticism

Hardly a week goes by these days when we don't see some article about the layoff of arts writers. This kind of news should be shocking, but it's become so commonplace in the past few years that we have a hard time generating the required outrage that such an announcement should merit. As each major city without a full time paid arts writer gets ticked off the list, we have become wearily resigned to the premise that arts criticism is a dying breed, that arts writing doesn't pay, and that we as a society don't value a well crafted gallery review as much as we do other kinds of journalism and criticism. As a contrarian thinker on these topics, I find myself on the outside looking in, often in head-scratching bewilderment. How can this be?

For me, thoughtful arts criticism is the foundation of the dialogue that pulses through the arts community. It introduces work to those who hadn't been exposed to it, and offers a reasoned explanation and analysis of its merits to those who are already in the know. With the best of intentions, it attempts to separate the wheat from the chaff, all while injecting genuine enthusiasm and knowledge into the discussion. By taking a stand, a critic offers an opportunity for debate, for both agreement and disagreement, and for further exploration of the work at hand. At least for me, reading a great review offers a new way into the work (whether I've seen it or not), and challenges me to think differently about what I've seen. I may not ultimately agree, but I am forced to come to a more complex and nuanced understanding of what's on view.

If there is any overly simple lesson that can be learned from the disruptive effect the Internet has had on newspapers and magazines, it's that the old advertising model has been forever destroyed. Paying for content with advertising alone will no longer provide any kind of reliable economic balance, and if we want high quality arts writing, we must find alternate ways to fund it, as it doesn't come for free. Entire industries of smart people have broken their picks on this problem, and after many years of innovative experimentation, we've still not discovered any magic bullet that makes the ledgers even out. So, we are left with a state of disarray: writers must be paid at least a living wage to produce superlative content, but advertising revenue won't match the outlays necessary to fund that content (or the other costs of producing the publication for that matter). And thus, the bleeding of arts writers continues.

As we all stand in a circle and look at each other for answers, our gaze inevitably turns back around to our readers; unfortunately, they're aren't a lot of other places to look. If we want the kind of thoughtful dialogue we draw from our best writers, perhaps the readers (or other supporters) can step into the breach and fill the funding gap. This idea starts from a deficit, as one of the early premises that underpinned the last decade of revolution was that content wanted to be free; even though we continue to pay subscription and newsstand prices for paper content, we were initially trained that its digital equivalent came at no charge. Along with this free mindset came the erroneous idea that professional arts writers would be happy to trade real dollars in payment for broad "exposure". This myth has been proven false again and again; great writing of all kinds costs money to produce (even if it is ultimately given away for free) and dwindling payment for writers will ultimately lead to very little writing, except the kind that people are willing to do altruistically or as a hobby (like this blog).

In the past few years, asking for the support of readers has become increasingly widespread. In for profit models, content is increasingly being locked up behind paywalls and subscription services; perhaps in the future, these systems will get even more granular, allowing the annual signup to migrate toward micropayments for individual articles. In not for profit models, memberships, charitable donations, and other fund raising methods are tapping readers for dollars. Whether the payment system is imposed or voluntary, we are now entering a phase where the users of arts content are being asked to help fund its creation - the community is being asked to support its own interests.

For roughly the past five years, DLK COLLECTION has been an attempt to support and engage the photography community by writing about facets of the art and its market that were being overlooked by other publications. Given the slow decline in plausible photography coverage coming from the traditional New York outlets, the current situation is certainly no better than when we started; for those of us that are passionate about photography (and collecting), the pickings are still pretty slim.

Perhaps delusionally, we remain undaunted. Now, more than ever, we have confidence in the need for great writing about photography, and are willing to put our money where our mouth is by investing in our delivery platform. Several months ago, we embarked on a major overhaul of the site, including an entirely new WordPress/Responsive infrastructure (finally moving off of Blogger) and an entirely new graphic design. When the new site launches in September, it will have a new name (and domain), a new logo, and completely different look and feel. Not unlike an online newspaper, it will have a front page and a series of edited sections, covering galleries, museums, photobooks, art fairs, auctions and the like. Every single one of the existing 1600+ posts (as well as all the individual images posted on Twitter) will be ported to the new site, and there will be plenty of tools and navigation helpers to make finding an artist or gallery in the archive much easier (with more than 1100 artists/photographers and nearly 700 galleries worldwide to be found in the system, these tools start to matter). If we get it right (and we're working feverishly to ensure that we do), we will in one fell swoop transform the site from an amateur undertaking to a crisply professional photography platform, equally ready for your desktop, tablet, or mobile phone.

While we don't want to steal the thunder of its ultimate caterpillar-to-butterfly-like transformation, there are a couple of changes in our overall approach that we want to pass along now:

1.) Given the investment in the underlying platform, the site will now be much more able to handle multiple bylines, and like our monetary commitment to the platform, we're also ready to start selectively funding more superlative content from great writers. We expect to pay better than competitive rates to a small group of freelance writers, and will hopefully end up with a spectrum of regular contributors and intermittent guest writers. What we're looking for is consistently thoughtful and well reasoned analysis of fine art photography, especially when it's written by active collectors. We're into opinionated, knowledgeable criticism, not news or aggregated links; if you've got an idea for a piece that will fit into one of our areas of interest (galleries, museums, photobooks, art fairs, auctions, and the photographers and art that underlies all of them), shoot an email to info@dlkcollection.com to start the discussion. Want to write a dumbed down listicle of the top 10 shows to see, aping the press releases that just arrived in your inbox? We're not a match.

2.) On the new site, all advertising will be priced on a click through basis. Part of this change is purely technical, in that we will now have the ability to track the number of click throughs for an individual banner with much more reliability. But more importantly, we've come to the philosophical position that plain vanilla banner advertising doesn't align the interests of the advertisers, the site, and the readers particularly well. What everyone wants is a robust community, where advertising/sponsorship is relevant and unobtrusive, but generates follow through from targeted readers who are actually interested. The branding value of a banner that people see but don't interact with is amorphous at best, and we've decided to discount it to zero. Advertisers will be charged entirely based on how many click throughs occur; at its limit, if there are no click throughs during the entire run of a banner, it would be free. While there are a few other details to the plan, the goal is to end up with verifiable, quantifiable metrics for how well the advertising is working, with readers ringing the cash register for the site when they express their genuine interest. Want to hear more (there are now many more options/locations than the old chiclet banner)? Connect with us at info@dlkcollection.com to be ready for the surge of Fall activity.

3.) With the utmost in modesty and humility, we will offer readers the opportunity to support the site. We'll leave the mechanics of the program for the launch, but the plan is to deliver a content product that has enough consistent value to be worth supporting with hard earned dollars. With most of the major infrastructure costs now sunk, aside from a few ongoing back office and operational costs, most of our variable costs will come in the form of payments to writers. The going forward plan is to run the business on a shoestring, so that all the available money is directed to great writers. This isn't a charity and we're not looking for your sympathy, but what we do want is for readers to be passionate about what they're reading, so much so that they make the plunge and offer some support that can be redirected to the next great essay or review. If we get the balance right, inflows from readers and advertisers will match outflows to writers and operational costs in a kind of unheard of equilibrium. We're looking for the mythical unicorn that no one has found yet in this world of arts criticism, the dream of stand alone sustainability, and the only way we get there is if we deliver content people are ultimately willing to pay for. The onus is on us to challenge our readers with great photography writing each and every day, and only then will we have a chance at making the math work.

With those ideas as a teaser of what's to come, we're going on summer hiatus until the launch of the new site in September; there will be no new reviews or other posts until we make the switch over. Rest assured, we're not taking a break in the slightest, just frantically working behind the scenes to ensure we're ready for our big debut.

The Artist/CEO and the Evolving Gallery Model

Quite a lot of ink has been spilled in the last year analyzing the changing nature of the contemporary art market and the external forces and competitive tactics that are putting pressure on the traditional gallery system. Part of this discussion has centered on the plight of middle tier galleries whose most successful (and profitable) artists are being poached by larger mega-galleries. In trying to understand the nuances of these changing realities, my MBA-trained brain has been thinking about the structural similarities between being an artist and running a start-up. While this kind of thought experiment may seem anathema to the entire artistic impulse, there are many more fundamental parallels between the two endeavors than we might initially expect.

Back in business school, one the core courses required of all students was a class called Organizational Behavior, where we studied how firms are organized, how structures and team design impact performance, how roles impact decision making, and how incentives are used to drive success. If we step back and look at how an artist's activities are organized and use the parallel structure of a typical software start-up as a guide, then the artist is the both the founder/CEO and the CTO/VP Engineering; she is both the face of the "company" and the person responsible for both "product" vision and "product" execution.

At the product/technical level for a software company, this means she hires and fires members of the technical and manufacturing teams, and figures out all the technical innovations, disruptions, and new directions. For an artist, this translates into the entire art making process, the building of a studio support team, the acquisition of raw materials, tools and workspace, the use of external contractors/services (like large scale printing), and all the intangible inspiration of artistic creation. At the company level, this means she hires and fires all the executives, is responsible for overall company leadership and strategy, and in the end, is the one on the line for delivering results. For the both the software exec and the artist, one important choice is which parts of the whole effort are going to be done in house and which ones are going to be outsourced (they all have to be done one way or another), and often this gets back to a set of decisions based both on core competencies and economics, or more simply put, a choice between building and buying.

For the artist, the gallery system provides a readymade approach to outsourcing all the customer facing functions required to bring the art to market. Back in the Renaissance (and now arguably again in the case of extra big name artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst), the artist was a vertically integrated operation, with all of the customer facing activities done and managed in house; this is the most expensive way to manage things, but it also offers the most fine tuned control.

In today's world, nearly all artists have opted to effectively hire a third party agent (a gallery) to manage these tasks; in fact, there really isn't much of a viable alternative to this model at the moment. From the software exec's perspective, this is the equivalent of hiring a distributor or sales rep in a far off geography (say China for a US based company). The distributor would handle all the sales and marketing activities, interact with customers of all kinds (who they already have relationships with), and handle inventory management, order processing, payment, and delivery of product. To handle such work, there would be a complex a la carte negotiation of economic terms, and the deal could take a variety of final forms, from just putting a product on a price list and taking orders, to dedicating sales teams, to co-marketing efforts, to full joint venture partnerships, all with different scales of cost sharing. There might be ratcheting sales commissions for volume, monthly retainers, co-marketing dollars, and bonuses/penalties for meeting/not meeting certain sales thresholds. Like any market, there are distributors and sales reps who are big and small, risk takers and conservative players, those with long standing reputations and those with attacker aggressiveness; the right distributor for the software company's product might be conflicted, might be too busy, or might not be the right fit for what the company really needs at any one time, so the relationships often change as products evolve.

Back in the head of our artist/CEO, she faces a very similar set of constraints. She needs someone to handle all the customer facing work to dealing with collectors, museums, and the rest of the outside world, and certainly doesn't want to build up all that expertise in house or do too many more studio visits. She wants a gallery partner to handle all the sales, all the marketing, PR, and branding efforts (including art fairs, books, exhibitions etc.), all the customer service (shipping, insurance, framing), and all the back office management (inventory and order tracking). Depending on her personality, she might also want her gallery to provide some loosely defined "product management" services, from helping to shape and edit the artist's work or to provide varying degrees of coaching, support and feedback. For all of this work, she's generally willing to share half the proceeds of the sales, although that percentage might be up for some negotiation.

What's intriguing about the gallery model is that galleries have evolved to be a hybrid combination of direct and retail selling. They both call directly on customers (important collectors, museum curators and the like) and provide a retail space for walk in sales. This space is important because it allows them to control the presentation of the art/product, often showing it in solo shows of the artist's work (its best possible presentation) rather than having it fight other competing offerings for the buyer's attention. The gallery spreads the costs of maintaining such a space, staffing it etc., by having a stable of artists who can continually fill the space with works on offer. The retail space itself is a sunk cost that is added to all the other costs of selling the art. In the new world of the Internet, the gallery also maintains a virtual selling space (its website), again taking on these costs as part of the distribution deal.

Given the way most gallery relationships are structured (meaning no up front money to the gallery to begin the relationship and no retainer), taking on an artist is like making a venture capital investment. The gallery's costs are mostly front loaded, especially the marketing and fairs, since awareness needs to be built over time, the bills piling up long before the sales start to materialize. (An exception to this general rule is the gallery that only does a series of one off consignment style shows, selling what it can and not necessarily investing in long term relationships/representation agreements with artists.) Even if a gallery has an unusually great eye for talent, there will always be a mix of those artists that muddle along and those that reach breakout velocity, with the ones that hit mopping up the costs of the ones that don't, allowing galleries to support important work that is hard to sell. This all works like magic, unless of course your one bankable, consistent seller is poached by a larger, more prominent gallery, in which case, the economic model breaks down completely, all your up-front costs already invested and no way to recoup them. This is the current conundrum of the small and medium sized galleries who are being raided by the large, deep pocketed players; just when they think it's all going great and their top line revenue is relatively predictable, the rug gets ripped out from under them and they're back to hoping the farm team has a future star. Match that with a bill from the landlord doubling the rent, and it's no wonder there are so many glum faces around.

The reality is, that just like software distributors, there are a wide range of gallery types, some designed for emerging talents and some organized around supporting a global mega brand. While there is some commonality of general tasks, the scale of the operations, the market share, and the durability of the reputations are significantly and appropriately variable. And there is an inherent logic to the artist/CEO wanting to start with a gallery who is supportive and small, and then when the success starts to come, to want to move to a larger outfit with more sales reach and better global support services. This natural transition puts loyalty and economic reality on opposite sides, and often leads to permanently broken friendships. While this isn't surprising, what is puzzling to me is how little structural innovation there has been in the way artist/gallery relationships are organized, so that this natural progression is handled more smoothly (instead of hoping it won't happen), offering both the protection to the early supportive galleries who make the initial investments and the opportunity for artists to grow with new partners without burning bridges.

I think it's time we saw some experimentation in the artist/gallery partnership, for the betterment of both sides. In this case, I'm not referring to low cost, low service collective-style operations often trotted out to replace galleries, but a more fundamental rebalancing between artist/gallery partners that reflects the new realities. Perhaps new, unknown artists need to be signed to two, three, or five year contracts, effectively locking them into a single gallery for that initial investment period, just like in minor league baseball. Or why aren't there deals where initial galleries negotiate a thin slice of royalty income even if an artist moves on to a larger gallery down the line, to ensure recouping of start-up costs? Why aren't their more clear economic break even/profitability thresholds that must be cleared before an artist can move on? There are well understood ways to paper such transactions (and their options and corner cases) in the world of start-ups, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel here; we just need to adapt these kinds of distributor deals to the specifics of the artist/gallery relationship. If we get it right, galleries should be even more willing to take on the risk of new and emerging talent, knowing that they have some downstream protection. In many ways, to my eyes, the artist/CEO is getting a pretty good deal for herself these days in terms of distribution risk sharing (assuming she has been taken on by a decent gallery in the first place), and as the competition heats up, the complexity of the relationship is going to need to increase to handle the pressure.

It seems altogether possible that we might eventually see a breakdown of the integrated physical gallery model, especially as more and more transactions move online. The artist/gallery relationship can take any number of forms, where the customer-facing agenting function (sales and marketing communications) and the retail show venue function (product marketing and distribution) could easily get separated into two different business entities, conceivably both hired separately by the artist/CEO for different slices of the sales proceeds. We're also seeing artists add their own websites to the marketing activity being done by their galleries, effectively taking part of the branding exercise (and its costs) back in house. It seems like we are now at a point where the traditional model will really being to change, with new kinds of services and relationships being tried, mostly because in its current state, the current state is often financially untenable for one side or the other.

There's an old adage that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and this analysis certainly reeks of a start-up guy applying an external model to a different (and complicated) market. But it feels to me like change is in the air, and both the artist/CEO and her gallery partner need to bring some creative flexibility back into the way they collaborate. If you are already a bankable artist, you have the luxury of choosing your own path; for everyone else, on both sides of the table, the competitive pressures (and the increasing rents) are squeezing all the margin for error out of the business; the cottage industry is being professionalized, like it or not. Artists and galleries need to look more carefully at other industries where product development and distribution are separated, and look for methods and best practices that might be borrowed and adapted. The mega galleries have already figured this out, and have shot the first volley across the bow by building up the infrastructure and services (including the expansion of the art fair model) required to attract the best selling artists. The small and mid sized galleries need to respond, and while I'm sure many artists will cringe (and outright rebel against) at the idea of the arrival of the MBAs, this industry is already undergoing a disruptive transformation, and those entrepreneurial artist/galleries who figure this out soon will have a better chance of not only surviving, but actually thriving. I'm not saying that the high touch, reputation based selling of fine art is going away any time soon, but that the structural framework that surrounds the existing model is going to have to change to ensure the gallery system doesn't cannibalize itself.

Photography Collectors in the 2013 ARTnews 200

ARTnews recently released its annual list of the largest, most active art collectors in the world (here, magazine cover at right, via ARTnews), and it's always intriguing to see how photography fares among this elite group. Each collector (or pair) is listed with their geographic location(s), how they came into their money, and the general categories of their collections.

In 2013, the following 11 collectors (out of 200) had some form of photography called out in their collection description, often one of many artwork types in a larger list:

 

Cristina and Thomas W. Bechtler-Lanfranconi
Joop van Caldenborgh
Ella Fontanals Cisneros
Danielle and David Ganek
Ydessa Hendeles
Alison and Peter W. KleinThomas H. Lee and Ann Tenenbaum
Heather and Tony PodestaLisa S. and John A. Pritzker
Aby J. Rosen
Chara Schreyer

Compared to similar lists from prior years, there is remarkable consistency in the names above; most have been on this list for plenty of consecutive years. Of course, this short photo-focused list is a little deceiving, in that roughly 85% of the names on the complete list of 200 collectors have "modern", "contemporary", or "emerging" art in their bios, so many of them likely collect some photography as a subset of their larger efforts, but haven't had it called out specifically as an interest; in fact, there may be other names with broad collection descriptions that may indeed own more photography than some of the names above. More generally, it would be fascinating to know how many of the complete list of 200 own at least one photograph; my guess is that it's meaningfully more than 50%, which points to a much broader rate of inclusion than the data here explicitly shows. All in, this annual list is always an entertaining barometer of what the most active among us are collecting, allowing us to sketch out a faint picture of the machinations at the top end of the market.

Size and Segmentation of the Fine Art Photography Market, 2013 Edition

I recently finished up the data gathering for the last few Contemporary Art auctions in London last week, and so now have a complete set of numbers for the first half of the year. In aggregate, and accounting for the harmonization of different currencies, I tallied up $91,601,540 of photography sales at auction in the first six months of 2013. If we assume that I covered most of the action, but missed some smaller sales in secondary and tertiary markets/geographies and some random lots buried in mixed sales, I think a round $100 million isn't a bad thumbnail number for the actual public secondary market results. While no one can predict the arrival rate of top dollar consignments and single owner collections for the second half of the year, I think a logical approach would be to double the amount given the second six month period, making the annual total roughly $200 million. This number represents the photography transactions that took place in public with verifiable data, covering everything from vintage to contemporary, big name and small. It's an important first step toward understand how big the market for fine photography really is.

Unfortunately, the statistical sledding gets quite a bit tougher from here, since there are no data sources for what actually occurred in private transactions between galleries and collectors, museums, and other buyers. So out comes the back of the envelope for some approximations, assumptions, estimations, and guesses. What if we start with a hypothesis that the private market roughly equals the public market, i.e. that if the public market is $200 million in 2013, the private market will be roughly the same, getting us to a total of $400 million for the entire fine art photography market. The first question is whether this number passes the laugh test in terms of potential credibility. So let's try to test it via breaking the gallery market down a bit.

Let's assume there are four types of galleries, and these galleries are defined not by their programs, their geographies, their longevity, or their general smartness (as we might normally characterize them), but merely by their top line revenue selling photography. These galleries could be photography specialists or broader contemporary art venues, but all we care about is how much photography they sell on an annual basis. This dollar number will include both primary market sales and any secondary market transactions they may be doing in the front or back room (I'll come back to try to break this part down in a moment), as well as whatever photography they sell at art fairs. In this model, a "small" or "emerging" venue sells up to $500K of photography in a year, a "mid-sized" venue sells between $500K and $1M, a "large" venue sells between $1M and $2M, and a "mega" venue sells up to or beyond $5M. I'm not looking for perfection here, but simply a plausible estimate of the buckets.

If we agree on this breakdown, the next question is how many galleries of each type are out there in the world, and what kind of flow through numbers they produce in aggregate. Here's a little spreadsheet table to help guide the discussion:

	Small/Emerging	Mid-sized	Large	Mega
Annual Photo Revenue	$           500,000	$       1,000,000	$       2,000,000	$        5,000,000
Number of Galleries	100	50	25	10
Total Revenue for Category	$       50,000,000	$     50,000,000	$     50,000,000	$       50,000,000
Overall Total Revenue				$     200,000,000
$ Market Share/Gallery	0.25%	0.50%	1.00%	2.50%

As you can see, I've plugged in numbers that make my original $200M assumption hold true, but in looking at them, I think they hold up decently well. I think we could argue there are many more than 100 galleries on the low end, but I think that many sell so little photography in terms of raw dollars that they don't move the overall market number much; you've got to sell a lot of prints at $1500 a throw to make the top line worth counting. On the top end, there may indeed be more than 25-35 galleries that are selling multi-millions in photography on an annual basis, but I think it's decently lumpy. If Gursky, Sherman, Wall at el all have shows in the same year, or a handful of million dollar Westons or Stieglitzes show up, we'll get a spike here, but if they are generally spread out, then this model isn't far off I think. I think reasonable, well considered arguments could be made for both larger and smaller numbers that $200M, and since we'll never get the top 200 galleries in the world to tell us their revenue numbers, I look forward to hearing alternate speculation or analysis in the comments area below.

The other number in the table is the market share number by revenue dollars for each gallery type. The reason I calculated this number is that I wanted to see how fragmented the photo market is. The answer is that it is very fragmented, with even the largest players only holding a few percentage points of share; in the markets for other kinds of products, 20, 30, or more percentage points of share for a market leader aren't unheard of. Which brings me to the now infamous "grow or go" effect we are seeing more broadly in the art world, where many galleries are adding spaces, gobbling up artists, and generally trying to get bigger. Part of this is an economies of scale issue in terms of amortizing the fixed costs of the underlying infrastructure of art selling and distribution (both fixed locations and endless fairs), but in many ways, I think this is just a bold market share grab, led by economic might. And as sellable artist names are plucked from the lower tiers, there is the danger of hollowing them out and driving the galleries that once supported them back down to smaller revenue rungs. This is the pressure that many of the mid-sized galleries are feeling now, and unfortunately, it's a result of straightforward competitive forces I'm afraid. Galleries feeling this onslaught need to find creative new ways to handle the pressure (from alternate partnership/support models with artists to different/lower cost distribution/selling options), as this stress isn't going to go away.

So let's assume you are willing to grant me the $200M private/gallery revenue number. The next idea to consider is how much of this is primary market and how much of it is secondary market. I'm defining primary market to mean a sale where an artist (or his/her estate if the artist is no longer living) is the direct consignor, and the revenue is shared between artist and gallery, rather than a secondary market transaction where the artist receives nothing. Another way to ask this question is what is the split between primary and secondary for most galleries. Of course, the answer is all over the map: some do only primary business, while others use a back room secondary business to fund their front room primary efforts. I'm going to timidly put out a number of seventy percent primary (in aggregate across the entire photography market) as an estimate, giving us a primary market size of $140M (the auction market is all secondary except in exceptional cases). It could be as low as half I suppose, but my gut tells me most galleries are still leading with primary sales.

The reason I wanted to know this number is that I think this $140M is the effective "servable" market (at least in 2013) for a contemporary photographer. Any start-up worth investing in understands very clearly how big their target market is and has sliced and diced it with granularity to understand what part of that market they can reasonably hope to take from the existing players. I think artists are a little like individual start-ups; they bring a "product" to market and hope (with the help of their galleries) to sell it to customers who have choices. Like any market, there are both entrenched market leaders and there are upstart attackers hoping to push them aside. And again, it comes back to a market share (or mind share) issue; collectors (and museums and other buyers) are spending $140M a year on fresh to the market photography, and all the artists out there are competing for a share of that pie. Those with big, hairy, audacious goals want to not only crush their competitors, but also grow the total market and create new spaces where they hadn't existed before. I don't get these sense that artists in the photography world are as cut throat as their counterparts in the business world, but in many ways, the substitution trade-off between dollars spent on a Thomas Ruff and those on a new photographer is just as real.

If I was a contemporary photographer, I'd actually want to take these calculations a few steps deeper, and try to subdivide the market further. While a large majority of collectors "buy what they love" and don't necessarily adhere to rigid rules about what they might buy, I think there might be as many as a third who have defined limits of one kind or another. Perhaps they buy landscapes, or abstract photography, or German photography, or work made since 1990, but they don't buy other things for the most part. So if you are a contemporary photographer making portraits, the "buy what you love" types are a target, but the landscape lovers generally aren't. So that $140M quickly gets chopped up into smaller sections, the main body still at least $100M I think, but less than the full total to account for the specialized collectors who don't fit a particular photographer's profile.

All of this statistical musing will seem anathema to many artists, many of whom don't like to think about their art in the context of a "market" or in competition with anyone, and at some level, I agree with that sentiment - it would be nice if art could reliably transcend commerce. But I can tell you that if I was running a photography gallery, I'd be poring over these kinds of numbers, trying to understand how to optimize the math for the good of both the artists in the stable and the gallery itself, especially if I was trying to buck the "grow or go" momentum. Like it or not, big box retailing (AKA the aggregated art fair) and broad franchising (AKA the multiple location mega gallery) make it easier for customers to buy; it's more convenient and it saves time for the consumer/collector. If the one location, tightly focused, artist-centric gallery model is to survive this shift in the competitive landscape, it will need to innovate economically (probably via cooperation with others and the power of the Internet), and this starts by understanding in detail how big your market can be and who your customer really is.

Core Samples of Contemporary Photography

I've been thinking a bit lately about what a useful history of contemporary photography for the recent decade (2000-2010) should or might look like, and I've come up wholly frustrated by the status quo. If you go to any book store, the kind of thing you will find on this topic (if you find anything at all) is a theme-based selection of representative photographers, bunched into buckets (staged, appropriated, manipulated, process driven, performance, etc.), with a few images from each along for the ride as examples. Perhaps there will be backgrounds on each photographer, discussions of high level prevailing trends and a stab at a comprehensive essay. All well and good, but this kind of analysis isn't particularly useful or actionable from my point of view, mostly because it glosses over the important chronological details of what was happening year to year. What I think needs to be understood is the interaction between photographers and their projects on an annual basis, so it is possible to trace who came first and in what order original ideas percolated through the artistic world.

As a starting point, what I think someone needs to do is build out a list of the top 50 photographers of the period (by whatever definition you might choose), and then detail each of the projects they did during the decade (good and bad, known and unknown) and the years in which they worked on those projects. As an example of what I mean, see my amateur hour infographic below of 5 photographers who I think would be in the top 50 (I'm no graphic designer, and I don't warrant that the data presented is either complete or correct - in fact I know it isn't, but it's good enough for illustrative purposes):

What I think this kind of presentation does is that it gives clarity on the progression of an artist's own projects and makes it much clearer to see the interactions with other artists working contemporaneously. Look at the three vertical lines, in 2001, 2004, and 2007. By ticking down the chart (or drilling a core sample), it is now possible to see what each of these photographers was doing at the time. If you want to overlay political (say 9/11, elections or the economic crisis), social, technological, or art world events, it becomes easy to see what the responses were and how long they took to percolate through the system.

So to build out the history of 2000-2010 in contemporary photography, you start with the top 50 as I mentioned before, to get a comprehensive visual on overall trends. Then you drill down into the top subgenres we already use as a rough and ready taxonomy (say abstract, or portraiture, or street etc.), and pick a top 15-25 or so in each genre (with particular attention to major influencers), repeating the ones from the top 50 that are relevant and adding others, thereby expanding the overall coverage further. Slicing and dicing this way would really generate some surprising insights I would think (as would some multi-layered Venn diagrams of intersecting genres, but that's an idea for another post). What is critical to success here is meticulous data collection and superlative graphic design. From there, example images and tying the findings into a coherent narrative (driven by what the data says) are the last tasks. The one drawback I can see here is handling those photographers whose work is not easily separated into discrete projects, series, books, or the like. In this case, I think the easiest and best solution is to select a few highlight images that stand in as representatives of a photographer's changing interests, subject matter, or style, even though this glosses over some work to work variation and evolution.

What I like about this kind of approach is that it is far more data driven than most art history texts or coffee table surveys. It uses fine-grained chronology to filter ideas and provide context in ways that we overlook far too often I think. To make sense of the confluence of ideas, approaches, and technologies that have driven contemporary photography in the chaotic past decade, I think we need to reconsider the tired "group show" summary approach and search for new ways to synthesize, analyze, intepret and communicate the wealth of data that is already available.

Poetry on a Kindle and Other Mysteries

One byproduct of my summer long hiatus from writing about photography was that I spent a lot of time outside the echo chamber of the photo and collector communities. I didn't read the reviews, articles, blog posts, comments and responses in various media that would normally swamp my brain and I didn't follow the back and forth of the daily flow of ideas inside the bubble. Flat on my back in bed and off the grid, I had plenty of hours to let ideas percolate around in my skull, lingering and gestating, rather than getting flushed into oblivion by the next flashiest thing in the never-ending photo news cycle. The quiet was a good antidote to the continuous static.

Much of my time was spent reading, and nearly all of it occurred on my Kindle because of the issues I was having with my arms. The Kindle is far superior to a paper book if you only have one semi-functional hand to use, since you can prop the device up and easily flip the pages with a single press of a finger, rather than wrestling with both holding the book and somehow grabbing the single sheet of the next page. Spending so much time with this electronic device got me thinking quite a bit about what it was good for, why I used it in the manner I did, and other strange questions about the general nature of electronic media and its implications for the digital incarnations of fine art photography.

If your Kindle is anything like mine, it is an embarrassing slag heap of discarded, disposable literature. I've come to understand that this has happened because I only buy books on my Kindle that I have no intention of keeping; if I wanted a permanent copy to read again or for reference, I would buy it in paper, crack the spine, dog ear the pages and put in on my shelf. As a result, my particular device is filled with first run hardcovers that I could buy cheaper and get faster electronically (immediate gratification), plus an astonishingly eclectic assortment of non-fiction, mysteries, thrillers, science fiction and other guilty pleasures that I would have thrown out, never finished, passed along or given to the local library had I purchased them in physical form.

One thing that I have never, ever purchased on the Kindle is poetry. While the world is equally full of forgettable poetry as it is of other literary genres, by its very nature, at least in my mind, the whole point of poetry, especially the kind of good poetry that stays with you, is that you return to it again and again. And of the various forms of literature, the generally shorter length of poetry lends itself nicely to repeated use and deeper explication. This conclusion got me to thinking about a mysterious question: who actually buys poetry on a Kindle? And why would someone purchase something of permanence in a format designed for easy discarding?

The answer I came up with is that poetry makes sense on an electronic device only when that device changes from being a "reader" to being a portable "library"; instead of being read once and passing into nothingness, the work becomes available to be read again and again. This of course works better with a one page poem than it does with The Brothers Karamazov, simply due to the generally smaller investment of time required to fully enjoy the work and the higher likelihood of coming back again to revisit it in the future (how many books have your read more than twice in the entire span of your life?). This relationship between time investment and likely repeatability is even more obvious with music, since we often play individual songs over and over again, sometimes in a manic "can't hear it enough" frenzy. My iPod was quickly dominated by a "library" usage model, and the reality of having my entire archive at my fingertips has undeniably changed the way I make choices about what to buy and what to listen to at any given moment. If my Kindle were to be used more like a library, I could certainly imagine having "shelves" full of poetry that I could refer to and enjoy from time to time; the problem is that I haven't ever really considered using the device in this way.

So what does all this have to do with fine art photography? I think the "poetry on a Kindle" problem is very similar to the one facing digital forms of fine art photography. We have never thought that we could or should carry around a library of our favorite fine art photographs in digital form for handy display and reference. But why aren't fine art photographs analogous to pop songs? Why doesn't it make sense to want Moonrise and Chez Mondrian and hundreds of others on my iPad or other display device so I could re-experience them repeatedly? Shouldn't we want to come back to great images, to savor them, and to return to them again and again because of the way they make us think and feel? Shouldn't we want to show our friends both our current favorites and our long loved gems and discoveries?

Let's use music and books as examples of how electronic forms have transformed certain media types. In both cases, a physical form is being slowly undermined by an electronic one, and this evolution has happened faster and faster as it has become clearer how to monetize that e-form and as devices have emerged that could be used easily to play the new media. In the case of photography, the first problem is that, unlike music and books, we haven't figured out how to monetize the digital form of the medium yet, and so right now, any image in its digital form is inherently only consumable and disposable; see it, pay nothing for it, enjoy it, move on, forget it. There is no mechanism or process for "buying" "authorized" or "quality" versions of digital images that haven't been stolen, scanned, hacked or otherwise used with or without the maker's consent; it's a lawless, amorphous land.

But imagine there was a photo equivalent of the digital CD or ebook, call it the digital portfolio if you want, issued directly by and vouched for by the photographer. Just like the old style photo portfolio in a special linen box, it's a selection of images grouped together (and potentially carefully sequenced), but instead of physical prints, these would be high quality, high resolution JPEGs or whatever technical format we might agree on, perhaps with fancy security features, hidden watermarks or digital rights management, perhaps not (I'll explain why these might not be needed in a moment). This distinct digital portfolio could be purchased for say $10-15, and individual pictures could be separated out and purchased for 99 cents each, just like a downloadable song. These image files would be stored on my tablet, iPad, laptop or whatever device I might find suitable for image viewing, as the software for displaying photographic images in some kind of library form is already ubiquitous. The underlying behaviour change that is required to enable this photographic revolution is that consumers of digital imagery need to understand and agree that they need to pay something for an image if they want to keep a copy if it. I don't think this is such a momentous leap, as we've already made this same exact leap for music and books.

So where does this grand idea break down? Will it kill off print sales? As a collector, having an electronic portfolio of images on my computer would in no way dampen my enthusiasm for paying for a physical print of one of those images made by the hand of the artist. I don't believe it will cannibalize print sales to any meaningful extent except perhaps at the very lowest end (sub $500), but will have opposite effect of potentially leading collectors like myself to purchase images we had taken a while to understand or wholly forgotten about (the "try before you buy" effect). If certain pictures stay top of mind and in seeing them again and again I gain a deeper appreciation for their value, I would be more likely to open my wallet and purchase a physical print to hang on my wall. Even when hi-res display technology evolves ahead a few dozen generations, there will always be a market for fine prints, regardless of whether high quality digital copies are floating around or not.

Will there be a wave of unauthorized prints that will dampen the value of the authentic ones? This question is really asking: am I going to go out to my local print lab and have them print me a wall sized version of one of my digital Gursky files? I highly doubt it (especially if security features or industry practices prevent it), as it is the participation of the artist that creates value in the physical print: the process, the tweaking, the signature, the markings etc. Even if the files are unprotected or "in the clear", the art world already has a well established process for dealing with forgers and fakers: it's called provenance. Show me the paperwork of where the print was bought or where it came from, and I'll attribute the appropriate value to its authenticity; no paperwork equals no value.

Would this digitization lessen my enjoyment of physical photography books? I don't think so, not remotely, even if creativity blossoms in the digital realm. I'd still like to hold the presence in my hands, to enjoy the design aspects of the book form, and to consider the book an art object in both conception and execution. Maybe I'd actually buy a few more books, because I'd have acquired the digital portfolio, and then decided I should "upgrade" to the book for my physical library.

Once you get beyond the primary "why it won't work" issues, some of the exciting downstream effects that might occur if digital photographic imagery can be monetized start to come forth:

*Artists and estates will be able to generate new digital revenue (i.e. get paid for their work). This could come directly from their own websites, Facebook pages or from online stores that aggregate work from thousands of photographers (the equivalent of iTunes or the Kindle bookstore). Who will be the next unknown photographer or amateur photojournalist who goes viral?
*Galleries can also sell digital portfolios or use them as free or discounted promotional items, sharing the revenue with photographers. This could include a portfolio of all the images of a current show, or the equivalent of the musical "boxed set" or "greatest hits" from an established artist. There could also be exhaustive "reissues" of "back catalog" images, grouped together in portfolios with "liner notes" or other explanations from the artists - the opportunities for creativity in packaging will explode.
*Museums who put together retrospectives and shows can publish groups of images (from their permanent collections or on loan), sharing revenue with the photographers.
*Book publishers can publish groups of images to coincide with a release, again as a supporting, promotional or tie-in device.
*There could be curated selections of images from everyone from scholars or celebrities.
*The "picture of the day" sites and blogs could share revenue with the artists through affiliate programs or referrals.

All of this at price points that would make these images impulse purchases, to be "collected" into a library on your electronic device of choice and enjoyed far into the future. Suddenly, I'll have my own personal art history lecture on my iPad, all the time. The shuffle-ization and remixing of images in different sequences would become surprisingly easy and exciting, allowing for unexpected connections and contexts. And the "if you like this, maybe you'll like this" kind of software recommendation engines could start to be employed more fully to introduce people to photographers they are unfamiliar with.

Monetizing the electronic form of fine art photography would I think grow the overall size of the market, especially for emerging and unrepresented photographers, with very little downside to anyone in the food chain, either at the very bottom or the very top. A real revenue/royalty stream would occur from the digital files themselves, and the increased visibility of the images themselves would lead to additional print sales, book sales, lecture opportunities and the like; I think everyone would be better off, most importantly the photographers themselves.

All we need to do is provide a viable alternative to "everything is always free" and start to think to ourselves that "digital" need not inherently mean "disposable". Fast forward a decade or two and ask yourself whether it seems likely or not that we will routinely view fine art photographs on our always connected devices. To me, it is ridiculously obvious that we will (or maybe already are) and that all kinds of new distribution and storage models will soon exist for these digital incarnations. The question that then remains is what are the mechanisms that will need to be put in place now to facilitate the smooth operation of that future reality, and what are the steps we can take today to move in the right direction most efficiently.

Thoughts on Atomization

This past weekend, I found myself sitting at a post opening dinner, engaging in a wide ranging discussion with a handful of the artists who were included in the show. The conversation turned to the idea of influences, where artists of the past and present were related to the contemporary work that these artists were producing. The discussion went down the tangent of whether these artists would agree that they might be "children of Agnes Martin" (this was a drawings group show). What came next was a whole raft of caveats and conditions: her ideas had been internalized, reformulated, synthesized, and turned into something entirely new and original by these artists, so tying back to Martin might or might not be entirely relevant. I have come to think of this as the "atomization" argument for contemporary art: there are no longer any important patterns, everything is individually different, the concept that certain artists might naturally cluster into movements (or -isms), groups, connections or shared ideas is either passe or mildly insulting. To me, it's a conversation killer; there's no answer to complete randomness.

On one hand, I entirely support the idea of celebrating the raw creativity of artists of all kinds and seeing their work as something that stands alone as a representation of the voice of a single individual. But in our hyper-connected world, I find the idea that there are no patterns or influences to be unsatisfying. We constantly complain that the art world is an echo chamber where everyone is talking to each other and themselves inside this small bubble. How can it be that when taken at a summary level, all of contemporary art is just chaos? To me this is a defeatist attitude; the problem seems too hard to solve, so we give up and conclude that there is no solution.

I think the main challenge is that the sheer number of accomplished artists/photographers has grown exponentially over the past few decades; there are just so many more people finding their way into the gallery and museum worlds that trying to track them all has become an overwhelming task. Critics and scholars used to have manageable numbers of artists to try and categorize and sift into buckets. 50 or 75 years ago, it wasn't impossible to group 10 or 15 artists from New York into one group and 10 or 15 others from Paris into another based on stylistic characteristics or conceptual theories; with a vast increase in the number of artists at work, this kind of sifting by hand has become incredibly complex.

I've started to think that the critical analysis of trends in art has really become a new kind of data analysis problem, and one that can really only be tackled with the help of computers. While I am a true believer in patterns and influences, I am increasingly skeptical of the ability of any one critic, curator or scholar to impose his or her own framework onto this large data set. Such a process is inherently biased by those data points (artists in this case) that are most easily recalled or known; it just isn't statistically valid in any way, and is prone to both flaws of logic and flights of arrogance.

I'd like to believe that instead of trying to dictate a set of frameworks in a top down manner that we could derive actual patterns by looking at the data from the bottom up. So follow this thought experiment for a moment. Let's start with the goal of making sense of the past 10 years of contemporary photography, the period from 2000 to 2009.

As a jumping off point, I think we would need to select the top 100 most influential contemporary photographers alive and working at that time. My guess is that we might be able to agree on the top 60 or 70 without much fuss, and then it would get a little tougher to choose who's in and who's out, but let's assume for the moment that we could pick 100 to start, and that we could layer in more later as necessary. For each photographer, we would then need to map his or her work across the ten year period, laying out important individual pictures and larger series or projects into discrete years, i.e. Project A ran from 2001 through 2003, Project B was in 2004, Project C got started in 2004 and continued through 2008, Important Picture 1 was made in 2002, Important Picture 2 was made in 2007 etc. We would then be able to slice through the data set in year 2002 for example (like a core sample) and see what each of the 100 was doing at that particular moment.

With this as the basic backdrop, we could then layer in a variety of other influence points, specifically the publication of a photobook/monograph or a museum exhibition or gallery show, where other artists may have been exposed to the work. There will of course be time delays between the making of a picture and its showing up in one of these forms, but this can be accounted for - the influence is just delayed a bit. We could also add in details of geography, schools attended/teachers, or even social network connections of close friends and colleagues. Conceivably, specifics of subject matter, technical process or genre (still life, portraiture, landscape etc.) might also be tallied, and major external events (like September 11th or the economic crisis) could be introduced.

So now imagine we have this deep database of the top 100 photographers and all these discrete data points about what was going on in the past decade. While the data visualization problem is indeed tricky (Edward Tufte here we come), I'd like to believe that lots of connections and patterns would start to emerge from this data, and that these conclusions would be more inherently valid than my personal opinion about which photographers should be grouped together. I'm not saying there is a "right" answer exactly, only that such a process might yield some insights that we have heretofore been unable to discern due to the immense size of the data analysis problem. Once the scaffolding is put in place, there really isn't any reason that the next 100 or next 500 photographers on the list couldn't be added in, it's just a question of effort and information gathering. We might also layer in connections to earlier photographers or artists in other media (children of Diane Arbus or Walker Evans for example), if the photographers themselves went on the record that these were real influences (rather than implied by critics or scholars).

Of course, this straw man idea has flaws, and I'm sure you'll highlight them in the comments. But even if this particular structure doesn't quite work, seems too "computerish", or would likely be too unruly or impractical, I remain unwilling to accept "atomization" as the natural state of contemporary photography (or contemporary art) on a going forward basis. We need better solutions than one brain coming up with a magic map of the artistic landscape; if we wait for this, we may never get a coherent analysis. And I'm not ready to throw up my hands and give into to the absence of patterns. There must be a better way, and I for one think it will come from a radically different approach to analyzing the data.

The New York MoPP

A recent reader comment expressing concern over the idea of museum curators as taste makers (here) has been bubbling around in my head for the past day or so, along with interconnected snippets of ideas from the Summer issue of Artforum (which takes on the idea of museums more generally, here) and lingering, tangential ideas from a post I wrote several weeks ago called Is Anyone Trying to Lead the Conversation? (here). They have all led me back to thinking about the central idea of how public museum collections are traditionally built and managed.

When we peel back all of the scholarly rhetoric, one way to think about the original, underlying function of a museum is that it is designed to be a safe repository for those items the public considers worth preserving. In the case of an art museum, its first role of the museum is to select, acquire, protect and conserve works of art that are deemed important, and as a downstream activity, to display those same artworks in ways that educate, entertain, and inform us about our cultural heritage.

Whether we like it or not, the public at large has currently ceded the selection of works that are to be preserved in public art museums to two types of people: experts (in the form of curators and scholars) and rich people (in the form of museum trustees, board members, and donors). These two groups collaborate to decide which works will be acquired/accepted (either by purchase or donation) and later, which works will be deaccessioned. With every single small in/out decision, this inner circle defines an individual museum’s collection, and by default, what we as a culture are tacitly saying we value. (And for the most part, even if we carefully track the accessions and deaccessions on an annual basis, the decision making process is generally opaque to all but the participants.) Everyone will agree that from an artist’s perspective, having your work in five important museums is altogether different than having it in five random private collections. Being included in a museum collection is an overt validation that the work is worth saving and studying in the long term. As such, I find it hard to believe that museum curators, who often lead/control the process of accessions and deaccessions, aren’t taste makers; in actual fact, that is exactly what they are (even if they hide behind academic scholarship) – they are making choices on behalf of the public about which art is most worthy in the long run. We put our artistic history in their capable hands.

So let’s say for a minute that this reality is somehow unsettling to us, that we have become worried that we don’t want to give up that much cultural control to a relatively small handful of people, even if they are potentially the most qualified to do so among us. One idea that came up in the earlier discussion was that somehow the “market” in the abstract is the default leader, that the aggregation of thousands of individual decisions (a crowd-sourcing) eventually leads to a consensus on what art is most important or valuable. So let’s play that idea out a bit further, in the form of a thought experiment.

Imagine we have a new public museum in New York, conveniently called the Museum of Popular Photography (MoPP for short). For the purposes of argument, let’s assume that it has roughly 50000 members (big enough to have some scale and resources). In building and managing its diverse collection of photography, it however uses a radically different set of methods and procedures than all other museums. Every single card-carrying member of the museum has voting rights. What this means is that all members have an actual voice in every single accession/deaccession decision that museum makes; it is after all a museum by and for the people.

Here’s how it would work. Any museum member or employee could propose a specific individual work for acquisition. As an example, Member 1 decides that she thinks the museum should acquire Irving Penn’s Cuzco Children, and using the social connection tools we are now so familiar with, posts an image of the work on the museum’s website with a short rationale for why it should be acquired. (The museum’s curators would use the same mechanism for advocating potential acquisitions.) All other members then have the opportunity to vote yes or no on Cuzco Children, with each vote worth 1 point. There would be no anonymous voting – every member would be named (to avoid gaming the system with phantom votes), and comments could be added to the voting stream. Over time, as a proposed artwork reached a minimum of 5000 net points (or roughly 10% of the membership in favor of the acquisition), it would become an active acquisition target for the museum staff. Assuming the funds were available or a donor could be discovered, the work would be added to the collection.

Such a system would create a priority ordered list of what the membership wants to see saved in the museum. Those photographs with the highest scores would be those most coveted by the museum and the most actively pursued by museum representatives. At any one time, there might be hundreds or even thousands of individual works under consideration by the members, all with a score based on their current level of support. In some cases, an image that the membership wants may not be available; perhaps a large number of members would like to have Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent II as part of the collection, but either the work is not available or too expensive for the museum’s limited acquisitions budget (all museum budgets are limited). This work would then stay on top of the acquisitions hit list until such time as it could be acquired or was donated; maybe it would never be possible to acquire a print of this work, so in the meantime, it would also be on top of the list of works to get on loan for temporary exhibition.

So at any one time, the museum’s holdings (both actual and desired) could be rank ordered by popularity with the members (thus the name of the institution itself), and potential donors would have complete transparency in terms of what the museum really wants/needs. On an annual basis, the museum would put on a show drawn from the permanent collection called The MoPP 100, displaying the top 100 works in the collection according to the members’ preferences, shown in priority order. Additionally, it would put on shows of loaned works that rate highly in the members’ minds.

Once a work entered the collection, on an annual basis the entire membership would be asked to participate in revisiting the collection. Members could change their original votes based on the passage of time and the changing of preferences. Works that fell below the 5000 point support threshold would be deaccessioned. Again, curators could make deaccession recommendations to the membership based on duplicates, condition, relative importance, depth of holdings etc., but the final choices would be up to the collective membership.

At face value, this entire scheme is a thoroughly wacky and revolutionary idea. So let’s think about what outcome it might produce. It seems quite likely that the MoPP would end up with a holding of photography’s greatest hits, works that a large percentage of the community could agree were worth preserving. It also seems plausible that depending on the composition and sophistication of the membership, the selections would be relatively risk averse; difficult, challenging, unknown and obscure works would be less likely to attract a wide enough support base to get over the 5000 point threshold. It would also take time for new contemporary work to become exposed to enough of the membership to achieve the required level of consensus.

On one hand, this collection, even over time, might end up being a dumbed down, lowest common denominator reflection of our aggregate tastes: boring, obvious, vanilla choices that are quickly seen to be neither innovative nor thought provoking. But if you give the membership credit for intelligence, perhaps this outcome could be avoided, and the museum’s holdings would be an accurate reflection of the art that really does move us, that is meaningful and relevant to our local community, without all of the chaff that currently fills up museum storage facilities, of interest to only a minuscule number of members. The Berlin, Amsterdam, and Shangahi outposts of the MoPP (we have to keep expanding and building fabulous buildings to stay relevant, don’t you know) would have their own permanent collections, selected and managed by their own members; these collections would almost certainly have different flavors based on local tastes. This would be exciting; imagine comparing what the members in New York and Shanghai think is important – perhaps we can all agree on some things photographic, or perhaps there is wide divergence of cultural tastes. Instead of all international museums converging to one, antiseptic and familiar norm (is this white cube in Oslo, Rome or Tokyo?), the MoPPs would splinter, fragment and diverge.

So I throw it open to you. Is a photography museum for the people, by the people, a viable idea? Can the “market” actually make good choices? Would such a museum reflect who we are, or miss what’s subtle but important? Would the “long tail” of art be overlooked? Or would the crowd be smart enough to single out the deserving winners, even among the lesser known?

Is Anyone Trying to Lead the Conversation?

Quick! Who is the most influential thought leader in the world of contemporary photography? Who is spotting the trends as they are happening? Who is taking risks and making a case for what’s really important (and what’s not)? If you’re like me, even with a bit of time for reflection, you’re utterly unable to come up with even a single name that can be defended as consistently (or successfully) trying to frame the discussion of what’s going on in contemporary fine art photography. Why is this?

This is a question that I have been mulling over for the past few months, and I was reminded of it once again when I read Peter Schjeldahl’s review of a biography of Leo Castelli in the recent issue of the New Yorker (here). Schjeldahl writes: “Castelli altered a situation in which critics and curators had wielded guiding authority. He became, effectively, the scene’s predominant critic.”

So who is contemporary photography’s predominant critic? I suppose the last person to have so much control over the narrative of photography (contemporary or otherwise) was John Szarkowski. But if we look back at the last twenty years (1990-2010), I can’t seem to come up with any individual since whose voice has been as strong and authoritative as his was. Whether his preferences and choices were in the end the “right” ones, he undeniably had a point of view and a platform from which to broadcast it to a large audience.

So I started to consider where I might look for the potential leaders of today’s photography discussion, those who have stepped out of the crowd and stood alone with their opinions. Even if we might not have any omniscient, far reaching voices, there are clearly those who are making choices, tacitly separating winners and losers on a daily basis. In theory, such people would likely come from one of a small handful of occupations/groups. Absent overt and explicit statements (i.e. “Contemporary Photographer X is durably important, while Contemporary Photographer Y is not”), of which there are very few (if any) these days, all we can do is infer points of view from their public choices and omissions.

So let’s examine the possibilities. Rather than naming names, I’m going to come at this more abstractly for the most part, in the form of direct questions that I think we ought to be asking. The most obvious location in which to search for thought leadership is amidst the ranks of the museum curators. So:

• Which museum curator (major institution or not) has put on the most influential set of contemporary photography exhibitions in the past decade?
• Which has written the most memorable catalog essays in support of key contemporary photographers?
• Who has actually taken a single contemporary photographer and championed him/her to the rest of the community?
• Who has considered larger thematic issues/topics in the current medium (like the recent “Is Photography Over?” symposium at the SFMOMA)
• In short, who has “shown their cards” and taken a position in favor of certain artists or modes of photographic expression, rather than taking the politically correct route of “it’s all good”?

Another stakeholder with a strong point of view in this discussion is the photographer/artist him/herself, via efforts in writing, active participation in the community of artists, and teaching. So:

• Which working photographers have meaningfully participated in the discussion of contemporary photography and its future? Who speaks out, voices public opinions and/or truth tells?
• Which have created “movements” or groups of followers/emulators who are working in a similar style or approach?

I think the gallery owner/director is an under appreciated source of control of the contemporary photography narrative; the Castelli example above is yet another reminder of how gallery owners can influence the direction of what’s important and what’s not. While supply of top contemporary photographers is scarce/limited (not everyone can represent the same artists), I think it is safe to assume that gallery owners represent work they believe in and are willing to champion, or at least work they think they can sell. While there are clearly different economic models in use (from international mega-galleries to small single geography dealers), I think the composition of the gallery stable (and which bodies of work are shown from the gallery artists) is the single most important way to judge how the gallery owner sees the market in which he/she is participating. I’ve been kicking this idea around in my head for a few weeks and doing some background work to see what the major NY stables actually look like in terms of their contemporary photography (and what those stables might mean in terms of implied thought leadership); more to come on this later in the summer.

I’ve lumped critics, writers, art historians, magazine editors, and book publishers all into one big group, as I think there are some commonalities to how they influence the contemporary photography conversation. So:

• Which critics, writers or historians have memorably covered and analyzed the most important events in recent contemporary photography?
• Which have taken a stand in support of a single photographer, defended a mode of expression, or identified an important trend in the contemporary medium?
• What choices have editors and publishers made in terms of which contemporary photographers got coverage/book deals?
• Who has published the most important contemporary photography books of the past decade?
• Which articles, essays and monographs have meaningfully altered or reinforced the trajectory of contemporary photography?

This short post unfortunately offers no answers to these many questions, only a framework to think about how to discover who the silent leaders in contemporary photography might actually be, so we can encourage them to step out into the light even more. In our always-on digital world, the number of individual voices has multiplied exponentially, but the noise is drowning out the signal. More than ever, we need intelligent, thoughtful, opinionated guides for this journey through contemporary photography.

You know who you are out there. Now is the time to stop being so polite and start molding this amorphous lump of clay into something recognizable.

A Contemporary Photography Investment Vehicle

While we often talk about art as an asset class (in the financial sense), the fact remains that given the uniqueness of the objects being traded and their general illiquidity, it's nearly impossible to find ways to bet on the "market" without going "long" (via a buy and hold strategy) on certain artists or specific works. There really are no synthetic financial instruments that can be used to mimic the behavior of the art markets, no ways to "short" certain artists, or to buy insurance against volatility in art prices. After recently reading Michael Lewis' The Big Short and diving into the weeds of credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations as applied to the subprime mortgage market, my head has been swimming with unrealistic ideas for finding a way to create a financial instrument that could encompass the world of contemporary photography.

So here's a thought experiment. Suppose you are a financial investor looking to get exposure to contemporary photography as a niche asset class. You are not interested in visiting gallery shows, looking at pictures, talking to gallery owners, or "buying what you love". You instead want to objectively place a financial bet on the prospects of contemporary photography, as it seems like a "hot" market that might outperform other asset classes, if you only knew how to access it.

Let's say that you heard about this site and decided that you would use the data provided here to generate "trade" ideas. If you went back through the 170+ reviews we did in 2009 and strip out all the museum shows (not for sale) and the exhibits of vintage work (not new/contemporary), you'd be left with a rated list (one to three stars) of the world of New York contemporary photography for the year (potentially a biased snapshot, but hopefully grounded in some reality, and far better than any you could generate on your own). If you then selected the top ten (or so) shows and purchased one print from each show, you might have a decent proxy (or "market basket") for the best of what was available in 2009. Sure, there are differences in quality between the works in any one show, but let's gloss over those for a moment and assume that a solid, representative work can be chosen from what was on view. And sure, we can have real arguments about whether the show ratings are accurate, but since you have no effective way to second guess the ratings (and no real interest in doing so), you are really just executing on what you have been given.

Taking this as a structural model, you then extrapolate this to a ten year fund vehicle (similar to a venture capital fund), five years of buying/investing in the work, and five years of "harvesting" (waiting to liquidate the images, via selling privately or in the auction market). Thus, in its minimum incarnation, the ultimate fund has approximately 50 diverse works from as many as 50 artists from a 5 year period. You then build a ladder of funds for each 5 year period of art.

If you followed the above instructions, here's what the 2009 DLK COLLECTION market basket for contemporary photography would have looked like (in alphabetical order):

1 Roger Ballen, 20x20, from Boarding House (Gagsoian)
1 Edward Burtynsky, 40x50, from Oil (Hasted Hunt Kraeutler)
1 Doug DuBois, 20x24, from All the Days & Nights (Higher)
1 Lee Friedlander, 16x20, from Still Life (Janet Borden)
1 Beate Gütschow, 36x31, from series of constructed cities (Sonnabend)
1 Sally Mann, 15x14, from Proud Flesh (Gagosian)
1 Walter Niedermayr, 50x100, from series of mountains/ski resorts (Robert Miller)
1 Nicholas Nixon, 11x14, from Old Home, New Pictures (Pace/MacGill)
1 Alec Soth, 32x40, from The Last Days of W. (Gagosian)
1 Kehinde Wiley, 24x20, from Black Light (Deitch)

This basket, as a whole, would have cost almost exactly $100000 last year. It covers both black and white and color, straight and manipulated, large scale and smaller sizes. If investors in this fund wanted to invest more than $100000 each year, simply multiply the investment out, buying say 5 prints from each show instead of 1 ($500000 a year invested in 50 pictures rather that $100000 in 10). This would avoid the temptation to dilute the pool by adding images from further down the list of shows. Year to year, there would of course be variation in the cost of the basket based on the arrival rate of great work, but I'm guessing it would likely even out over time.

The returns of the fund would follow a similar path as the "j-curve" of venture capital. Immediately after purchasing the works, their actual market value would fall, as a retail premium is paid before any lasting value is created. (The value of the works could in theory be "marked to market" by using comparative auction results.) The value of the images would likely slowly build over time, with some "winners" growing faster than others, driving the ultimate return on the whole pool of images. Was 2009 a "good vintage" for contemporary photography or not? It's too early to tell.

To me, all of this seems utterly plausible, in a ruthlessly financial sense.

From other vantage points, I think this whole concept raises a few tangentially interesting ideas, even for those who are not particularly financially minded.

• Suppose you are a wealthy person who has hired a "photography consultant" to assist you in choosing what to buy for your collection. You are paying this person a fee for their services. If you were interested in building a contemporary collection, how were his/her recommendations different than what I've proposed? Did you buy the prints on the list above? And if not, why not, and what did you buy instead, and why?
• Suppose you are on a museum acquisitions committee for photography, and you have a decent sized budget to spend on recent contemporary work. How did what you actually bought in 2009 match with the list above? Did you actually talk through all of these and actively dismiss them?

In both cases, I'd be tempted to slap this list down and force some real discussion about why you made the buying choices you did. Not because your aim is to maximize your financial return on contemporary photography (it almost certainly isn't in these two cases), or because our ratings are somehow all-knowing, but because the exercise of talking through the choices and trade-offs would be worthwhile. And of course, if you change your mind, it is altogether possible to still "buy into" this 2009 "trade", although prices may have already started to rise, diluting your eventual returns.

For you money managers out there, I'd be interested to hear how you might improve on this fanciful idea or if someone else is already doing it. By the way, I also think there is the potential for an "event-driven" investment vehicle for photography as well, driven by upcoming retrospectives, artist deaths, and other major market movers; but we'll save that for another day.

A Contrarian View: A Collector’s Thoughts on Photobooks

For the past month or so, there has been a far reaching discussion on the future of the photobook going on at RESOLVE/Livebooks (here), with dozens of interested parties (photographers, publishers, critics/writers, curators etc.) contributing their ideas. After reading quite a few of the posts, it became clear that the voice of the photography collector has been generally absent from this otherwise broad and thoughtful conversation. For the most part, the discussion to date has been mostly artist and publisher centric (supply), with a primary focus on how changes in technology (digitization and websites, low cost print-on-demand, etc.) might impact the ability of artists/publishers to make/sell amazing books or use new replacements to achieve some of the same end goals. The view from the other end of the pipe (demand) has been covered with somewhat less detail. So it is from the position of collector (and active user of photobooks) that I pass along a few disconnected thoughts:

1.) The primary reasons to buy a photobook for a photography collector are two-fold: reference and education.

I have yet to meet a large and serious photography collector who doesn’t also have a deep library of photobooks (numbering in at least hundreds if not thousands of books). These books are constantly being purchased and carefully read/reviewed as a method of increasing the volume of “seeing” that we do. This is a completely separate activity from “collecting” photobooks (rare or otherwise) – we are not searching for mylar covered signed first editions that will increase in value in and of themselves as objects; we are actively engaging with the content of the photobooks as the background work required to make educated collecting choices. Books in our library (old and new, monographs, exhibition catalogues, greatest hits collections, museum inventories, catalogues raisonne etc.) are not languishing on a coffee table gathering dust; on the contrary, they are constantly being reread, dog-eared, reconsidered and marked with paper slips as we look at new work, as new connections and contexts arise. We hardly ever buy a photograph without first tracking down a monograph (or exhibition catalogue) of the photographer’s work and then spending time looking over the entire project/output; our goal is to winnow down all the available images into a short list of pictures we find most exciting (or not), having spent the effort to actively look at them all. From there, we can then enter the marketplace (at a gallery or at auction) with a much sounder understanding of the work, hopefully making a confident beeline for just those images we have fallen in love with. We also buy books from all kinds of genres and photographers that don’t fit into our particular collecting tastes, as further reference on the trends and important figures in the medium and to keep current on what’s fresh. In short, books are for us the primary vehicle (beyond going to see photography in person) for our photo education.

2.) The purpose of the photobook is the photographs. Period.

We buy books so we can reference the pictures, now and in the future. Detailed image lists and specs are always welcome. If there are well-written, helpful essays (written by the photographers themselves, scholars, or whomever) that provide some understandable back story to the work that will increase our appreciation of what is contained in the images, so much the better. (The indecipherable, artspeak essay is a tragic waste of space.) Of course, we thoroughly enjoy lush paper, superlative reproductions, elegant design, thoughtful sequencing and the like; but top quality production values won’t increase our appreciation of bad photographs. Conversely, great images will make up for lots of deficiencies of publishing, at least for our purposes. Some of the photobooks we come back to again and again have small images or even thumbnails, but this obvious weakness is made up for with additional completeness or increased depth (more work shown). Old photobooks still have plenty of resonance, even if the printing technology or design aesthetic in use at the time wasn’t as effective.

3.) Multiple viewpoints make for a richer discussion.

Once the blocking and tackling of initial immersion in a photographer’s work has been done, the nuanced contrasts of multiple books become important in solidifying our education. The balance point to consider is author control.

A monograph published by or with the cooperation of the photographer is a document to how the artist wants to display the work; the control lies in the hands of the photographer (with the assent and collaboration of the publisher) to present the work as he or she sees fit. As a collector, this vantage point is highly useful to understand: which pictures were selected and sequenced in what order, what size was thought to be the best size, what was left in or taken out etc. Nearly all photobooks about early career artists and photographers come from the artist’s point of view; as artists move along in their careers, more books of this type are published on a project by project basis.

Third party photo books (monographs, exhibition catalogues, group/thematic collections, etc.) put the control in the hands of a scholar or curator, who makes all the display decisions through a slightly different lens. These books provide a collector with a more distanced or distilled view of the work; it’s less raw and more processed, but often provides more historical context or analysis. As photographers progress in their career, more of these kinds of books are produced.

As collectors, we really need (and want) both sets of “eyes” in our library; this gives us a better chance of developing a more nuanced understanding of the work at hand. Our desired outcome is to have more of both, with a weight towards more in-depth scholarship (as it is less broadly available at this point).

4.) For photography collectors, innovation in photobooks isn’t a huge issue.

One part of the thread of this discussion has centered on innovation in photobook publishing or the lack thereof. As a consumer of photobooks, I’m sorry to say that innovation in book design isn’t generally what I’m looking for; I’m nearly entirely focused on the quality of the photography. If the pictures are great, it is my hope that at a minimum, the rest of the package will be good enough not to distract me too much from the images.

Of course, there are the 5% of the books that are so meticulously conceived that the photographs, essays, design, paper, slipcover, etc have all been carefully orchestrated together into a real art object, a collaborative effect that is greater than the sum of its parts. This is truly sublime and wonderful when this occurs, and the impact of the photographs is meaningfully enhanced. No matter what happens in the electronic world in the future, there will always be room for this kind of creative effort (with a small but enthusiastic audience of potential buyers ready and waiting). With costs of self-publishing coming down, creativity will likely be unleashed in ways we can’t yet imagine. That said, I don’t need a library full of these kinds of (often expensive) books - a few treasures from our very favorite photographers here and there will suffice. Perhaps a different way to think of this is that the super special limited edition print run of 500 with an accordion fold and fancy slip case isn’t likely aimed at collectors like us (it’s likely aimed at "photobook as object" collectors, a smaller group of photography/art collectors who have a special interest in the specific artist/project, and potentially other fellow artists); we’re actually in most cases much happier with the run of 3000 that does a high quality job of showing us the work with a minimum of fanfare.

5.) We are likely the last generation of collectors who will rely so heavily on the physical photobook for our photography education.

We are in our 40s, and began our collecting a decade or so ago. So while the Internet has certainly become an integral part of our lives during that time, our collecting has been largely rooted in the traditions of the pre-digital age. We have thus been trained to love the tactile quality of a great book page, and to venerate it above the fleeting image on a computer screen. Even if we are not photo book fetishists, we’re still among the paper based Luddites. This will be impossible to change for us, even if artist websites and online archives/databases become orders of magnitude more compelling, pervasive and useful.

I’m not as certain however about how future collectors who are now in their 20s (or younger) will see photobooks, if their electronic equivalents are ratcheted up in overall quality. Social networking has already begun to transform how we communicate to each other about the art we find of interest. If I was in college today, would I go out and plunk down $100 bucks for a thick, beautiful monograph (much less a lavishly produced artist’s book) if I could see the hi-res images anytime, anywhere on the artist’s website? Wouldn’t I just get my education as a straight feed from the net, bringing in a multitude of voices from the artist, to curators, to the chaos of the blogosphere?

While I have no concrete predictions for the future, I think this brings us back to the underlying question at the core of this whole conversation: what is the purpose of the physical photobook going forward and who is the target audience? An interesting thought to consider is that maybe the photobook will evolve (or some might say return) to having no defined consumer at all, beyond those in small specialized niches/long tails - maybe it will be made by the photographer/curator in a DIY (or self funded) manner solely because the effort of making the physical book is an important part of the overall artistic/scholarly process or is the best venue for the work itself. For us as collectors, the photobook is and always will be a required reference resource; for those of the future who have been weaned on bits, it may be a “nice to have” or an artistic talisman.