The Fair

I had to clear out of Boston early - before a lot of what I wanted to see. But I couldn't leave without stopping into the book fair part of the conference, which is usually my favorite thing anyway. But at this one, I noticed something that I hadn't really seen before. Of course there was the usual mix of tables - from the printers of barely readable theoretical texts to the people who make erasers and want you to get as excited about them as the vendors were. (Guess which group had better freebies?) But I hadn't noticed the extent to which the two appear not to meet.
I spent a goodly chunk of time talking to a rep from Art Boards who was able to answer detailed questions about the composition of the gesso panels and products he was showing. He seemed knowledgeable and generally unhurried. And he had a ton of samples. Other vendors of materials - the huge booth from Golden Acrylics were also similarly helpful and interesting to chat with. One felt a renewed sense of excitement about experimenting with materials after seeing what was out there to use, refreshed and reinvigorated at the possibility that we might not just be making images that were ultimately destined only for slide lectures of websites, but objects that had character and physicality of their own - traits that would contribute to their meaning as much as what they depicted might contribute.
On the other end of the spectrum, there were the book vendors, who generally had the larger adn flashier booths and who appeared to be attracting the most visitors. One of the busiest was the booth for Prentice-Hall publishers, who were going all out to pitch for the new edition of Janson's History of Art. (They had refrigerator magnets...) A plasma screen showed videos or webstuff related to the book, and hoards of art history teachers (readily identifiable by their sensible shoes) milled around.
Other presses had books piled high. Most of them offered discounts for purchases ordered at the conference (some as generous as 50% off). But the communication in those booths – if there was any – was between browsers, who would notice you were looking at something and tell you what they felt about the book. The notable exception was Yale University Press , where I actually got into a conversation with a sales person knowledgeable enough to not only know about the show whose catalog I was browsing, but excited enough about art to know where and when it would be traveling to the east coast.
But by and large, the crowds looking over books were quiet and diliegent about looking through the torrent of titles, as if trying to find something that they might be able to use for next semester without letting on that most of the stuff there was little more than a tempting but obscure reminder of life's brevity (I had the feeeling I was the only person who thought I should have brought my librarian to the conference). I mean, who could read all that? The idea that the editors of these presses had plowed through all that materialwas at once inspiring and enviable, and simultaneously horrible. It's as if each and every moment in the chronology of art (mostly in New York, but in other western cities as well) now had about 5-7 pages to speak for it in that room.
And what of making things - the occasion for which criticism exists? It seemed that there was little discourse between those who stopped at the art supply tables and those who stopped at the bookstalls. I felt rather alone (and after a while, like the subject of some suspicion) crossing back and forth between the two camps. But the whole thing struck me as a metaphoric map of higher education in art – a lot of books many people felt obliged to read, a few books a few people felt excited about, and a general distrust of the materials of art (which – it should be noted, were exclusively related to drawing and painting, though those two disciplines did not enjoy any such majority among the topics of books on view).