An Exhibition catalog
is a publication that records the temporary display by museums, galleries, and other similar cultural institutions of a specially curated collection of objects that either are not part of their permanent collections or do not usually appear in that particular unique context. Some early examples were extremely concise and compact affairs; bearing the title of the exhibition, a brief introductory essay, and a basic listing of artists' names together with the titles of their featured works. This catalog from 1906 for a New York exhibition of early 20th century lithographs by German artists is representative of the exhibition catalog at its mostsuccinct: http://research.nyarc.org/digital_projects/gilded_age/NE2310_K44.pdf#view=Fit
It's difficult to imagine the 1906 catalog sharing an umbrella with today's colossal, full-color, glossy, prohibitively expensive, and connoisseur-status-conferring exhibition catalogs that so often grace the coffee tables of A-list celebrities whose homes are featured in recent issues of Architectural Digest:
An even harder presence under the umbrella to reconcile is that soft vinyl "catalog" that Barbara Rose designed to accompany Claes Oldenburg's 1970 MoMA exhibition:
Indeed, the daunting challenge of determining just what exactly defines the exhibition catalog
is the focus of the common Introduction to each of 3 ARLIS/NA Cataloging Advisory Committee's Cataloging Exhibition Publications: Best Practices pamphlets (addressing the topical areas Title and Statement of Responsibility, Notes, and Subject Headings respectively) from 2008 and 2009:
"[An exhibition catalog] may or may not contain additional information, such as illustrations, introductory essays, analyses of the works of art, biographical information on the artists, etc. In recent years there has been a trend to publish what can be termed exhibition publications, which document or complement an exhibition but which may or may not include a list of the works exhibited. ... The following guidelines have been drafted for use with the broader definition of an exhibition publication. The term exhibition catalog should not exclude exhibition publications which are not strictly a catalog."
(see below: 1a, 1b, and 1c of Bibliography)With this statement alone, the ARLIS/NA CAC members can -- and do -- make a very persuasive case for the urgent need to establish comprehensive standards for cataloging this very broad and diverse category of publications! By adopting this more inclusive terminology, and by extension, a looser interpretation of what constitutes the (mostly text-based) record of an exhibition, however, the committee members also loosed a veritable Pandora's Box of blurred boundaries and ambiguities of every tint and hue! While a 400+ page, hardcover, mass-produced, "coffee-table book" type exhibition catalog that documents a highly publicized show at an internationally renowned, major museum clearly and unequivocally belongs on the shelves with the other resources in the museum library's general collection, the same cannot be said of the just-shy-of-50 pages, soft-bound, hot-off-the-personal-word-processor and hastily stapled together, "small-batch publication" that accompanies the first exhibition of works by an as-yet-unknown, local artist held at a new, yet-to-become-established, local storefront gallery. The latter -- if it ends up being kept for posterity at all -- would be categorized more appropriately as Ephemera; perhaps someday (best case scenario) to be stored somewhere within a special or archival collection, perhaps even in an artist's (vertical) file. Yet even in this best case scenario, it is extremely unlikely that this more humble version of the exhibition catalog would ever receive any formal processing other than being entered among the items on a general inventory list.
Then...
Just when ARLIS/NA has you convinced that you can correctly and reliably pick out the exhibition publication in the line-up...
In walks The Association of Art Editors (AAE), with their own criteria for what constitutes an exhibition catalog!!!
In their capacity as editorial standard-setters for fine arts publications, the AAE's online Style Guide offers definitions of art terms that are both descriptive and prescriptive. Consequently, their Exhibition Catalog definition goes into great depth in enumerating the content areas it (ideally) covers and the conventional structure given to that content. In her blog entry, Lisa Welter provides an excellent overview in the form of a bullet list of the item-for-item content description proffered by the Style Guide:
(http://446fall15.blogspot.com/2015/10/blog-entry-1-exhibition-catalogs-cover.html; see: What is an exhibition catalog?)
A quick tally of the characteristic content sections into which the catalog is organized gives us a sum of 13. Of these 13, the core feature is the catalog entry which in turn, comprises an additional 16 sources of information about each exhibited work -- In effect, an exhibition catalog typically contains 29! potential sources of research information!!!
And as a result, the art librarian is saddled with the following onerous tasks:
- determining the depth of cataloging appropriate to the information content of each catalog in order to meet the anticipated research needs of the prospective curator, docent, expert museum staff, less-or-inexpert museum staff, outside researcher, public patron, etc.
- figuring out how to represent all potential sources of research information in the OPAC record
Thanks to those ARLIS/NA Best Practices pamphlets, art librarians receive truly exhaustive and indispensable cataloging guidance --
in MARC format, using AACR2R 2002...
but:- what if the museum library has converted to RDA?! {*gulp!*}
"They are a NIGHTMARE to catalog!"
-- Martha's words upon assigning Exhibition catalogs as a special materials focus group category
Despite the time, effort, seemingly insurmountable problems, countless hours of intensive psychotherapy, etc., that these accursed exhibition catalogs, since their inception, have cost countless much-beleaguered art information specialists the world over;
the unequivocal consensus of art information professionals specifically and of the art world in its entirety is:
Exhibition catalogs are the single most important, indispensable, critical source of art information; frequently, the SOLE SOURCE of information about a particular art work and/or artist, proving in effect, uniquely invaluable to the researcher.
So museums, museum libraries, galleries, gallery archives, art and architecture school libraries, special and academic libraries and archives all continue to give highest priority to acquiring, cataloging, prominently displaying, providing access, updating, maintaining, and conservation of exhibition publications; to the greatest extent their budgets allow.
Because, in the end:
THE BOTTOM LINE always has the last word.
Fortunately, people who make the fine arts and artists the focus of their life's work usually excel at getting creative!
Creative Approaches to Tackling Budgetary Constraints :
Examples and Links
- Some respected and dependable independent booksellers and antiquarians who specialize in collecting and selling rare, out-of-pint, hard-to-find, etc. exhibition publications either at a premium or at more affordable prices include:
- Worldwide Books -- the premier vendor of Exhibition Catalogs and Art Publications, renowned for offering an exceptionally vast and comprehensive selection. Customers have the options of visiting one of numerous national and international outlets, open weekdays from 9-5; placing telephone orders or buying books online. (http://www.worldwide-artbooks.com/)
- some decent alternatives to Worldwide that conduct book sales exclusively online are AbeBooks - Used books, Rare books, New books & Textbooks (http://www.abebooks.com/) and Alibris (http://www.alibris.com/)
2. In spring 2014, New York City organized "This Kiss to the Whole World": Klimt and the Vienna Secession, a unique, citywide, multifaceted exhibition -- requiring the full participation and collaboration of all five boroughs and of unprecedented ambition, scope, and importance -- to celebrate the life, work, and legacy of the artist Gustav Klimt in association with the Vienna Secession movement. For their representative part in the exhibition, New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) partners The Frick Collection, Brooklyn Museum, and MoMA chose to pool together the extraordinary wealth of resources from their individual collections and present it entirely online as a free open access digital exhibition. No physical exhibition catalog copies exist, defraying both the production/distribution cost incurred by the museums and the cost of purchasing a personal copy incurred by the general public. Here is the link to the exhibit: http://secession.nyarc.org/
3. The 2-resources-in-a-single-carrier format exhibition catalog published jointly by the Davis Museum at Wellesley University and Smith College Art Museum (February 2016) exemplifies a collaboration on a more modest scale. The back-to-back exhibitions of Käthe Kollwitz' Krieg cycle woodcuts (at Davis, September-December 2015; then at Smith, January-March 2016) represent two complementary interpretations of the cycle. The resulting exhibition catalog aims to document each exhibition exhaustively and represent the intellectual contributions of the two curators separately but equally. I'm eager to follow this ambitious joint venture as it unfolds! Here are the links to exhibition coverage at the Davis museum:
http://www.wellesley.edu/davismuseum/whats-on/current/node/64251
and to that of the Smith Art Museum:
Bibliography
1a. Art Libraries Society of North America. Cataloging Advisory Committee, Cataloging exhibition catalogs, best practices: Titles and statements of responsibility, 2008. 2
1b. Art Libraries Society of North America. Cataloging Advisory Committee, Cataloging exhibition catalogs, best practices: Notes, 2009. 2
1c. Art Libraries Society of North America. Cataloging Advisory Committee, Cataloging exhibition catalogs, best practices: Subject headings, 2009. 2
Available electronically as 1 (single) resource:
Available electronically as 3 individual resources:
2. Association of Art Editors (AAE) Style Guide: https://artedit.org/style-guide.php
3. Ballmer, Amy and Peter Blank, "Special Collections at the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago" in Art Museum Libraries and Librarianship, edited by Joan M. Benedetti, 149. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2007.
4. Frederick Keppel & Co., Catalogue of an exhibition of original lithographs by contemporary German artists, with an introduction by Hans W. Singer (New York: F. Keppel, 1906) [electronic resource]
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