Exhibition catalogue
Encyclopedia
There are two types of exhibition catalogue (or exhibition catalog): a printed list of exhibits at an art
exhibition; and a directory of exhibitors at a trade fair
or business-to-business event.
"coffee table book
". The advent of cheap colour-printing
in the 1960s transformed what had usually been simple "handlists" with several works to each page into large scale "descriptive catalogues" that are intended as both contributions to scholarship and books likely to appeal to many general readers. The catalogues for exhibitions held at a museum are now often far more detailed than the catalogues of their permanent collections.
In the early 21st century, exhibitions that gather items from other institutions (museums, galleries, libraries, etc.) and that are elaborately publicized very often have catalogues in the form of substantial books.
and other critical apparatus
. It is usually only in the language of the location, although if the exhibition is travelling internationally, local translated editions will be produced for each location. The book may be published by the institution that hosts the exhibition (or one of these institutions), but is distributed by and often co-published with a larger publisher. It will not dwell on the fact that it is the catalogue of a particular exhibition, and often will not contain a plan of the exhibition. Visitors to the exhibition will anyway know this, and the intention - often successful - is to create a book which has a permanent usefulness. Nearly all are produced in paperback
; a hardback edition is a sign of serious intentions. Most major catalogues are sold in at least some bookshops, and are available for order more widely through the booktrade. Many receive specific sponsorship to finance them, and usually a number of authors contribute.
In recent decades, exhibition catalogues have grown to prodigious sizes and may be the most comprehensive sources for even rather large subject areas. Probably the largest to be produced were in the 1970s in a competitive spree by Italian provinces and German lander
to promote the significance of their region by mounting huge exhibitions on the period when its cultural production was at its peak. A typical example is the three-volume Die Parler und der schöne Stil 1350-1400. Europäische Kunst unter den Luxemburgern from Cologne
of 1978, with a further two volumes published in 1980 on a colloqium held in conjunction with the exhibition. The three volumes covering the exhibition proper amount to over a thousand pages and it would have been unfeasible to have taken them into the exhibition itself. Another example is The History of Japanese Photography, 432 pages long and with over four hundred plates.
This trend was led in Britain by the Royal Academy of Arts and in the USA by the Metropolitan Museum of Art
in New York and the National Gallery of Art
in Washington.
artist Yasunori Taninaka is in Japanese alone. Meanwhile Works by 25 Photographers in their 20s is completely bilingual, Japanese and English.
The great majority of Japanese exhibition catalogues are only available directly from the galleries or museums that host or hosted the exhibitions. These catalogues are acquired and shelved by libraries together with other books and are available on the used book market, but lack ISBNs. However, exceptions do exist: the catalogue of an exhibition of the photographs of Nakaji Yasui
was produced via an independent publisher and distributed as a regular book.
Many exhibition catalogues are used by market researchers because they contain good quality information about companies that are active in a particular market place.
A typical exhibition catalogue contains the following:
The format of exhibition catalogues for trade fairs can range from A5-sized ‘saddle-stitched’ publications with descriptions of as few as 30-40 exhibitors, to much larger perfect-bound ‘stretched A5’ or A4-sized directories containing profiles on thousands of companies exhibiting at major international trade events such as The London Book Fair
, SIAL (the Paris-based food exhibition), and Nuremberg International Toy Fair
(Spielwarenmesse).
The exhibition organiser is ultimately responsible for publishing the catalogue for their own event. However, many organisers outsource the design, production and advertising sales for these publications to specialist exhibition catalogue contract publishers operating within the exhibitions industry.
Other common terms to describe the exhibition catalogue at a trade fair include 'event guide', 'show guide', 'show catalogue', 'exhibition directory', 'fair guide' or 'exhibition guide'. Often exhibition organisers will add the word 'official' to the front of the name of the publication (e.g. 'Official exhibition catalogue') to distinguish their publication from unofficial exhibition catalogues for their event produced by trade magazine publishers.
Art exhibition
Art exhibitions are traditionally the space in which art objects meet an audience. The exhibit is universally understood to be for some temporary period unless, as is rarely true, it is stated to be a "permanent exhibition". In American English, they may be called "exhibit", "exposition" or...
exhibition; and a directory of exhibitors at a trade fair
Trade fair
A trade fair is an exhibition organized so that companies in a specific industry can showcase and demonstrate their latest products, service, study activities of rivals and examine recent market trends and opportunities...
or business-to-business event.
Art or museum exhibition catalogues
Catalogues for art or museum exhibitions may range in scale from a single printed sheet to a lavish hardcoverHardcover
A hardcover, hardback or hardbound is a book bound with rigid protective covers...
"coffee table book
Coffee table book
A coffee table book is a hardcover book that is intended to sit on a coffee table or similar surface in an area where guests sit and are entertained, thus inspiring conversation or alleviating boredom. They tend to be oversized and of heavy construction, since there is no pressing need for...
". The advent of cheap colour-printing
Printing
Printing is a process for reproducing text and image, typically with ink on paper using a printing press. It is often carried out as a large-scale industrial process, and is an essential part of publishing and transaction printing....
in the 1960s transformed what had usually been simple "handlists" with several works to each page into large scale "descriptive catalogues" that are intended as both contributions to scholarship and books likely to appeal to many general readers. The catalogues for exhibitions held at a museum are now often far more detailed than the catalogues of their permanent collections.
In the early 21st century, exhibitions that gather items from other institutions (museums, galleries, libraries, etc.) and that are elaborately publicized very often have catalogues in the form of substantial books.
Format of art catalogues
Book-sized exhibition catalogues in the West typically have a colour photograph of every item on display, and also of other relevant works not in the exhibition (these usually smaller and often in black and white). There will be a short formal catalogue description of each item, and usually interpretative text often amounting to one or more pages. The resulting book will have at least one introductory essay, often several, footnotes, bibliographyBibliography
Bibliography , as a practice, is the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology...
and other critical apparatus
Critical apparatus
The critical apparatus is the critical and primary source material that accompanies an edition of a text. A critical apparatus is often a by-product of textual criticism....
. It is usually only in the language of the location, although if the exhibition is travelling internationally, local translated editions will be produced for each location. The book may be published by the institution that hosts the exhibition (or one of these institutions), but is distributed by and often co-published with a larger publisher. It will not dwell on the fact that it is the catalogue of a particular exhibition, and often will not contain a plan of the exhibition. Visitors to the exhibition will anyway know this, and the intention - often successful - is to create a book which has a permanent usefulness. Nearly all are produced in paperback
Paperback
Paperback, softback or softcover describe and refer to a book by the nature of its binding. The covers of such books are usually made of paper or paperboard, and are usually held together with glue rather than stitches or staples...
; a hardback edition is a sign of serious intentions. Most major catalogues are sold in at least some bookshops, and are available for order more widely through the booktrade. Many receive specific sponsorship to finance them, and usually a number of authors contribute.
In recent decades, exhibition catalogues have grown to prodigious sizes and may be the most comprehensive sources for even rather large subject areas. Probably the largest to be produced were in the 1970s in a competitive spree by Italian provinces and German lander
States of Germany
Germany is made up of sixteen which are partly sovereign constituent states of the Federal Republic of Germany. Land literally translates as "country", and constitutionally speaking, they are constituent countries...
to promote the significance of their region by mounting huge exhibitions on the period when its cultural production was at its peak. A typical example is the three-volume Die Parler und der schöne Stil 1350-1400. Europäische Kunst unter den Luxemburgern from Cologne
Cologne
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...
of 1978, with a further two volumes published in 1980 on a colloqium held in conjunction with the exhibition. The three volumes covering the exhibition proper amount to over a thousand pages and it would have been unfeasible to have taken them into the exhibition itself. Another example is The History of Japanese Photography, 432 pages long and with over four hundred plates.
This trend was led in Britain by the Royal Academy of Arts and in the USA by the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
in New York and the National Gallery of Art
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden is a national art museum, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, in Washington, DC...
in Washington.
Japanese catalogues
Japanese exhibition catalogues often provide captions, a certain amount of text, or both in a second language (usually English), and occasionally also a smaller amount in a third language. This is not always so: the large catalogue (over 360 pages) for a major exhibition of the wood-blockWoodblock printing in Japan
Woodblock printing in Japan is a technique best known for its use in the ukiyo-e artistic genre; however, it was also used very widely for printing books in the same period. Woodblock printing had been used in China for centuries to print books, long before the advent of movable type, but was only...
artist Yasunori Taninaka is in Japanese alone. Meanwhile Works by 25 Photographers in their 20s is completely bilingual, Japanese and English.
The great majority of Japanese exhibition catalogues are only available directly from the galleries or museums that host or hosted the exhibitions. These catalogues are acquired and shelved by libraries together with other books and are available on the used book market, but lack ISBNs. However, exceptions do exist: the catalogue of an exhibition of the photographs of Nakaji Yasui
Nakaji Yasui
-Life:Yasui was born in Osaka and became a member of the Naniwa Photography Club in 1920s and also became a member of the Tampei Photography Club in 1930.His photographs cover a wide range from pictorialism to straight photography, including photomontages...
was produced via an independent publisher and distributed as a regular book.
Catalogues for trade fairs
Exhibition catalogues are used at commercial exhibitions and trade fairs to profile all the exhibitors at the event. They serve not only as a guide for visitors on the day, but also as an industry directory used afterwards by visitors (and others) to find suppliers and business partners.Many exhibition catalogues are used by market researchers because they contain good quality information about companies that are active in a particular market place.
A typical exhibition catalogue contains the following:
- Introduction and welcome message from the event organiser
- Floor plan showing the location of each exhibition stand
- Summary alphabetical list of exhibitors
- Exhibitor profiles (normally a textual description of each exhibitor plus their contact details)
- A ‘buyer’s guide’ where exhibitors are listed under relevant product or service categories
- Details of seminars or conference sessions running alongside the exhibition
- Advertisements promoting the exhibitors
The format of exhibition catalogues for trade fairs can range from A5-sized ‘saddle-stitched’ publications with descriptions of as few as 30-40 exhibitors, to much larger perfect-bound ‘stretched A5’ or A4-sized directories containing profiles on thousands of companies exhibiting at major international trade events such as The London Book Fair
London Book Fair
The London Book Fair is a large book-publishing trade fair held annually, usually in April, in London, England. The London Book Fair has grown in size and importance in recent years, and 23,000 publishers, booksellers, literary agents, librarians, media and industry suppliers from over 100...
, SIAL (the Paris-based food exhibition), and Nuremberg International Toy Fair
Nuremberg International Toy Fair
Spielwarenmesse International Toy Fair Nürnberg is the largest international trade fair for toys and games. Only trade visitors associated with the toy business, journalists and invited guests are admitted...
(Spielwarenmesse).
The exhibition organiser is ultimately responsible for publishing the catalogue for their own event. However, many organisers outsource the design, production and advertising sales for these publications to specialist exhibition catalogue contract publishers operating within the exhibitions industry.
Other common terms to describe the exhibition catalogue at a trade fair include 'event guide', 'show guide', 'show catalogue', 'exhibition directory', 'fair guide' or 'exhibition guide'. Often exhibition organisers will add the word 'official' to the front of the name of the publication (e.g. 'Official exhibition catalogue') to distinguish their publication from unofficial exhibition catalogues for their event produced by trade magazine publishers.
Art catalogues referred to
- The History of Japanese Photography, ed. Anne Wilkes TuckerAnne Wilkes TuckerAnne Wilkes Tucker is an American museum curator of photographic works. Tucker was born in Baton Rouge. She received a B.A. in Art History from Randolph Macon Woman's College in 1967, and an A.A.S in Photographic Illustration from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1968...
, et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-300-09925-8. Exhibition held at the Museum of Fine Arts (HoustonHouston, TexasHouston is the fourth-largest city in the United States, and the largest city in the state of Texas. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the city had a population of 2.1 million people within an area of . Houston is the seat of Harris County and the economic center of , which is the ...
) and the ClevelandCleveland, OhioCleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Cuyahoga County, the most populous county in the state. The city is located in northeastern Ohio on the southern shore of Lake Erie, approximately west of the Pennsylvania border...
Museum of ArtCleveland Museum of ArtThe Cleveland Museum of Art is an art museum situated in the Wade Park District, in the University Circle neighborhood on Cleveland's east side. Internationally renowned for its substantial holdings of Asian and Egyptian art, the museum houses a diverse permanent collection of more than 43,000...
, 2003. - Nakaji Yasui: Photographer 1903–1942 / Yasui Nakaji shashinshū (安井仲治写真集). Tokyo: Kyodo News, 2004. ISBN 4-7641-0542-X. Exhibition held at the Nagoya City Art MuseumNagoya City Art MuseumThe Nagoya City Art Museum is located in the city of Nagoya in central Japan.The museum building itself was constructed by Kisho Kurokawa, one of the leading Japanese architects, from 1983-1987....
and Shoto Museum of Art (ShibuyaShibuya, Tokyois one of the 23 special wards of Tokyo, Japan. As of 2008, it has an estimated population of 208,371 and a population density of 13,540 persons per km². The total area is 15.11 km²....
), 2004–5. Text in both Japanese and English. - Die Parler und der schöne Stil 1350-1400. Europäische Kunst unter den Luxemburgern, ed. Anton Legner. 3 + 2 vols. Cologne: Schnütgen-Museum, 1978 & 1980.
- Taninaka Yasunori no yume: Shinema to kafe to kaiki no maboroshi (谷中安規の夢:シネマとカフェと怪奇のまぼろし, The dreams of Yasunori Taninaka: Apparitions of the cinema, cafes and mysteries). Published by the exhibitors, 2003. Exhibition held at the Shoto Museum of Art, Suzaka Hanga Museum (SuzakaSuzaka, Naganois a city located in Nagano, Japan.As of May 1, 2011, the city has an estimated population of 52,493, with a household number of 18,934 and the density of 350.32 persons per km². The total area is 149.84 km².Fujitsu Corporation has a plant in the city....
) and Utsunomiya Museum of Art (UtsunomiyaUtsunomiya, Tochigiis the capital and most populous city of Tochigi Prefecture, Japan. In October 2010 the city had an estimated population of 510,416 and a population density of 1,224.49 people per square kilometer. The total area is 416.84 km². had a population of 888,005 in the 2000 Census...
), 2003–2004. Text in Japanese only. - Works by 25 Photographers in their 20s / 25nin no 20dai no shashin (25人の20代の写真). Published by the exhibitor, 1995. Exhibition held at Kiyosato Museum of Photographic ArtsKiyosato Museum of Photographic ArtsThe is a gallery of photography in the Kiyosato regionof the city of Hokuto, Yamanashi .The gallery was founded in 1995; Eikoh Hosoe has been its director since its inception....
(KiyosatoKiyosato, Yamanashiis a locality in the city of Hokuto, Yamanashi, Japan. It is a popular resort area.It is serviced by Kiyosato Station on the Koumi Line.-External links:...
), 1995. Text in Japanese and English.