What’s Driving the Surge in Art Books?

Art books are niche products: Hardly anyone reads them, you can’t make money with them, and anyway, there’s the Internet. And yet, more and more galleries have begun producing books. Why?

A spectacular high point of this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair—the largest international meeting of the industry—came when David Hockney and his publisher Benedikt Taschen presented A Bigger Book (500 pages, 35 kilograms) to a large audience of journalists and fans. With this $2,000 supersized art book Taschen has landed another coup, underlining the special status that the imprint he founded in Cologne in 1980 has gained: Its sales strategy includes a chain of boutique stores in cities like Paris, New York, Los Angeles, London, and Brussels, with interiors designed by artists and designers including Philippe Starck, Beatriz Milhazes, and Albert Oehlen.