Art history is fortunate to have two institutional bases, the museum and university, which enrich the field in different ways. Curators may feel their authority infringed by the rising importance of education, development, and design departments, but one of the unequivocally salutary aspects of the exhibition boom that characterizes modern museum culture is the growing collaboration of scholars from the museum and university worlds.2 The exhibition and its catalogue constitute a vibrant intersecting space between the museum and the university, and the increase in the number of exhibition catalogues has created opportunities for academic art historians, who are often asked to contribute expertise and catalogue essays.

The remarkable and continuing growth of museum exhibitions with large audiences and handsomely produced catalogues presents a singular resource for art historians and their publishers. Exhibition catalogues give scholars access to a wider readership than is available with other scholarly publications, and their copious, full-color illustrations give substance and pleasure to close readings of art works. As Part I of this report indicates, exhibition catalogues have become a mainstay of some university press lists because, unlike the monograph with its dwindling sales, the catalogue comes with a good business plan: a publication subvention, guaranteed advance sales, free advertising, and fewer copyright issues, many of which were resolved in exhibition planning. (Fifty percent of the biggest university press art history list is devoted to catalogues.) Notwithstanding the attractions of catalogues to authors, publishers, and the public, the full potential of the genre has not been exploited.

It is important to recognize that catalogues serve two distinct audiences: the museumgoing public and the scholarly community of art historians and curators. Access to a large, intellectually curious public is one of the great assets of art history, and the exhibition catalogue is the primary vehicle through which that connection is made. It is worth asking if the catalogue best serves the needs of its two-part audience. There are very good scholarly, educational, and business reasons for museums to continue to coordinate the publication of catalogues with the opening of the exhibit. Nevertheless, the limits such a schedule imposes on the scholarly potential of catalogues encourage rethinking how exhibition publications might better fulfill their potential as sites of collaboration between museum- and university-based scholars.

One problem with the current system is that tight publishing deadlines driven by exhibition schedules require catalogues to limit or bypass the time-consuming process of peer review. Content editing often falls in the lap of an overextended curator preoccupied with the exhibition itself, and time constraints often preclude the developmental editing that normally improves manuscripts. Thus, although university presses publish these books, exhibition catalogues are fast-tracked and vetted less stringently than most monographs. As a result, catalogues are inconsistent in quality, and academic scholars find that their catalogue essays do not weigh heavily in tenure and promotion review. When asked if it is possible to extend the benefits of peer review to museum-based publications, the answer is usually negative. Scholars, curators, and editors expressed keen awareness of these drawbacks of exhibition publications. Junior as well as senior scholars would like top-quality museum publication to be taken more seriously in the academic review process. Such regard would be likely to follow if museum publications were more consistently peer reviewed.

A second concern arises from the publication of exhibition catalogues before the events they describe. As a result, the content of the book is uninformed by the exhibition itself. Exhibition catalogues generally comprise two parts: a set of essays aimed at a wide audience and addressing overarching themes, and a catalogue of the exhibited work, which is primarily for specialists. Except for the organizing curators, who have scoured collections in selecting objects to exhibit, most book contributors compose their texts without benefit of studying the work firsthand. The entries, having been written before the exhibition is assembled, cannot capture the important insights to be derived from comparative study of the works nor reflect the varied expertise of academics, curators, conservators, frame experts, and other specialists that the museum convenes.

The catalogue would be more useful if updated to reflect new information and insights developed over the course of an exhibition. Electronic publication offers a flexible format suited for the iterative thought process exhibitions set in motion. The pre-exhibition book might be accompanied by a digital extension on a museum website that serves as a portal for scholarship pertaining to the exhibition. The website could accommodate ongoing cataloguing, provide an interactive space to discuss exhibition-related issues, and allow curators and academic art historians to exchange their specialized knowledge. The well-trained scholars who work as curators are often frustrated by the limited opportunities they are afforded to pursue serious research. Museums invest heavily in exhibitions. These investments should be capitalized on by taking greater advantage of the exhibitions as sites of research and expanding the participation of curators in scholarly endeavors. Online publication could support these goals and take advantage of the considerable expertise in image display and analysis developed by museum education and design departments.

It should be acknowledged that museums already foster scholarly and intellectual exchange in various ways. In-house curators frequently engage guest curators and catalogue contributors from the academic community. Exhibition and installation planning grants of the kind provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Federation of the Arts rely on close cooperation between host museums and external curators and scholars. This kind of productive exchange frequently continues during the run of the exhibitions or on the occasion of reinstallations. Well-resourced museums from the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum to the Clark Art Institute and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum hold scholars' study days in the galleries and present public symposia, often organized in collaboration with neighboring academic institutions or in-house research centers. Publication of these events tends to be limited to the symposia though, for the very good reason that not every observation or comment in an informal gathering of scholars needs to be recorded. Nevertheless, the wonderful opportunity of seeing normally dispersed objects in close proximity, for a sustained period and often together with colleagues from the academy, museum, and conservation worlds, might lead to more dynamic forms of post-exhibition publication.

Models for publication of sustained scholarly discussion of conservation and exhibition projects exist, but such publications are extremely rare. When museums and scholars manage to produce them, the publications have great potential to become authoritative reference works and records of new thought. In 1998 the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) mounted the exhibition Jackson Pollock: A Retrospective. This was followed by the publication in 1999 of a book edited by the show's curators and with a significant focus on new findings produced during the exhibition.3 In 2000, MoMA published a compilation of interviews, articles, and reviews about Pollock, edited by one of the curators.4 A delay of just one or two years for such exhibition-related research is remarkably fast. On another front, for the past few years, an international group of curators, conservators, and scholars have been engaged in regular discussions of the cleaning and restoration of Lorenzo Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise. These consultations and shared viewings, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, are helping shape an exhibition of some of the restored panels in 2007, curated by the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence, and publication of the results of these cooperative studies is intended.

In conclusion, the pre-exhibition book is an indispensable form of communication, but it might be still more useful if recognized as a starting point rather than a culmination of research, as it now aspires to be, and if it were part of an expanded portfolio of exhibition-related publications in print and electronic format. The goal is to develop other publication genres and formats that take advantage of the exhibition itself and materialize during and after the exhibition to harvest and disseminate its significance.