Middlemen

In both art and science, the products of (small groups of) individuals are disseminated to the world by other companies. In the world of art, these companies are the galleries representing artists. In the world of science, they are the publishers and their journals.
In both these situations there is a clear distinction between those who produce the goods and those who distribute them to a wider audience. The presence of such middlemen is common in many industries, but an uncommon aspect found in both art and science is that the financial benefits to the intermediary are far greater than those of the producer. Scientific publishing is now a multi-billion euro industry and the largest of the art galleries have turnovers in the range of tens of millions of euros.
The curious similarities between the two fields are the result of imperfect information on the consumer side, combined with some leftovers from an older world where the financial risks were differently distributed and legally arranged. 

For both scientific publishing and art galleries the most valuable asset is the firm's reputation.
For example, the price of an artwork is linked quite directly to the standing of the gallery it is shown in. Similarly, a scientific discovery is generally considered more impactful if it's published in a journal of significance. It's therefore imperative for both galleries and scientific journals to become, and remain, reputable. It's also easy to see that for both fields there is simultaneously no inherent and necessary connection between the quality of the work and the social standing of the middleman. The intermediary does not change any intrinsic property of the final product. That the perceived quality of the intermediary is nevertheless seen as a useful indication of the quality of the good is due to a characteristic that economists call imperfect information.
In both art and science, there is no information about the quality of a good that is both reliable and readily available. The causes of this imperfect information are different in each field, but over the course of the last century they have led to a similar outcome where the intermediaries have a disproportionate influence on both the kind of goods that get produced as well as which consumers have access to it.

Any consumer needs information about a good in order to make a decision about what is worth spending their money on. They can either have full access to all necessary information, which is called perfect information, or limited access to one or more characteristics of the good, which is called imperfect information.
In both art and science, information about the quality of a good is difficult to ascertain for a large number of interested buyers. Quality in the arts is next to impossible to quantify and subject to changing cultural perceptions. And while scientific merit can be checked in principle, this requires an impossibly large amount of time, money and other resources, so in reality it is unfeasible for any one party to make an objective judgement based on their own experimental knowledge about the quality of all articles published in all journals.
Hence, for both art and science, there is a lot of effort that goes into convincing a potential customer of the value of the good that is being sold. As the goods themselves don't provide accurate clues to their genuine value, this is done through less direct means that convey a perception of longevity. Such (signs of) longevity can ostensibly only be reached by consistently providing quality goods.

Galleries and artists today try to provide credible signals of value by demonstrating a long-term commitment to each other. Until the early 20th century, this meant that dealers were directly buying (nearly) all of an artists output, thereby putting their money where their mouth is. If nothing else, this would at least demonstrate to a potential client that the dealer has a strong belief in the artist. And the dealer is only able to aquire those works today if they have made sound financial decisions in the past. These days the commitment is less strong, expressed by 'representation' of the artist by the gallery. The financial capabilities of the gallery are generally demonstrated through large, and mostly empty, spaces in expensive buildings in desirable locations, as well as participation in ludicrously priced art fairs.
I've written elsewhere on this blog how this shift is likely partially caused by changes in anti-trust legislation in the Western world in the first half of the 20^th century, so I won't delve any further into this subject here.

The publishing of scientific works likewise underwent significant changes in the last two centuries.
A scientist is usually employed by a university or some other institution, and when they've made a discovery, they write up what they've done to try and make it known to others what they have discovered. It is of course difficult to reach a broad audience, even in the age of the internet, so this is one thing a publisher can help you with. A publisher possesses ways to reach an audience that any single scientist doesn't have. A publisher also has access to infrastructure. Although these days more and more of scientific publishing is done digitally, physical printing and distribution of materials has historically been a venture with large upfront costs, combined with specialised knowledge and equipment. These upfront costs carry significant financial risks, which can only be borne by a large company that is able to spread such risk over multiple ventures. 

It's also a well known fact that most scientific literature has a very small readership. Current estimates on the audience size of the average journal article range from single to triple digit numbers.
Yet at the same time, there is a great number of scientific articles that are published every day. With such fragmented readership, there is little possibility for scientific texts to gain widespread attention in the same way a newspaper article or a viral video might. Therefore, to a broad audience it is virtually unknown what the value is of any given article relative to all the other articles that are available.
As already stated, some of this uncertainty is remedied through the reputation of the journal the article is published in. This reputation is mostly based on the reception of the works that were published by the journal in the past, as well as the academic standing of its current editor(s). There have been attempts at quantifying this reputation by metrics like a journal's impact factor, which essentially measures how often articles from a journal have been cited by other scientists. But as Goodheart's law states, any measure that becomes a target seizes to be a good measure, so such undertakings merely repackage the problem instead of solving it. 

Both industries thus have a small customer base and these customers ought to be sceptical of the goods they provide and the high prices they ask for them.
So how do these middlemen leverage their position to create profits for themselves?
In the arts it is a simple question of gallerists charging very high commissions for their work, so that a handful of sales can provide an adequate amount of turnover, especially when their risk is spread over a number of artists.
In scientific publishing, exorbitant profit margins only arrived around the turn of the millennium, and to see why this is the case requires a short history lesson on copyright law, and in particular how such laws were implemented in the United States of America.

The foundation of today's copyright legislation was laid at the Berne Convention in 1886. This type of copyright is based on an idea of author's rights, where the creator of intellectual property is also automatically the owner of intangible rights relating to that work. These reproduction rights could then be licensed to a third party, such as a publisher. This can happen in different ways, but it must be noted that a perpetual exclusive license to reproduce the work is an option, even when the author retains the copyright in such a case.

This is in contrast with the common law idea of copyright, which is much more focussed on the economic right to publish and distribute. The United States, which legal system is based on common law, was thus late in incorporating the principles of the Berne Convention. In the early 20th century, copyright for individuals did not exist, but a publisher could register the publication of a work at the copyright office to obtain its copyrights.
It's a bit of an oversimplification, but it wasn't until the Copyright Act of 1976 that the intellectual property laws of the United States became more closely aligned with those of most other countries.

This change has quite directly lead scientific publishers to mandate their authors to sign over their copyrights to the publisher, instead of licensing their papers. At best this can be seen as a good-natured attempt to retain the best publishing standards possible, but it's much more likely that this decision was aimed at retaining control over the substantial captial the publishers had ammassed up until that time.
For example, in the 1966 edition of the Handbook for Authors of Papers in the Journals of the American Chemical Society, the section on 'Liability and Copying Rights' is only half a page long and simply states 'The Society owns the copyright for any paper it publishes'. This was true under the federal copyright laws of the USA at the time, which required registration at the copyright office.
Interestingly, the section on 'Liability and Copying Rights' of the 1978 edition of the Handbook for Authors of Papers in the Journals of the American Chemical Society was nearly twice as long as the previous edition. It now contained the following phrase: 'Under the terms of the Federal copyright law, effective January 1, 1978, scientific publishers who wish to obtain copyright ownership of papers in their journals are required specifically to obtain such ownership from the author of each paper. Since it is necessary for the widest possible dissemination of scientific knowledge that the society own the copyright, authors are required to transfer copyright ownership before publication of their manuscript.'

This last sentence is simply not true. A perpetual, even exclusive and non-restricted, license to publish poses no practical objections. However, such a license would still leave the ultimate ownership in the hands of the author, so that the publisher could not license the work out to third parties. Transfer of copyright ownership thus is an issue of control of the work beyond the any direct publishing efforts in their own journals.

However, it might have been vital for publishing companies to protect those interests. In the 1970's, publishing was still a complex and costly business, with large upfront costs and little or no guarantee that anybody would be interested in the final product. The publishing industry had a high risk of failure and the small number of scientific publishers that have survived, only survived because they originally published books that turned out to be of particular significance and relevance to other scientists. Unlike most of their publications, these tomes had several reprints and made a healthy profit, which could offset the cost of the many failures.
It is, however, impossible to predict which publications become a hit, and if the publisher didn't own the copyright, such a reprint would have most likely have to be renegotiated with the author. This author by then has of course seen how well their book is selling and so they'll likely want a bigger cut for themselves, or could even let the reprint be done by a different publisher altogether. This is therefore debilitatingly risky to a publisher during that time, and so the transfer of copyright ownership may have been a reasonable request in the 1970's. 

This all changes towards the 2000's and the advent of widespread internet access. Through more than a century of publishing and consolidation in the industry, a handful of scientific publishers are in possession of enormous archives and because of their insistence on copyright ownernship, they have full control over them. Through digitisation these materials are now also easily searchable and through the internet they can be distributed at negligible cost to the publishers. In other words, the publishers' material capital is now more valuable than ever, while their operating costs have fallen dramatically.
As a result their profits have risen to extraordinary heights. To illustrate this fact, two of the top ten highest paid CEO's in the Netherlands are scientific publishers. 

In summary, the presence of middlemen is necessary in both art and science to create credible signals about the quality of goods. And in both these markets, the middlemen have understood the necessity of their presence and found ways to leverage that power into great profits by essentially exploiting the weak negotiating position of their suppliers and in some cases those of their clients.
Such predatory practices are much lamented in both industries, yet I'm unaware of any proposed solution that could remedy the problem. Many of such initiatives are focused on the (financial) inequality of the artist/scientist and gallery/publisher, but I believe a solution can only be found in making information about the quality of goods readily available to end users.

As a final remark, it must be noted that book publishing in the arts is a market that functions remarkably well, considering the difficulties that exist in scientific publishing and the sale of artworks. In art publishing, there is a healthy market of buyers and sellers, while risks and profits are usually shared in reasonable terms between the artists and the publishers.
The reason for this is simply that an art book can quite literally be judged by its cover. When selecting which art book to buy, an interested buyer usually can find the books that appeal to them by considering the design of their covers. Art books also retain their value rather well, so that even if a mistake is made, a buyer can still resell the book at only a minimal loss. Therefore information on the quality of a good is widely available, while the cost of misinformation is marginal.
This is the exact opposite of scientific publishing and the market for artworks, where credible information is hard-won and the costs of getting it wrong can be extremely high.

'Gazing Dreamingly Into the Distance'

In the interest of greater inclusivity, many museums are attempting to see how they can better accommodate people with various disabilities. Of particular, and peculiar, interest to me are the attempts to improve the experience for people who are (legally) blind. The mechanism of information transfer in the visual arts is, well, visual in nature, so that these endeavours are likely to fail. That being said, knowing that people are able to recall visual imagery, such attempts might have some value to individuals who lost their sight later in life. Nevertheless, to those born without vision the well-intended efforts of various institutions often only show their own lack of understanding of how others might experience the world.

The title of this post, 'Gazing dreamingly into the distance' is taken from the audio description of a photographic portrait of writer Arthur Rimbaud as made by the MMK in Frankfurt, Germany. This is an evocative description to anybody who knows what such an expression looks like, but a person who was born without sight will have zero reference to what this might mean. The audio description was made with the aim of 'removing barriers on our [MMK's] website by means of alternative image descriptions'. The audio descriptions made by the MMK consistently introduce such poetic phrases that are potentially gibberish to their target audience. This could have also easily been avoided by changing their frame of reference ever so slightly. A sentence like 'He appears involved in thought and disconnected from the world' would cover the same load, for example, without including such intangible references to sighted phenomena.

The MMK is a museum with an international reputation and a strong self-proclaimed focus on accessibility. When I visited the museum two years ago, however, I found their accessibility provisions lacking and even insulting to a degree.

My first introduction to their accessibility program was their 'Leichte Sprache' exhibition guide. Leichte Sprache, or easy language, is a program initiated by the German government to create texts with shorter sentences of commonly understood words so as to make hermetic or difficult to understand topics more broadly accessible. As I'm of the opinion that too many art texts are full of aggrandising and obfuscating bullshit, I naturally welcome these efforts.
On page six of the Leichte Sprache booklet I encountered a QR-code that will take you to a webpage with 'audio descriptions of the artworks for people with visual impairments'. It goes without saying that any visually impaired person is never going to find a printed QR-code on page six of such a booklet, let alone take a picture of it. So even before they got started the MMK already failed to provide an accessible environment that people with disabilities are able to navigate independently. My criticism of the MMK's accessibility program thus could have ended here, but unfortunately it is only the start.

Before we continue it must be noted that the QR-code in question is only found in the Leichte Sprache exhibition booklet. In the regular exhibition booklet no reference is made to these accessibility options. This in turn implies that visually impaired people are also unable to understand the normal exhibition text, or that all kinds of disabilities are meant to be grouped together and separated from what is considered 'normal'. This is of course absurd, as any visually impaired person who desires to overcome the extremely high barriers to better understand visual art must naturally be an intellectually curious person and probably has a lot more experience with text than your average adult.

But if at this point they haven't walked out of the museum in disgust and actually had somebody help them navigate their phone to find the audio descriptions, then they would find that it only gets worse. When I scanned the QR-code with my phone using a screen reader, I heard the following:

What you're hearing is the loading of the webpage and then me, as a sighted person, selecting the play button. What follows is the screen reading software simply rattling off the consecutive numbers of the time indicator. The result of this is that you can't even hear the audio file the MMK provided. I also tried to navigate the website using screen reading software on desktop computers and it they all had some kind of problem with navigating the playback of the audio description, if I could get the software to find or select the play button at all.

These problems are the direct result of the way the MMK chose to set up their website. Its design is sparse and relatively easy to navigate visually, but because of the code that makes this possible, it's almost impossible to navigate with a screen reader. And if you can't navigate a website with a screen reader, then it's going to be impossible for any blind person to find the required information on that website.
The Web Accessibility Initiative provides a Web Content Accessibility Guideline. In version 2.1 of this guideline, under section 1.2 related to time-based media, the broad reaching advice is that a website should 'provide alternatives for time-based media'. In other words, time-based media, like the pre-recorded audio description the MMK provides, should be avoided, because it often, if not always, creates accessibility problems. The approach the MMK has chosen is thus patently wrong. An audio description, if meant to be played back on a user's own device, should have been made available in text format, preferably with some kind of high-level hierarchy for navigation purposes. In this way text to speech software could process it without any problems, thereby providing the user with the information in a way they are familiar with.
Which brings us to another shortcoming of the audio descriptions of the MMK. People using screen readers are often used to the specific flat intonation of the software and are able to listen to it at very high speeds. For their English audio description, the MMK used somebody who speaks very slowly, with a lisp and a far from perfect English accent, making it agonising to listen to when you just want to hear the information the text provides.
As already alluded to in the beginning of the text, the information itself is also by and large unsuited for people with congenital blindness. In the first text I listened to, there were many references to sighted phenomena, like 'black and white', 'out of focus', 'a beam of light directing attention' and things being 'visible through the windows'. In contrast, the quote-unquote normal description of this work had no reference to these kind of purely visual aspects and instead focussed on the movements of the figures in the work and the context in which they were depicted. This provides broader information about the work that is useful to everybody. Instead the MMK's audio description for people with visual impairments is a list of things only sighted people can see. Which might make sense on paper, but by doing that in a way that mostly references phenomena that can only be understood through sight, they completely missed the mark.

With these observations about the web environment of the MMK, it should come as no surprise that navigation inside the museum is likewise poorly managed.
On their website the museum boasts that that they are 'pleased to receive the certification from Reisen für Alle.' They go on to say that 'Reisen für Alle is a nationally valid label in the field of accessibility'. If you, or the museum, would actually read the rapport that Reisen für Alle made, it quickly becomes clear that there is still a lot of improvements that can be made. To give a few quotes from the rapport: 'The entrance area is not recognizable by a tactile change in the floor covering', 'The door or door frame is not visually contrasted with the surroundings',' There is no tactile information about the floor at the beginning and end of the flights of stairs', 'The walkway from the entrance door to the counter/desk/cash register is not marked with visually contrasting markings (e.g. carpet)', 'There are obstacles, e.g. columns, in the room', and so on, and so on. 

The critical remarks that Reisen für Alle have made in their report are very much in line with the things I noticed during my visit. 

This is an image of the entrance to the museum. There are many columns in front of the entrance, a number of unmarked steps, and the entrance itself is a revolving door. This already makes the regular entrance a small obstacle course for unsighted navigation.

Inside, some tactile floor markings are placed immediately after the revolving door. But it's only the warning kind, with nothing following it. They also weren't present on the outside of the entrance. So instead of providing a route to the next important step in the visit, like an information point, an unguided blind visitor is greeted only by a single confusing floor marking and then a large open space with no other indicators.
It must also be said that in the back of this picture there is a 'regular' door for entering the museum. This door, as far as I understood, is closed unless some employee of the museum opens it. This alternative entrance also has a single strip of tactile floor marking on the inside of the building, but for some inexplicable reason this is covered up with a floor mat.

Near the desk is a muted, but subtitled, video of a woman providing the exhibition text in sign language. I personally don't really see the point to show providing two different ways of visual textual information, but hey, that might be me. Sign language provides the benefits of spoken language, such as facial expressions, body language, intonation and so forth. None of these things are essential to an informative text. 

Moving on from this sidenote to the exhibition floors, we see that the mistakes continue. To illustrate this, I would like to focus on the tactile floor plans that are placed on each floor of the MMK:

There are a number of problems with this 'aid' and it has clearly been created by, and for, sighted people.
Firstly, the effectiveness of such a floorplan without any (references to) guiding floormarks in the surrounding area is questionable. Visual impairments don't come with a magical intuition for, and perfect recollection of, distance and proportion.
But let's presume it could be a useful guide. In that case, the only properly marked and textured area is called the 'luftraum', which is translated as 'outdoor'. This really doesn't mean outdoor at all, but simply indicates which part of the building have extremely high ceilings. As most of the other rooms are already four to six meters in height, such a distinction on a floorplan for non-sighted navigation is pointless.
Furthermore, all walls have been rendered as single lines in the floorplan, so that a row of open windows and a row of pillars both appear as single dots. Yet the tactile sensation of a hole in the wall and a solid column is markedly different.
The floorplan also does not account for temporary changes to the layout of the rooms. The presence of sculptures or other obstacles on the floor are not marked, for example. During my visit, there was a temporary wall built right behind the floorplan, and this wall is not marked on this floorplan. As a guide for self-guided movement through the space this floorplan is thus entirely useless.

As we have seen, the MMK has done very little to make its facilities more accessible to visually impaired visitors and in their attempts they might have even actively worsened the experience.
It might seem a bit of a stretch to chastise a museum of visual art for not being attuned to the needs of those with visual impairments. Indeed, I personally believe the only adjustment an art museum should ever make to visually impaired visitors is the availability of well-trained guides who are able to both physically and intellectually walk them through the exhibitions, and wherever possible supervise some amount of physical interaction with the works.

My point is that if one wishes to make lofty claims about accessibility in their promotional material, it is shameful and despicable to merely inconsistently implement a number of measures where the visual design takes precedence over practical use.

Reading Comprehension

The primary purpose of graphic design is the structuring of information. A secondary purpose is providing an easily distinguishable visual identity, that in some way reflects the values, meaning or purpose of the thing that is designed.

With this in mind I would like to point out some examples of a worrying and somewhat foolish trend that I've noticed in the arts, where this secondary purpose of interesting or quirky visual identities is given priority over the primary purpose of legibility. 

One of the most extreme examples is the Bonnefanten museum in Maastricht, the Netherlands.
Their old logo was a very simple wordmark that was at times combined with an outline of the tower of the museum building:

Their new logo is a variable typeface that's composed from various elements found in the building:

This logo is most often presented in colour on a coloured background. Without a recognisable word shape, this logo severely inhibits comprehension, which is exacerbated by the use of various colours, which decreases contrast. For a logo per se this wouldn't be too bad, as a logo is still mostly recognised as a single form, rather than a legible text. But in the case of the Bonnefanten museum, this kind of lettering is also used in other parts of the website, where legibility very much becomes an issue.

Broadly speaking, the use of coloured texts and/or backgrounds is becoming increasingly common on the websites of various art institutions. See for example the website of KM21, heden, 1646 and Page not Found, all located in the Hague:

 

I'm sure the owners are very happy with their edgy and peculiar colour schemes, but to stare at such intense colours on a screen is very straining to the eyes. It's therefore almost impossible for anyone to actually read more than a few words on such a web page. And as I still believe that art is related to the intellect, this makes such choices highly problematic.

However, it can be argued that nobody does much reading on the web anyway, so that these extreme design choices are justified. Unfortunately, I've also seen such colour schemes be used on official documents, such as the Van Abbemuseum's policy plan for 2025–2028. This document was also divided in short columns of only ~20 characters, so that for every other line a hyphen was required. Such narrow columns are suitable for tabloid journalism that uses short words and appeals to short attention spans, but not for fifty-page documents on museum policy.

In this particular example, ironically concerned with accessibility, the two colours have very little contrast. This can be seen most clearly when the image is desaturated and the text subsequently disappears almost completely. This makes reading this text difficult for anybody and for some people downright impossible.
WebAIM, a web-accessibility initiative that was founded over 25 years ago, provides a tool to check colour combinations for their contrast and legibility. The combination that the Van Abbemuseum uses here clearly fails their guidelines.

It must be said however, that on their website the Van Abbemuseum does provide an optional high contrast mode, where all colour is removed from backgrounds and text. They also provide functional screen reading options, which is a rarity. So where they come up short in their policy plan, they do practice what they preach on their website.

Unfortunately there are many other institutions who don't think legibility is important for them, even if they stick to the high contrast of black text on a white background.
I've seen many visual identities of art institutions that use on some kind of cut up letters for their texts. As an overall wordshape is far more important in reading comprehension than the placement of individual letters, this makes reading this kind of text once again very cognitively demanding.
Examples are, among others, the Fondation Pernod Ricard, Melly, Casco Art Institute and Lafayette Anticipations:

 Others use a legible font, but then negate this with some kind of unnecessary 'clever' additions. A prime example is the visual identity of Shimmer in Rotterdam. 

The addition the designer has made is to place a shaded box around some punctuation marks. This is potentially an interesting, and possibly even helpful, addition to long-form texts. Yet Shimmer regularly falls into the artworld trap of generating lists rather than reasoned arguments, so that the overabundant punctuations instead create a lot of distracting visual noise.

Another trend I've noticed is that many custom typefaces go overboard with their serifs. A serif is there to help you recognise the shape of the letter, yet these serifs have such complicated and unusual forms they actually reduce legibility.

That's not a 'j' in the upper example, that's an 'i' with an epileptic tumor. 

There are also a number of websites that look alright on a phone, but become poorly programmed disproportional messes on desktop computers. The most recent example I've personally encountered is the website of KIN, but there are many others. This phenomenon mainly concerns the larger commercial galleries, but it also affects public institutions. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is a good example of a website that is just awful to navigate no matter what device you use.

 

Although I feel like I've given more than enough examples already, I would like give you one more example that's particularly terrible and where a bunch of bad practices come together. On the About page of the website of Sternberg Press, a 'publishing house of art and cultural criticism', the multicoloured text simply disappears under a sea of red if you select with your pointer. Highlighting text is a commonly used aid when reading on screens, so it's quite amusing that this text becomes invisible when people attempt to read it.

As these trends reduce legibility of the most basic forms of communication, they are detrimental to art when it is considered an intellectual activity and highlight the superficial and unthinking approach of many art institutions.
Of course, there are also many institutions that do employ graphic design for the clear communication of information, in addition to providing a distinguishable visual identity. I can't think of any comprehensive examples right now, but I'm sure they're out there.

Therefore I would like to end with two cases that many art institutions could learn from.
The first is the Atkinson Hyperlegible typeface that was created, and distributed for free, by the Braille Institute of America. This typeface is made with legibility as its focus, and the result is notable for its usability in a great number of cases. It's an excellent example of how being distinguishable doesn't have to come at the cost of clarity.
The second is the approach IBM has taken to their graphic design. The company has had a strong focus on the visual identity of the documents that support their products since the 1960's, wherein readability was an important aspect from the beginning. Relatively recently they made their in-house typeface IBM Plex freely available and provide a lot of background information on the principles of their design on their website.

 

Addition on April 20, 2025:

The previous website of the Frans Masereel Centrum in Kasterlee, Belgium:

 The current website of the rebranded 'Masereel' in Kasterlee, Belgium: