A few years ago, Artforum had an identity crisis about whether to accept fashion ads. In the end, the staff decided to admit them but to give them left-hand-page positions only. At that time, they didn’t think jewelry was “the right signifier,” but they eventually admitted Bulgari when the company became a key sponsor of the website.
The intercom makes a loud beep. “Knight?”
“Yes,” says Landesman.
“Stefan from Gallery B on line one.”
“Okay, I’ll take it here,” says Landesman. “Huh…Okay…Let me mention it to Mike Wilson, our reviews editor, and see if he can pop in and see it himself…Hmm, yes, it was definitely a unique show. How long is it up till? I’ll make sure he gets up. You’ll see his name in the book. He’s the reviews editor. He makes the decisions. Okay. Great.”
Landesman hangs up. “I always get calls from people wanting to make sure that their shows get seen,” he explains. “We stay out of the editorial process. If you ask any of our reviewers, why did you review this show in London, Berlin, or New York? they will say it’s because they wanted to. You can tell that when you read the reviews—they’ve been written by someone with an intellectual or emotional stake in the work.”
The only editorial ground on which the publishers officially tread happens to be the site that offers the most powerful affirmation of an artist’s work—the front cover. Each month (or rather ten times a year) the design director creates three or four different possible covers for the editors and publishers to consider. Landesman likes a commercial cover, “something that will sell well on the newsstands. Pictures of girls and ascending airplanes are good. You can’t put a pile of dirt on the cover…although we have.” Griffin, by contrast, says, “I don’t worry about the newsstand. The cover is a portal to the issue. It’s iconic and metonymic. Ideally, all aspects of what’s happening in an issue are somehow compressed into this one image. We try to do that without betraying the artist. Something can be emblematic of the issue but not of the artist’s work, so our philosophy requires a little give-and-take.”
Artforum’s design director, Joseph Logan, worked at French Vogue before he came to the art magazine. His minimal office, which sits next to Griffin’s, displays a selection of thin, relatively ad-free Artforums from the 1960s that were designed by Ed Ruscha. For Logan, a key question in deciding what art to put on the cover is, does it work as a square? “The square format is great because it doesn’t privilege horizontal or vertical images,” he says. “But it can be a nightmare. I’m not supposed to crop, out of respect for the art, and each reproduction is supposed to emulate the way the work is hung.” Since joining the magazine in 2004, Logan has made the Artforum logo smaller, so it is “a little stamp” that interferes less with image. “The art we put on the cover is not our voice, but by putting it on the cover, we make it our voice,” he explains. “Whenever you put the Artforum logo on a work of art, it is not just their work anymore.” The validating impact of the cover depends on when it occurs in an artist’s career. “Every now and then,” says Logan, “we like to take risks with the cover by giving it to a younger artist.” Logan and the editors don’t sit around talking about the longevity of an artist’s career, but they wouldn’t give the top spot to someone who they didn’t think had a certain amount of staying power.
One of Artforum’s most talked-about covers in recent years reproduced a diptych by the fifty-year-old “artists’ artist” Christopher Williams. The magazine published two covers for the issue: a photo of a beautiful brunette with a closed-mouth smile and a yellow towel on her head ran on the cover of half of the print run, and an image of the same woman with a toothy laugh ran on the other half. The double cover is one of Logan’s favorites. “It played with the language of advertising and studio photography,” he says. “It evoked a fashion magazine even though she wasn’t dressed or retouched. At Vogue, we would have obliterated all the wrinkles and veins.”
Christopher Williams found it strange to see his work on the newsstand in Texas, in the bathrooms of galleries in Paris, on billboards in Vienna. When I met up with him in a beer garden outside Art Basel, he told me, “All artists experience cycles. Before the Artforum cover, I felt that something was happening, but when it came out, it definitely changed things. Suddenly there was recognition from noncolleagues like collectors and museum people.” Williams particularly appreciated the way the magazine published two covers. “A lot of my work is about doubling and about small changes, like her smile,” he said. “Those guys recognized this. My work wasn’t just ‘represented,’ but an aspect of it came out conceptually through the magazine.”
After discussing his cover, I asked Williams about how he generally looked at the magazine. “Even if I get home at ten o’clock at night and the TV is on, I’ll still open it up and go through the ads,” he told me. “It’s like an illustrated bulletin. I’ll often adjust my travel plans to catch a show.” The next morning, “I might skim all the reviews, because it’s a way to catch up on what I’ve missed and it’s a reflection of how things are being received. If a friend gets a bad review, I call them up and say, ‘That critic is an asshole. I don’t know why they didn’t get it.’ If they got a good review, you call and say, ‘That’s fantastic!’” When it comes to the columns and features, “I’m more selective. I always read the ‘Openings’ pieces about young artists and the ‘Top Tens,’ particularly for suggestions about music. I like reading the more difficult stuff too. I’ll read an article about an artist I don’t care about if it’s a writer I like.”
The power of Artforum as a promotional vehicle is not something with which all its contributors are 100 percent comfortable. A few months ago I met the well-known freelancer Rhonda Lieberman, who has been writing for the magazine since 1989 and on the masthead as a contributing editor since 2003. Given the heavily hämisch quality of her written voice, Lieberman was unexpectedly slim and stylish in person. “In the art world, a critic is an exalted salesperson,” she told me. “When you are writing a feature, no matter what you write, you are contributing to a super-glossy brochure, and when you whip up a review, you’re little more than a glorified press agent. If I were into that, why in the world wouldn’t I be a dealer?” Lieberman contended that honest criticism must contextualize. “I can’t not notice the market. A lot of artists notice it and play with it. Writers shouldn’t bury their heads in the sand,” she said, wagging her finger. “Within Artforum’s sleek upmarket exterior is this endless blowing of windbags who lift and separate art from the marketplace through a strategic use of theory.” Lieberman suggested that the loftier the writing is, the more effectively it legitimates. “We are supposed to commune with their self-contained emporium of fine ideas,” she concluded. “And transcend the fact that certain things are supervaluable to shopping fetishists. It’s repression by omission, and it’s mind-boggling!”
Artforum is often under attack from a number of sectors. As Guarino explains, “People feel ambivalent about the magazine. We’re resented by the artists who never got what they deserved, the dealers who owe us too much money, and the critics who were never asked to write for the magazine. And while a lot of collectors subscribe, many complain that they just can’t read it.” Korner regrets that the editor in chief is always under intense scrutiny. “Artforum is establishment in a funny sense,” he said. “And therefore people want to pull it down. They’re always trying to catch us out.” When I asked him which segment of the art world was most vociferous, he responded, “Academics, without a doubt.”
2:00 P.M. I leave Artforum’s offices and head to the Hilton Hotel in midtown, where six thousand art historians and other art-oriented scholars are converging for the annual conference of the College Art Association (CAA). I’ve made back-to-back appointments with two art historians in order to flesh out my understanding of the magazine. The generic hotel is outstandingly bland except for the shock of the garish wall-to-wall carpeting. Art historians wearing Banana Republic and designer diffusion-l
ine suits swarm the building seeking to improve their positions, recruit colleagues, and win publishing contracts. Some network on their own; others parade the corridors with entourages of grad students nipping at their heels.
The CAA bears comparison to an art fair. It’s a market, albeit one in which art historians are selling themselves within an economy of modest scale. For the cost of a work by a mid-ranking German photographer (one in an edition of six), a collector could obtain a unique art historian for an entire year. Like the fairs, the conference is also increasingly focused on new art. Doctoral theses used to be written about work that was at least thirty years old. Now, artists unheard of six months ago are being “historicized” at CAA.
I take the elevator up to the top floor of the hotel, where I’ve arranged to meet art historian and Artforum contributing editor Thomas Crow, who has just moved between two pinnacles of his profession. Head of the Getty Research Institute for seven years, he now holds the Rosalie Solow Chair in Modern Art History at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. A compact man with a high forehead, black hair, and a gray beard, Crow has published much-admired books on eighteenth-century, modern, and contemporary art. According to Crow, Artforum’s strength is that it embraces history: “They have a major historical piece in virtually every issue.” Moreover, when Crow writes for Artforum, he doesn’t approach it any differently than he would a scholarly journal. “It’s simply how compressed you have to be,” he explains as he sips his filter coffee. “The articles are shorter, so you don’t have the luxury of building up and you need more dramatic hooks, but I don’t try to write anything less ambitious. I have never been asked to make my argument more accessible or dumb it down in any way.”
Artforum’s strategic ties to the art-historical world may contribute to the way it “maintains its dominance with impressive acuity” over competing art titles, according to Crow. “Artforum is like the dominant athletic team who always finds a way to win,” he says. “It’s like the New York Yankees or Manchester United. It’s always there, and you have this sense that it always will be.” Although all contemporary art magazines attempt to make something more permanent of the ephemeral, Artforum makes it an overt policy. As Griffin told me, “I want to go to art history and make it look contemporary and go to contemporary work and make it look historical.” The result may be a publication that provides a context for what Crow calls “art at its highest level”—in other words, the art destined for art history.
Crow doesn’t see himself as a critic and is resistant to adopting self-conscious, high-style writing. “I just try to keep myself out of the text,” he tells me. “Half the battle is in the description. If your material is vivid enough, you don’t need to adopt an ego-driven voice where you’re always reflecting on your own formative experiences or your own complexity of mind.” Crow taps his conference schedule of events. “I don’t like cults of personality, even minor cults,” he adds. “It gets in the way of observation and learning. Your material should be out in front, carrying the weight.” Crow rises to refill his mug at the self-service bar. The two women to my left are having a cheerful conversation about the use of lapis lazuli in early Italian Renaissance altarpieces, while the grave man to my right is quietly relating what is evidently an enthralling tale of hirings, firings, and “alleged sexual harassment” to an attentive friend.
When Crow returns, I ask him to expand on the issue of self-restraint. “Many of the artists who are ruling the roost at the moment—Jeff Koons, Maurizio Cattelan, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin—exploit constructed personae,” he says. “Cults of personality are realities, people are attracted to that, but there has to be a space between you and the people that you’re writing about, so you’re not just echoing the situation that you’re trying to analyze.” Although art historians are always making judgments about what is worth their time, Crow believes that “severe attitudes and extreme judgments are a bit out of place.” For weekly columnists who are read for their consistent taste, “their readers enter into a regular relationship with them. They want to know whether they thought it was phony or great.” However, “If you’re an art historian, you can’t just decide that you like this little bit of history because it appeals to your self-regard. A real historian doesn’t do that.” On this count, Crow laments aspects of the textbook Art Since 1900 by the powerhouse academic quartet Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh. “If you read the little chapter on Californian assemblage, for example, Ed Kienholz is written off as a bad artist. It creates confusion that is counterproductive. I would hate to see students reading that chapter and not looking at Kienholz again.”
I thank Crow for his time, squeeze into a crowded elevator, and descend to a café off the lobby to interview a younger art historian, Tom McDonough, who teaches at Binghamton University and writes for Art in America. As we line up for tea, the tall, pale author of a book on the “language of contestation” in post-war France defends Artforum’s linguistic convolutions. “You need to have a complex language to analyze complex ideas,” he says with genuine enthusiasm. “So there is a justification for all that footnoted, highfalutin claptrap. Obviously, we—I have to include myself here—are also performing a set of competencies. We are assigning ourselves a peer group by using a certain language. It’s code. It signals an in group.”
McDonough believes there was a time when people were convinced that the role of criticism was to advance culture. “Now, instead of moving culture ahead, it’s about finding a group of people you can promote,” he explains. “They promote that work not because they think it is the most important work being made or because it is a do-or-die issue, but because it’s a little corner that they can own.” McDonough pauses and adds, “Not that I haven’t found my own niche as well and mined it for all it’s fucking worth. I’m not excluding myself from this tenure-seeking game.”
Still, McDonough is disappointed that Artforum has “settled into predictable formulae,” and he condemns its “rapid turnover” of Top Ten lists and its “cycles of obsolescent previews.” (Three times a year, but not in February, the magazine runs blurbs about upcoming shows.) But the worst thing about Artforum, according to McDonough, is that it offers “no controversy, no real debate. It’s a comfortable world in which people basically all agree with one another. That concept of a forum—a public sphere in which ideas could be discussed—has disappeared.” Although Artforum makes a point of including contrary opinions, it does rely on a small cadre of historians and critics. McDonough is not alone in seeing its debates as narrow and elitist.
At 5:30 P.M., I leave McDonough and, as I’m crossing the academic-infested lobby of the Hilton, I bump into Jerry Saltz, who is on his way to the ballroom where the CAA is holding its awards ceremony. The event is supposed to be “as close as art historians get to the Oscars,” and Saltz’s column in the Village Voice is being honored with the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism. Twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Saltz tells me that the Mather is nothing to sneeze at either. “Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Roberta—the big guns—along with some other idiots have won it,” he says, referring to the dogmatic formalist Clement Greenberg, his ideological archrival Harold Rosenberg, and Saltz’s wife, New York Times critic Roberta Smith.
One of the eye-opening facts about the small world of contemporary art is that two of the most influential critics in America, Jerry and Roberta, as everyone calls them, are married to each other. The previous Saturday, I had met Smith for lunch at an old-style New York deli. We sat across from each other in a brown vinyl booth and ordered chicken soup with rice and grilled cheese on whole wheat. Smith is a fresh-faced fifty-nine-year-old with thick red hair and multicolored eyeglass frames. She did a master’s in art history and then became “obsessed” with Artforum. “That was where everybody wanted to be,” said Smith, who went on to write reviews for the magazine between 1973 and 1976. “When I set out, my goal was to do criticism as a primary activity and not get a harde
ning of the arteries. Most critics have a great deal of difficulty developing beyond the art that was their first love.” These days, Smith always looks at Artforum, but she rarely reads it. “The ads are great. Everyone has to look at it to see what’s there. It’s really snobby, like Anna Wintour.” Smith can’t imagine going back to a specialist art monthly. “Writing for an art magazine is like recording in the studio, whereas writing for a daily is like doing nothing but perform onstage. Which do you think is more fun?”
Many believe that no one critic wields quite as much power as Smith. “You draw attention to artists and give people ways of thinking about them,” she explained with a graceful wave of her hand. “Power is something that you have because you’ve earned it. It ebbs and flows with every piece.” Integrity is fundamental. “That’s why you don’t buy art and don’t write about your best friends,” she continued. “That’s why you keep your eye on the main subject, which is art. You need to handle whatever power you have in a responsible way if you want people to listen to you.”
Smith believes that it is essential, but not always easy, to be honest about your experience. “You have to be prepared to let your taste betray you,” she explained in a sisterly way. “When you are writing, you have a lot of white noise. Doubt is a central part of intelligence, and doubt is hard to control. What I do is I write first and question myself later. After my deadline, I have a little whimper session: I feel bad about something; it could have been better; certain people are going to hate me the next day.”
When I wondered aloud about the relationship between art criticism and art history, Smith offered a range of lucid answers. “Art criticism is done without the benefit of hindsight,” she said. “It’s done in the moment. It doesn’t involve research. It is out in front, giving some reactions.” As art objects move through time and space, people “throw ideas, language, all kinds of interpretations at them. Some of it sticks and some of it doesn’t.” Smith always hopes that her ideas will be “useful and accurate enough to get used.” She took a bite of her sandwich and tilted her head. “Art accumulates meaning through an extended collaborative act,” she said. “You put into words something that everyone has seen. That click from language back into the memory bank of experience is so exquisite. It is like having your vision sparked.”
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