Artforum
Related: contemporary art - magazine - USA
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Artforum is an American contemporary art magazine, based in New York. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artforum [Mar 2006]Edit Deak
I first met deAk well after Art-Rite folded, in 1981, when I came on staff at Artforum. Ingrid Sischy, who had become the magazine's editor a year or so earlier, had made Edit a regular contributor, and besides writing unorthodox articles--I remember, for example, a spectacular piece about the hip-hop artist Rammellzee, and another on, of all things, those Cabbage Patch dolls--she served as an all-purpose one-person think tank. Ingrid tended to keep her meetings with Edit deux, I suspected then (and have not changed my mind) because Edit contributed more to her plans for the magazine than she wanted to let the rest of us see. (I should add that Ingrid was formidably inventive herself.) But Edit regularly danced by. She would hurry through the office, laughing, vivid, bright-clothed, Hungarian, making herself brieflyfocal before she and Ingrid would run out to a gallery, a studio, a bar. --The rite stuff. (On Art-Rite).(Critical Essay), ArtForum, Jan, 2003, by David Frankel http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0268/5_41/96223222/p1/article.jhtml?term=, accessed Apr 2004Art-Rite
DEAK, ROBINSON, AND COHN MET in 1972, when they were all in their early twenties and the three of them took an art-criticism class taught by Brian O'Doherty at Barnard College in New York. Under another hat O'Doherty was the editor of Art in America, which he wanted to make new, and he liked to ask his strongest students to write for it. He extended this invitation to Cohn, Robinson, and finally deAk, whom, however, it puzzled: "I thought, Aestheticism must be in trouble if they want baby blood--I mean, what do we know? We were in the last year of undergraduate work. I had come from Budapest, didn't even speak English when I started school. We started giggling; there must be some weird void-- what's wrong with the system that they want us?" She and the pair she still calls "the boys" did write for O'Doherty, but they also began to fantasize about producing a magazine of their own, perhaps as a newsprint insert in Art in America--"piggybacking on the establishment, having the establishment distribute the enemy , our voice. This was the period when people talked about things like that." The insert idea died but the larger idea stuck, and to make it happen they enrolled in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program, for which they proposed to publish a magazine as their class project. Robinson meanwhile had gotten a job as a typesetter and designer for a Jewish weekly newspaper, and, he says, "We stole all the type from there until they caught me and I got fired." And that's how Art-Rite began. --The rite stuff. (On Art-Rite).(Critical Essay), ArtForum, Jan, 2003, by David Frankel http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0268/5_41/96223222/p1/article.jhtml?term=, accessed Apr 2004Blog
After a recent conversation about how Artforum.com does not link to blogs, even when a certain blog has first dish on a huge art scandal in New York, I started to look more critically at their online content. Most of it is snip-its from the print version (Top Ten, Longer Essays, etc) and there is the daily mentioned for 4-5 national and international stories they link to. That stuff is a good/easy source but they should be taking advantage of their status and doing a whole lot more.
To be more specific, I'll discuss their reviews. The online reviews are not the same as those in print and, therefore, would lead one to assume that with the convenience and limitless possibility on the web, that they would broaden their horizons and get some more museum and gallery reviews from across the entire country. I'm sorry but New York is not the lone epi-center of the art world anymore so why is it that NYC has dozens of monthly online reviews while Los Angeles may get 1 or 2 and poor Chicago, DC, San Francisco are lucky to get one...a year. To address Los Angeles, all of the online reviews are written by one person (Michael Ned Holte) which, though good, are inherently one-sided because he's the only one writing. Are there not at least 20 writers in LA that would love to review shows on Artforum.com? Are there not at least 20 galleries that should be reviewed on Artforum.com? (I'll leave the print edition for another post!)
The beauty of the web is that things can be instant (isnt' being very "now" important to arty folks?), they can be good, they are international, they are freeing, and they can be inclusive. Eventually Artforum, and other art industry publications, need to start applying this or art blogs, and even Artnet, are going to be the main places people go to read about what's good now.
Artforum sidenote: there's a little preview for the summer version of artforum where Scott Rothkopf introduces 24 never-before-seen photographs of my focus of my art obsession, Ed Ruscha. These photos will be a "focal point" in Ruscha's upcoming Whitney museum show. Sigh.
Posted by Caryn at June 4, 2004 12:45 PM http://art.blogging.la/archives/001290.phtml [Jul 2004]
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