Seven Days in the Art World (16 page)

8
:30
A.M
. on an icy Valentine’s Day, I’m walking along Seventh Avenue toward the offices of
Artforum International
. A street hawker chants, “Get your free
A.M. New York
” in a beautiful baritone as commuters spill out of the subway. The art world may be decentered and global, but Manhattan is still the print media capital that supports more art critics than any other city. I nod at the doorman as I enter the unassuming 1920s Beaux-Arts building, which houses the magazine’s editorial and advertising staff.
Artforum
is to art what
Vogue
is to fashion and
Rolling Stone
was to rock and roll. It’s a trade magazine with crossover cachet and an institution with controversial clout. In an episode of
Sex and the City,
the relationship between the characters played by Sarah Jessica Parker and Mikhail Baryshnikov is starting to falter. How do we know? He’s reading a copy of
Artforum
in bed. Likewise, when Bart Simpson becomes an artist and opens a gallery in his treehouse, how can we be sure of the enfant terrible’s success? He’s featured on the cover of
Bartforum
.

The elevator’s old-fashioned
ding
announces the nineteenth floor and I step onto a grubby landing facing a glass double door that says
ARTFORUM
on one side,
BOOKFORUM
on the other. An orange Post-it note hails: “Pizza Delivery, Enter & Yell.” Beyond the unlocked doors, a park bench sits across from the reception desk and a Manhattan zip code map. A few more paces into the mostly open-plan office yield a view of white laminated desks adorned with wilted white daisies and white Apple Macs. “Hello?” I call out. Silence. All sounds come from outside: sirens, honking, the grinding and crashing of a construction site.

A stack of February issues sits on a counter in front of the entrance. The magazine has a distinctive square shape, and this month’s cover features a detail of
The Plumbing
, a retro-modernist oil painting by Amy Sillman. On chapter 1, the illustrated table of contents starts with obituaries of a Swedish museum director and the Hollywood film director Robert Altman, then moves to a review of the latest volume by the eminent Marxist art historian T. J. Clark. Columns on architecture and design are followed by a young artist’s “Top Ten” of favorite exhibitions and other cultural experiences. Longer, more theoretical features come next: most of them are monographs exploring the work of a single living artist. After these pieces are four extended and forty short reviews of exhibitions from around the world. I try to flick to a “1000 Words” written by the performance artist Miranda July, but I have trouble finding the article for all the advertisements.

My cell phone rings. “Sarah! It’s Knight!” Knight Landesman is the
Artforum
publisher who’s always clad in primary colors and treats advertising sales as if they were performance art.

“I’m in your office,” I say.

“Are you still up for attending that opening this evening?” he asks.

“Absolutely.” I want to experience the poles between which
Artforum
thrives, hence an afternoon among art historians at the College Art Association conference followed by an evening in a gallery in Chelsea. “Will you be wearing a red suit?” I ask.

“Of course,” he replies. “You don’t think I’d wear yellow today, do you?”

As I hang up, Charles Guarino emerges from behind a bookshelf in jeans and one of his many black zippered cardigans. “Darling,” he says satirically, with outstretched arms. A droll insomniac with a hardworking slouch, Guarino likes to lord it over the empty office. The
Artforum
organization is desynchronized in the manner of a family home with teenagers. The publishers, accountants, and advertising people arrive and leave early, while editorial takes over the asylum at night. As we walk toward his office, Guarino says, “
Artforum
is mincemeat. What are you going to make of us, meatloaf or meatballs?”

Guarino, Landesman, and Tony Korner, the three publishers of
Artforum
, have been working together for almost thirty years. Korner bought the magazine in October 1979, when it consisted of two typewriters, four telephone extensions, and a subscription list. Landesman and Guarino joined soon thereafter. By that time
Artforum
already had a distinguished history. Founded in 1962 in San Francisco, the magazine soon moved to Los Angeles, where it established its critical edge as a specialists’ magazine, and then relocated in 1967 to New York, where it consolidated its position as the forum for debate about minimal and conceptual art. In November 1974 the editors had a famous falling-out when several staff members objected to an advertisement in which the svelte feminist artist Lynda Benglis posed naked with a giant dildo in response to an image published in the previous issue—a self-portrait by Robert Morris, bare-chested in a Nazi helmet and chains. Those editors left in protest to set up an academic journal (without illustrations) with the revolutionary moniker
October
.

Shortly after Korner acquired the magazine, Ingrid Sischy was made editor. Her
Artforum
explored the relationship between high and popular culture, deepened the magazine’s reporting of the local East Village and SoHo art scenes, and broadened its coverage of European art, particularly German postmodern painting. During this period
Artforum
adopted a perfect-bound spine rather than a fold. Sischy resigned in 1988 to take over the editorship of
Interview
. Her successor, Ida Panicelli, expanded the international coverage further, but as English was not her mother tongue,
Artforum
suffered from what one insider called “the wrong kind of unreadability.” In September 1992, Jack Bankowsky was appointed. He simultaneously reintroduced serious academics to the magazine’s roster of writers and expanded its popular appeal with a wide range of formats that improved its navigability. Tim Griffin, the current editor in chief, took over the helm of the magazine in September 2003.

“A publisher has to worry about everything,” says Guarino as he settles into the high-backed swivel chair behind his messy desk. “My job is to mind everybody else’s business and try not to act like it. Knight has a perverse ability to sell advertising. I’m more of a devious Machiavellian manipulator.” He looks for a reaction, then adds, “My whole identity is tied up with being invisible.”

Guarino’s office evokes an ivory tower. It has windows on three sides: some offer glorious glimpses of the East River, others present unobstructed views of the Hudson. He shares the space with Korner (who is in Europe today), and between their desks is “the conference room,” a round table surrounded by five brown leather chairs. Guarino draws his rimless glasses up onto his forehead and peers at a chart depicting the copy flowing into the current issue. “
Artforum
is running like a clock at the moment,” he says as he tosses it aside and turns to a stack of white envelopes. “A fabulous invitation to a palazzo in Torino,” he announces. “I’ll have to live vicariously.” After wading through half his mail, he turns to his computer. “My in-box is choking and dying,” he says. “Here’s something wildly internal—Tim copying me on a letter. But I will not get between editors and their writers. That is the stairway to hell.

“One of my missions is to make the writers feel loved,” says Guarino. “I love them for their effort, then I love the staff for turning their work into something that will eventually appear here.” Between the magazine and the website,
Artforum
hosts a wide range of voices. Contributors don’t necessarily like each other’s style; some are divas who resist being edited. “I have relationships with a lot of writers,” says Guarino wearily. “At a certain point, one suffers that beleaguered feeling of agents dealing with stars.”

Artforum
has an editorial department of sixteen people, most of whom graduated from Ivy League universities or their British equivalents. “We are blessed to work with staff that can’t be bossed,” explains Guarino. “It’s like trying to shepherd a pack of wolves.” Most studied English literature or creative writing rather than art history. “We are also blessed with being a destination,” he adds. “They arrive and we try to corral them.”

Guarino worked with a group of performance artists before he joined the magazine, and he loves the art world for its characters. As for contemporary art, “ninety-five percent of it cannot be taken seriously,” he declares. Guarino is more cynical about art than one might expect of someone who participates in the production of a monthly art world tome. “I’m like the atheist priest who understands the salutary effect of religion,” he tells me. “You can’t be the leader of scientology if you believe in aliens and all that shit.”

Somewhat like a Turner Prize victory or nomination, an
Artforum
front cover, feature, or sometimes even a review can have a tremendous impact on an artist’s career. And just as the prize relies on the authority of the museum and the trustworthiness of the jury, so the magazine’s influence is directly related to its perceived integrity. “There is an abiding belief, based on the facts, that you cannot buy your coverage in
Artforum
,” declares Guarino. “A new dealer’s first response is to be a little upset and frustrated, but in the end they respect us for it. Our reputation is dependent on an entire history of doing our best to be objective in a world of subjectivity. Of course, an objective opinion is an oxymoron, but that’s never stopped us.”

Guarino takes the cap off a Quill ultrafine black permanent marker and signs a new
Artforum
press card, and as he hands it to me he says, “Take this, sister. Use it honorably. Use it well.” In the process of negotiating access to
Artforum
, I ended up writing freelance reports for the magazine’s website. Participation seemed to be the only way to enable observation. Editors and publishers who are accustomed to the power of representing are not always entirely comfortable with the prospect of being represented, but it was implied that they’d let me in if I wrote for them. As it happens, the online and print magazines are run as separate entities with different content, so I never had direct involvement with the main object of research—the glossy monthly.

Still, I couldn’t help thinking of Adrian Searle’s maxim “No conflict, no interest.” Searle, who is one of Britain’s most influential critics in part because he has a reputation for maintaining independent opinions, told me, “You often end up knowing too much. Some people think that they can be pure and aloof, but I don’t know if that is even advisable. Everything I’ve learned has come from talking to artists, but you can gather too much personal information, so I make it a policy to be very forgetful.” As it happened, Searle also gave a compellingly straightforward definition of criticism. “Art critics are just spectators who say what they think,” he said. “If I were an artist, wouldn’t it be truly dreadful if nothing were said about what I did? Don’t things live not just by direct experience of them but by rumor, discussion, argument, and fantasy?”

Artforum
’s integrity is no doubt attributable to the principles of its noninterventionist main owner, Tony Korner. The second son of a British banker, he attended Harrow, then read law and economics at Cambridge. Korner is a gentleman. He stands six foot two, wears navy blazers, and uses polite words like
backside.
Unlike most art magazine owners, Korner has never collected contemporary art. When I interviewed him one evening in his London flat, an exotic environment full of objects dating from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, he explained: “It felt cleaner to avoid the conflicts. First, I didn’t want favors from dealers. I didn’t want to slip into the muddy waters of backroom bartering or the fast lane between what might be on my walls and what might be on the cover of the magazine.” As he poured me a glass of champagne and offered almonds, he continued, “Second, I grew up in a society that hardly acknowledged that the twentieth century existed. When I started at
Artforum
, I was a beginner and probably would have bought all the wrong work. It was good for me and the magazine that I looked at everything with fresh eyes and that I wasn’t—and still am not—vested in any specific art movement or trend.”

When I asked Korner what makes a good art magazine, he was adamant: “The one essential thing—it cannot follow the market. Nor should it try actively to influence the market. It has to have its own point of view. It has to be honest. After that, clarity of writing, purity of design.” Korner gazed thoughtfully at the two fifteenth-century Flemish donor portraits that hang on either side of his mantel. “We regard ourselves as the contemporary art magazine of record. We spend an incredible amount of time fact-checking, making sure we have the accurate dimensions and materials of each work, et cetera.” When I mentioned that newspaper critics complain that art magazines, which are dependent on gallery advertising, rarely publish negative reviews, Korner was unruffled. “We can have credibility without negativity,” he declared. “What we
don’t
publish is sometimes very telling.” Moreover,
Artforum
is renowned for publishing scathing reviews of major museum shows and biennales. Korner can be proud of the magazine, but he is not self-satisfied. As I was leaving his flat, he told me the old joke “If you’re resting on your laurels, you’re wearing them in the wrong place.”

10:00
A.M.
The editorial department is located on the west side of the nineteenth floor, while the advertising department sits on the east side. Production acts as a buffer in between. The managing editor, Jeff Gibson, is quadruple-checking a feature to make sure it is “squeaky clean.” The soothing hum of low-volume dub music and the smoky scent of Lapsang souchong tea pervade his small, orderly office. Gibson likens his job to that of a traffic cop, maintaining relationships and filtering copy from eighty to a hundred writers. Before joining
Artforum
, he coedited a magazine called
Art & Text
and wrote a dictionary of delusional conditions common to artists and critics, titled
Dupe
. In the latter he defined
schizophrenic appraisal
as “wild swings in evaluative criteria brought on by competitive envy” and
sideline omniscience
as “a heightened sense of enlightenment based on inexperience.”