Seven Days in the Art World (17 page)

A few doors down, senior editor Elizabeth Schambelan is waking up to another round of editing an article “written by a foreigner in a rush.” She’s already had a “painful back-and-forth” with the author, so she’s resigned to spending the morning on more revisions. Schambelan worked as an assistant editor at the book publishers Serpent’s Tail and Grove Atlantic before coming to
Artforum
. “I kept making proposals to publish books that nobody wanted to publish,” she says. “I had
unbelievably
uncommercial ideas.” Schambelan thinks there is some credence to the adage that writing is fifty years behind painting. “I was so sick of reading Hemingwayesque novels full of muscular lyricism,” she explains. “Contemporary art seemed to be taking more interesting risks than contemporary fiction.” She fingers a printout as if she were eagerly dreading her work. What about the writing that
Artforum
publishes, I ask—what are its conventions? “I honestly don’t think we have a dominant discourse,” she replies. The etymology of the word
magazine
suggests a place where diverse goods are stored. “We’re committed to being a portmanteau for different things,” she explains. “Some of our writers are very academic, very theory-driven. Others come from literary or journalistic backgrounds.”

Between the managing and senior editors’ offices lies the larger corner lair of thirty-six-year-old editor in chief Tim Griffin. An avalanche of books, magazines, and packages slides over his leather couch, armchair, and desk. On the floor, a television sits on top of a DVD player next to more landslides, while on the desk the clearing between the keyboard and the screen is demarcated by a can of Dr Pepper and a navy New York Shakespeare Festival mug. With an MFA in poetry from Bard College, Griffin follows in a venerable tradition of poets (from Charles Baudelaire to Frank O’Hara) who have turned to writing art criticism. “You sit wherever you want,” he tells me as I enter. “I’ll move a few things out of the way so we can actually see each other’s faces.”

Dressed entirely in black, with a hairless head and a solemn manner, Griffin comes across as an embattled, half-hip, half-geeky cleric. He sits still, his hands in his lap. Since his first issue as editor in October 2003, the magazine is generally perceived to have become more serious. He tells me, “Art is an intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual endeavor.” Before leaving home this morning, Griffin made a couple of calls to Europe, and while traveling down on the subway from Harlem, he read some “galleys” (that is, page proofs). When he arrived at the office, he checked in on the cover, made sure a key article had arrived, and confirmed that “there were no holes or emergencies.” Griffin is busy trying to close an issue, a monthly ordeal that involves long hours of relentless word-crunching, so I jump straight into the interview: What makes a good editor?

“You have to be willing to exchange ideas,” says Griffin. “You have to have your ear to the ground. You have to be open to all factions…while exercising judgment.” He quotes the lyrics of a Kenny Rogers song about knowing when to hold your cards and when to fold ’em, then adds, “Ideally,
Artforum
ends up telling the story of art in its day.” The editorial pages convey the critical tale. The ad pages deliver the market narrative. “If you can’t have intellectual dialogue in an art magazine,” he asserts, “then where in the world are you going to have it?”

How would you describe the influence of
Artforum
? I ask.

“I’m still trying to wrap my head around that one,” says Griffin earnestly. “There’s an argument out there that once upon a time the critic led the dealer led the collector, whereas now, supposedly, the collector leads the dealer leads the critic. You’d be a fool to argue that the landscape hasn’t changed, but we still try to drive the discourse, or at the very least give a perspective.”
Artforum
’s content focuses on exhibiting artists, so galleries would seem to sift and sort first. But then, artists often pick up dealers in other cities after they’ve received an endorsement from a convincing critic. Rather than being a linear chain of influence, each player has sway, and consensus tends to swirl.

How would you describe your relationship with dealers?

Griffin shrugs. “You might think that dealers have a taxpayer sensibility—‘I’m paying your salary so I’d better see all my interests reflected’—but to date, people have been generous,” he says. “I think everyone recognizes that we could lose the whole game if we don’t have a meaningful dialogue happening somewhere.” Griffin takes a sip of his coffee, then returns his hands to his knees. “I don’t want my editorship to be associated with the rise of a handful of artists,” he continues, “but rather with a shift in the language used—a substantive change in the discourse around art and the kind of attention that this community brings to it.” Griffin loathes anything that he sees as trivializing art, which is one of the reasons he scorns artforum.com’s online diary,
Scene & Herd.
“It risks simply mirroring the ‘celebrification’ of the art world and its creation of veiled coteries,” he declares with distaste, as if my writing for that far too well-read part of the
Artforum
organization were tantamount to whoring myself in a brothel.

A fire alarm abruptly pounds through the building. Griffin glances out the door but stays still. Apparently the alarm has been going off several times a day. On Griffin’s desk is an old Christmas gift from the Norton Family Foundation: a music box by the artist Christian Marclay, which says
SILENT
on top and opens to reveal the anagram
LISTEN
. As ignoring the siren is obviously the thing to do, I ask: When was the last time you were caught between conflicted interests?

“It must be more recently than I think,” he says. “But if you start supporting artists who don’t deserve it or in a manner that seems like overkill, you will drive your readers away and undermine your own credibility.” When Griffin believes in an artist, he is devout, but when he doesn’t, well…“There’s some art that we just don’t touch,” he says. “I have no idea why it sells or why people care.” The alarm stops and he looks relieved.

Griffin’s eyes drift to his computer screen. Do you have time for another question? I ask.

“Okay, lay it on me. Then I might have to tune out,” he says.

There are many metaphors for the function of art critics, like “Art criticism is to artists what ornithology is to birds” or “Criticism is the tail that wags the dog.” What’s your analogy for the role of the critic?

Griffin glances at the Venetian blinds that block his spectacular westward view, then at the cover of the Collier Schorr catalogue sitting atop one of the mounds on his desk. “A critic is a detective,” he says finally. “You look at all this, and you just try to make it mean something.”

Hmm…So a critic is a
private eye
? I ask. Does that mean that artists are murder victims and their work is evidence? I would hate to think that you were investigating something as dreary as insurance fraud.

“It’s an existential thing,” replies Griffin. “Nothing is ever
evidence
in and of itself. You have to decide what might constitute a clue. Perhaps, as was the case in John Huston’s
noir
classic
The Maltese Falcon
, there isn’t even a crime that can be solved. It’s a matter of trying to create meaning in these things in the world around you and giving art a place where it can resonate.” Griffin takes another sip of coffee and adds, “My favorite detective is actually Marlowe in Robert Altman’s
The Long Goodbye
.” In the surprising final scene of this film, Marlowe kills a friend who faked his own death in order to escape conviction for the murder of his wife.

As I get up to leave, Griffin, who is acutely aware of
Artforum
’s intellectual legacy and not altogether comfortable with its commercial status, says, “Just don’t make me out to be the toothpaste salesman for a counterculture.”

Not so long ago I had coffee with a very different kind of poet-critic, Peter Schjeldahl, the chief art critic for
The New Yorker
. In his East Village flat, surrounded by artworks presented by friends during his freelance days, Schjeldahl told me that he dropped out of college. “I was an impatient, undisciplined, drug-using narcissist,” he said. “It was the early sixties. It seemed like the thing to do.” At that time the poetry world bled into the art world. “All the poets wrote criticism for
ArtNews
,” he said. “Little by little, I discovered that there was nothing else I did well that they paid you for.”

For Schjeldahl, the purpose of art criticism is “to give people something to read.” He sees it as a “minor art, like stand-up comedy,” rather than a metaphysical endeavor. “A great art critic is the last thing any civilization gets,” he explained. “You start with a house, then you get a streetlight, a gas station, a supermarket, a performing arts center, a museum. The very last thing you get is an art critic.” Moreover, “You’re not going to get a good art critic in St. Louis. To be a good critic, you have to be able to make a new enemy every week and never run out of people to be your friend. In this country, that’s L.A. and New York. Otherwise you’re going to be moving a lot.”

Whereas Griffin has edited “feature packages” on European cultural theorists and has no fear of jargon, Schjeldahl is a populist who complains about professional intellectuals who “think they are scientists and aspire to some kind of objective knowledge.” He takes solace in the fact that “bad writing is a self-punishing offense. It doesn’t get read, except by people who have to read it.” Nonetheless, he’s willing to be amused by jargon’s function as shoptalk. “You hear two auto mechanics and you have no idea what they are talking about,” he explained. “There is a kind of poetry in their impenetrable phrases. Why shouldn’t art criticism have that?”

Schjeldahl often feels like he has “seen it before,” so he looks at contemporary art for pleasure less than he used to. “Art is generational, and
Artforum
is a magazine that identifies with youth,” he explains. “It’s
the
art magazine, whose role is to hold up a two-way mirror to the rising generation, so they can see themselves and we can see them from the other side.” Many
Artforum
writers are either young people or academics trying to earn a reputation rather than a living. “Those who write for the little they are paid by
Artforum
are writing for glory,” said Schjeldahl. “But there is a point when your glory meter smiles and you notice that you are starving to death.”

Critics’ poor pay means that their personal interests and social relationships can easily overshadow their professional obligations. “It is a conflict,” affirmed Schjeldahl. “I really like artists, but I find that I’m hardly friends with them anymore. I had to stop accepting work.” Back in the 1980s, a dealer who still has a gallery in Chelsea tried to hire Schjeldahl. “She offered me tons of money. I said to her, what you don’t realize is that all the value that you want would be gone the moment I took your check. Later she called and said, ‘I know you wouldn’t take money. I wouldn’t dream of offering you money. But I tell you what I’m gonna do—I’m going to pay for your daughter’s education.’” Schjeldahl laughed and added, “Another time she said, ‘Tell me again about your ethics.’” At
The New Yorker,
which the critic described as “so high up the food chain that I’m drifting on a cloud,” Schjeldahl is vigilant about his agendas. “One of my principles,” he explained, “is that my reader has to know or intuit my interest in the situation. If there is anything bearing on my opinion that I don’t declare in the course of the piece, then I am picking their pocket.”

Outside Griffin’s
office, the
clickety-click
of keyboards and the white noise of giant printers override the low buzz of the fluorescent lights. I walk along a row of cubicles where everyone is worrying over texts under Anglepoise lamps. Griffin’s assistant, a smart twenty-five-year-old with a copy of
Vanity Fair
under his desk, sits next to the fact-checker, an art history graduate who wears vintage furs. Next to them are two associate editors, one with a degree from Harvard, whose work uniform includes high heels and earplugs, the other with a degree from Oxford, one of the few here who hangs his coat on a hanger.

Perpendicular to “pod row” is a corridor, which acts as “the library” (a floor-to-ceiling wall of books) on one side and “the kitchen” (a grungy sink, half fridge, and microwave) on the other. Two women from advertising and the reviews editor stand by the water cooler, waiting for the kettle to boil. I pass a well-fingered map of Europe and a sequence of red-pen-on-yellow-Post-it notes written in Landesman’s distinctive handwriting (imploring late-leaving staff to lock up and clean up), then skirt a corner and find myself back by the entrance. The reception desk is now manned not by a chirpy girl but by a gangly male artist who answers the phone in a morose monotone.

I wander through the congenial all-female space that deals with advertising, circulation, and accounts.
Artforum
has a circulation of 60,000 copies; roughly half are mailed to subscribers and half hit the newsstands. Sixty-five percent of the issues stay in North America, while the other 35 percent fly to foreign, mainly European countries. Although both
ArtNews
and
Art in America
have higher circulations, they do not have the professional readership that makes
Artforum
the art world leader. “We are not going to admit that
anyone
is our competitor. We’re
Artforum
and they’re not,” says Guarino with a grin. “We keep an eye on [the British art magazine]
Frieze
. They do a good job, but we like to think that we do better,” says Landesman.
*

Beyond the accountants’ corner sits the enclosed office of
Bookforum
editor Eric Banks. On his door, a postcard declares,
NO MORE ART
. His desk is a cityscape of neatly stacked new releases, but the office itself is empty. I feel a cold draft and step over the threshold to investigate. “I’m on the ledge,” Banks announces in his deep southern drawl. He has climbed out the window onto a balcony to chain-smoke a few Marlboros. “Don’t you love my Warholian view?” he adds, pointing toward the Empire State Building. Banks worked at
Artforum
for eight years before taking over the helm of its bimonthly offspring,
Bookforum
, a literary review for “intellectually curious, not quite eggheads, I would never use the word
hip,
but certainly younger, smarter” readers. I sit down on the peeling radiator and Banks begins to enthrall me with insights into the psychological dynamics of
Artforum
. “The family structure is beneficial and not so,” he says. “Some days it feels like the Brady Bunch, other times it’s more like the Manson family. I love the Mansons. They’ve always been my favorite killers.”