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Art Periodicals and Contemporary Art Worlds (Part I) a Historical Exploration Gwen L

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Art Periodicals and Contemporary Art Worlds (Part I) a Historical Exploration Gwen L ARTICLE Art PeriodicAls And conteMPorArY Art Worlds (PArt i) A historicAl eXPlorAtion gwen l. allen Artforum is an art magazine published in the west—but not only a magazine of western art. We are concerned fi rst with western activity but claim the world of art as our domain. Artforum presents a medium for free exchange of critical opinion.1 This editorial statement appeared in the fi rst issue of Artforum, founded in San Francisco, California, in 1962. The “west” here referred not to Western culture in general, but specifi cally to the western region of the United States, refl ecting Artforum’s initial goal to foster West Coast art, which was marginalized by the dominant, New York-centered art press at the time.2 However, the editors also voiced their aspiration to inhabit a larger “world of art,” a phrase that at once anticipates the specialized social and professional realm that would come to be known as the art world, and hints at a nascent internationalism (with overtones of cultural imperialism), foreshadowing the role Artforum would come to play in the globalized art world of today. The 1960s marked a new historical understanding of the “art world”—a term that would, in fact, 1 Editorial note, Artforum 1, no. 1 (June 1962). 2 The New York art press in the early 1960s consisted of Art in America, Arts Magazine, and Art News. Artforum was specifi cally founded as “a counterpoint to Art News,” which under the editorship of Thomas Hess in the 1950s had become the leading art magazine in the United States at that time. John Coplans, quoted in “Art as News,” Newsweek, September 18, 1972. © 2016 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00157 35 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ARTM_a_00157 by guest on 28 September 2021 be coined by the American philosopher Arthur Danto just a few years later, in 19643—and during the subsequent decades, many of the con- ditions and institutions of our contemporary art world (globalization, the vast commercialization and expansion of the art market, spectacu- lar media culture) developed or were substantially transformed under late capitalism.4 Artforum’s founding editorial suggests how the art world was being imagined at this historical juncture and reveals the many different, contradictory roles that magazines played within this emerging world: vehicles of critical exchange, sites of regional identity, instruments of hegemony. This essay considers how such contradictions informed the North American art world of the 1960s and 1970s by looking back at the early history of Artforum—its beginnings as a small regional art magazine; its rise to national and international prominence; and, along the way, the defection of several of its editors to found the critical journal October. It further contextualizes this history within a larger field of publishing practices stemming back to the Enlightenment, including self-published Salon pamphlets, 19th century art magazines, little mag- azines, and artists’ periodicals. In different ways, both Artforum and October sought to provide alternative channels of critical publicity within the art world of their time: Artforum gave voice to an underrep- resented, regional artistic community, while October attempted to coun- teract the increasingly promotional character of the commercial art press (of which Artforum had become, by that point, the prime exam- ple). As we think about the role of art periodicals and newer online media in today’s globalized art world, this history offers important models of how magazines mediate publics and counterpublics within art worlds, how they may function as sites of criticality, and how their capacity to do so is strengthened and/or compromised within different social, economic, and political contexts, as well as by their own “appara- tus” (i.e., the material and technological conditions of their production and distribution).5 In particular, the histories of Artforum and October serve as case 3 Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 571–84. 4 See Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” Social Text, no. 9/10 (Spring/Summer 1984): 178–209. 5 This term “apparatus” references Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Author as Producer.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. artmargins 5:3 Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 220–38. 36 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ARTM_a_00157 by guest on 28 September 2021 studies for the ways in which publications that start off in the mar- gins—to contest the conditions of the mainstream art world—so often end up becoming dominant, reinforcing the very conditions they set out to oppose. If these dynamics played out in the North American art world of the 1960s and 1970s, they now occur in a global context, characterized by the geopolitical hierarchies of the contemporary art world—a contested arena that signals both the unprecedented hetero- geneity and multiplicity of artistic production around the globe today and the pervasive efforts to tame and exploit it by Western neoliberal institutions (processes in which magazines, including the two dis- cussed here, certainly participate). To quote the editors of the indepen- dently published Spanish magazine Brumaria: “We live in a world that is politically unidirectional, economically anarchical, and socially unfair, where the international Art Institution has become a big circus. The hegemonic magazines (Artforum, Parkett, Flash Art, Frieze, October) play a role that hardly questions the classist and perverse nature of this institution.”6 Yet, as the example of Brumaria itself attests, periodicals can also function as sites of critical publicity that challenge, resist, and reflect upon these processes. The point of this essay is not to reinforce the dominance of Artforum, October, and the North American models of publication and criticism they embody; rather, I hope to better understand and complicate the histories of these publications and to think critically about the examples they provide— whether touchstones or cautionary tales—as we seek out new, alterna- tive modes of publication today. Art Worlds, Art MAgAzines Danto’s 1964 essay “The Artworld” marked a new understanding and theorization of the art world as a specialized institutional and interpre- tive framework that determines the status, meaning, and value of art. Danto defined the art world as a discursive and theoretical realm of possibility through which works of art become recognized and agreed upon as such. Discussing the work of Andy Warhol, he observed, “What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo box is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into 6 Dario Corbeira and Irene Montero, “The Big Lie,” Radical Philosophy 146 (November/ December 2007): 46. allen | art periodicals and contemporary art worlds 37 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ARTM_a_00157 by guest on 28 September 2021 the real object which it is.”7 Yet, the art world to which Danto was referring was much more than simply an “atmosphere” of language and artistic theory, as he described it.8 It was a complex set of relationships between works of art, artists, audi- ences and critics, markets, institutions, and publications, located primarily in the United States and Western Europe.9 In 1969, George Dickie expanded upon Danto’s observations to develop what is known as the institutional theory of art, defining the art Marcel Duchamp. The Blind Man, no. 1 (1917). Image courtesy of Roger Conover. world as a “social institution” whose practices “confer the status of” art.10 Dickie illustrated his point with Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, arguing that what transformed the ready-made urinal into a work of art was the fact “that Duchamp’s act took place within a certain institutional setting.”11 While Dickie focused mainly on museums and galleries, his example of Duchamp’s Fountain is revealing of the equally crucial role of magazines in conferring the status of art. For it was in Duchamp’s self-published periodical The Blind Man that the original 1917 Fountain (which was rejected by the Society of Independent Artists and subsequently lost) was documented in a 7 Danto, “The Artworld,” 581. 8 Ibid., 580. 9 To clarify, I am not suggesting that these were the only places that an art world existed, but rather that Danto’s concept of the art world was based on deeply Euro-American assumptions about who and what this world included. 10 George Dickie, “Defining Art,” American Philosophical Quarterly 6, no. 3 (July 1969): 255. Both Danto and Dickie have been influential on subsequent sociological theories of the art world, most notably those of Howard Becker. See Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). artmargins 5:3 11 Dickie, “Defining Art,” 255. 38 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ARTM_a_00157 by guest on 28 September 2021 photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz. Thus it could be argued that the magazine was the actual vehicle through which this work entered the art world. The role of art magazines would grow even more important during the 1960s and 1970s, as part of the expansion of media culture more generally.12 By 1972, Lawrence Alloway would define the art world as itself a communication “network,” composed of “original works of art and reproductions; critical, historical, and informative writings; galler- ies, museums, and private collections. It is a sum of persons, objects, resources, messages, and ideas. It includes monuments and parties, esthetics and openings, Avalanche and Art in America.”13 As he pointed out, magazines were privileged sites in the art world’s power structure: they helped to organize its information system and mediated the com- munication among its various publics (though his examples of Art in America and Avalanche also suggest the contested nature of this power structure, and the roles of different kinds of publications in upholding or challenging it).
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