Most art magazines still suffer from impenetrable writing and tired ideas, but a few new magazines offer hope
By Sarah Vowell
You read an art magazine the same way you eat an artichoke -- gnawing on a precious few edible strands here and there while laboriously tossing out the indigestible bulk. The entire exasperating project is all the more frustrating because of beauty's false promise: juicy-looking leaves, like smartly-designed covers, never quite live up to your expectations. A haphazard survey of a few newsstand titles finds the state of arts journalism the same as it ever was, which is to say too something. If not too pretentious, then too mundane. If not too self-indulgent, then too stiff. If not too flippant, then decidedly too reverent.
To be sure, art magazines have always suffered from, and been criticized for, their alienating use of academic, jargon-laden, almost indecipherable writing. In her current editorial in the Chicago-based New Art Examiner, editor Ann Wiens simply states that "writers -- and editors -- have been too slow to address the frustration many readers feel concerning the language with which art is discussed." Wiens mentions a panel discussion held in May at New York's American Craft Museum about the strained relations between critics and the public. She prints writer Peter Plagens' uppity comments from that panel, which jumped out of the New York Times' coverage of the event that week: "I've come to the conclusion the average middle-class American is a real boob, and probably worse than he was when Mencken first said it. As far as I'm concerned, 'Fargo' was a documentary." Considering that the context of that nauseating statement is a public forum ostensibly concerned with bridging the gap between pundit and reader, one shivers to think what stuck-up tastemakers like Plagens are saying (or writing) behind closed doors.
On the other hand, some publications attempt user-friendly coverage that errs on the side of legibility. Art in America, for instance, is largely jargon-free. The September issue contains architectural historian Franz Schulze's no-nonsense analysis of Chicago's new Museum of Contemporary Art building. His sensible essay is called "Pragmatic Modernism," which is about as action-packed as it sounds. The magazine's exhibition review section -- the meat and potatoes of any art rag -- is equally functional and competent, and yet somehow very, very limp. Of its 33 wrap-ups of international exhibitions, 11 of them -- one-third -- begin with the artist's name, as in, "Steven Baris is an abstractionist whose color and tactile application of oil recall elements of Action painting." That kind of writing, poised between literature and laundry lists, isn't just Art in America's problem. Valerie Gladstone writes in ARTnews, "Ford Crull's big, vividly-colored canvases are full of symbols and figures, movement and metaphors," thus dimly describing roughly 82 percent of this century's paintings.
The ubiquitous introduction formula "So-and-so's show at the Whatchamacallit Gallery was . . . " has become the "It was a dark and stormy night" of art criticism. So perhaps it was to avoid such banalities (along with words like "biomorphic" and the ubiquitous references to Claes Oldenburg), that the photography journal Blind Spot chucks critical text altogether, simply publishing exquisitely reproduced pictures. Issue #7 contains only three items that might be considered articles -- a transcript of a discussion about photography by the artists Ross Bleckner, Gregory Crewdson and Edward Robinson and a sketchy little two-page A.M. Homes short story, plus a bad poem called "Voyage" by Kim Zorn Caputo. The rest of the magazine offers deluxe portfolios of work by blue chippies Bleckner, Nan Goldin and Uta Barth. But Blind Spot is a little too elegant. The primo paper and dazzling color spoil the scavenger hunt. Part of the joy of flipping through a pulp glossy like ARTnews or a black-and-white non-profit like Art Papers is the way in which astonishing images, however small and cruddy their presentation, can stop you cold. Blind Spot's very elegance levels its photographs; Goldin's earthy creepiness cannot be distinguished from Barth's airy abstraction.
Ultimately, the only two publications which really live up to the demands of the noisy, swirling vortex of contemporary culture are Artforum and World Art. Both magazines are international (World Art's Australian base can't help but lend to a global reach, and Artforum is committed to translating reviews from hither and yon). Their liveliness is also based on an expanded notion of what art is -- including extended coverage of pop music, film, fashion and books. The 1994 upstart World Art, commanding all the attention of a toddler in the terrible-twos, is obviously modeled (in design, size and breadth) on big daddy Artforum. World Art has his nose, but not his eyes.
The chasm between the two is readily apparent this month. While Artforum genuflects at the establishment icon Jasper Johns, World Art offers a likable examination of an actual idea -- what they see as the burgeoning popularity in art of the "Lolita Complex": "[The] nymphet . . . has re-emerged as triumphant emblem of a newly configured female desirability." Artforum rarely insults its readers' intelligence, and the writers it employs frequently have real and singular voices. It's just that the voices usually belong to the kind of art world insiders World Art hasn't been saddled with -- yet. Artforum's current issue highlights slumming brainiac Rosalind Krauss (of the academic journal October) who throws around yawns like "Duchampian trope," a phrase the sassy whippersnappers over at World Art would snicker at. If writers like Krauss are the gnarled part of the artichoke you retch into your napkin when no one's looking, then World Art hands over essay after essay pointing to the reason we pick up these godforsaken magazines in the first place -- the heart.
Sarah Vowell has contributed to Artforum, Art Papers, New Art Examiner and High Performance.
