Seven Days in the Art World (18 page)

My cell phone rings. “Sarah! Where are you?”

Standing some ten feet from Banks’s office at one of his many workstations is Knight Landesman. Bright-eyed, compact, clad in a vermilion suit, Landesman evokes not one but a host of fantastic fictional characters. Imagine Jiminy Cricket, ever ready with quiet advice for Pinocchio, or the pagan sprite Puck in a new Shakespeare-inspired office comedy from the makers of
Bruce Almighty
. While Landesman is visually demanding, he is verbally self-effacing. “I subsumed my identity into the institution long ago,” he tells me. “I think that is true for everyone who works at
Artforum
. It’s not a place where you are going to get your name in lights, but working here gives you an added dignity.” Along with advertising director Danielle McConnell and her staff, Landesman brings in the bulk of the revenue. For the past two years, as the art market has boomed, the magazine has been as thick as a phonebook, earning it the nickname
Adforum
. “I see my job as the ground crew,” he says. “Fueling the plane, getting everything ready so that, in an ideal world, the editors and writers can fly wherever they want.

“Come with me,” commands Landesman, who doesn’t like to stay still for long. I follow him to Guarino’s office. In the center of the round table is the dummy, a mock-up of the magazine, which specifies the location of all the advertisements this month. Guarino, who is leaning over it, looks up as we enter and says, “Knight, we’re confused. Why is this weird trashy thing opening up the museum section instead of something glorious, beautiful, and strong?”

“Change it,” replies Landesman. “I didn’t want to start with the Schaulager because I wanted to keep them near MoMA.” Guarino turns to me and explains, “MoMA is always the last ad before editorial. It says to everyone, ‘Hey, you’re ahead of MoMA, so shut up, don’t complain.’” When dealers open up a new issue of
Artforum
, the first thing they do is check to see where their ad falls in its hierarchy of pages. Galleries pay a premium to be placed in the first 30 percent of the magazine. “Just because you can afford to pay doesn’t mean you can get in,” continues Guarino. “For it to maintain its value, you have to make sure that only certain people can live there.” Some ad positions are consistent: Marian Goodman is across from the table of contents; Larry Gagosian is adjacent to the contributors’ page; and Bruno Bischofberger, whose distinctive ads consist exclusively of photographs of Switzerland, has had the back cover of every issue since the 1980s. But many other spots vary from month to month.

“It’s like a Rubik’s cube,” explains Landesman. “Every ad involves a story. The Basel Art Fair ad cannot go next to an ad for a gallery that is not in Basel. Bigger galleries can pay to control what’s on the page opposite by buying spreads, but it’s up to us to make it look good all the way through.”

“Even at the very end of the dummy you’re looking at some beautiful ads,” says Guarino. “But if I were an art dealer advertising in
Artforum
, I would deliver the quietest, most elegant, most subtle ad that I could, because I know I would get good placement. They would reward me for my restraint.”

A few years ago,
Artforum
had an identity crisis about whether to accept fashion ads. In the end, the staff decided to admit them but to give them left-hand-page positions only. At that time, they didn’t think jewelry was “the right signifier,” but they eventually admitted Bulgari when the company became a key sponsor of the website.

The intercom makes a loud beep. “Knight?”

“Yes,” says Landesman.

“Stefan from Gallery B on line one.”

“Okay, I’ll take it here,” says Landesman. “Huh…Okay…Let me mention it to Mike Wilson, our reviews editor, and see if he can pop in and see it himself…Hmm, yes, it was definitely a unique show. How long is it up till? I’ll make sure he gets up. You’ll see his name in the book. He’s the reviews editor. He makes the decisions. Okay. Great.”

Landesman hangs up. “I always get calls from people wanting to make sure that their shows get seen,” he explains. “We stay out of the editorial process. If you ask any of our reviewers, why did you review this show in London, Berlin, or New York? they will say it’s because they wanted to. You can tell that when you read the reviews—they’ve been written by someone with an intellectual or emotional stake in the work.”

The only editorial ground on which the publishers officially tread happens to be the site that offers the most powerful affirmation of an artist’s work—the front cover. Each month (or rather ten times a year) the design director creates three or four different possible covers for the editors and publishers to consider. Landesman likes a commercial cover, “something that will sell well on the newsstands. Pictures of girls and ascending airplanes are good. You can’t put a pile of dirt on the cover…although we have.” Griffin, by contrast, says, “I don’t worry about the newsstand. The cover is a portal to the issue. It’s iconic and metonymic. Ideally, all aspects of what’s happening in an issue are somehow compressed into this one image. We try to do that without betraying the artist. Something can be emblematic of the issue but not of the artist’s work, so our philosophy requires a little give-and-take.”

Artforum
’s design director, Joseph Logan, worked at French
Vogue
before he came to the art magazine. His minimal office, which sits next to Griffin’s, displays a selection of thin, relatively ad-free
Artforum
s from the 1960s that were designed by Ed Ruscha. For Logan, a key question in deciding what art to put on the cover is, does it work as a square? “The square format is great because it doesn’t privilege horizontal or vertical images,” he says. “But it can be a nightmare. I’m not supposed to crop, out of respect for the art, and each reproduction is supposed to emulate the way the work is hung.” Since joining the magazine in 2004, Logan has made the
Artforum
logo smaller, so it is “a little stamp” that interferes less with image. “The art we put on the cover is not our voice, but by putting it on the cover, we make it our voice,” he explains. “Whenever you put the
Artforum
logo on a work of art, it is not just their work anymore.” The validating impact of the cover depends on when it occurs in an artist’s career. “Every now and then,” says Logan, “we like to take risks with the cover by giving it to a younger artist.” Logan and the editors don’t sit around talking about the longevity of an artist’s career, but they wouldn’t give the top spot to someone who they didn’t think had a certain amount of staying power.

One of
Artforum
’s most talked-about covers in recent years reproduced a diptych by the fifty-year-old “artists’ artist” Christopher Williams. The magazine published two covers for the issue: a photo of a beautiful brunette with a closed-mouth smile and a yellow towel on her head ran on the cover of half of the print run, and an image of the same woman with a toothy laugh ran on the other half. The double cover is one of Logan’s favorites. “It played with the language of advertising and studio photography,” he says. “It evoked a fashion magazine even though she wasn’t dressed or retouched. At
Vogue
, we would have obliterated all the wrinkles and veins.”

Christopher Williams found it strange to see his work on the newsstand in Texas, in the bathrooms of galleries in Paris, on billboards in Vienna. When I met up with him in a beer garden outside Art Basel, he told me, “All artists experience cycles. Before the
Artforum
cover, I felt that something was happening, but when it came out, it definitely changed things. Suddenly there was recognition from noncolleagues like collectors and museum people.” Williams particularly appreciated the way the magazine published two covers. “A lot of my work is about doubling and about small changes, like her smile,” he said. “Those guys recognized this. My work wasn’t just ‘represented,’ but an aspect of it came out conceptually through the magazine.”

After discussing his cover, I asked Williams about how he generally looked at the magazine. “Even if I get home at ten o’clock at night and the TV is on, I’ll still open it up and go through the ads,” he told me. “It’s like an illustrated bulletin. I’ll often adjust my travel plans to catch a show.” The next morning, “I might skim all the reviews, because it’s a way to catch up on what I’ve missed and it’s a reflection of how things are being received. If a friend gets a bad review, I call them up and say, ‘That critic is an asshole. I don’t know why they didn’t get it.’ If they got a good review, you call and say, ‘That’s fantastic!’” When it comes to the columns and features, “I’m more selective. I always read the ‘Openings’ pieces about young artists and the ‘Top Tens,’ particularly for suggestions about music. I like reading the more difficult stuff too. I’ll read an article about an artist I don’t care about if it’s a writer I like.”

The power of
Artforum
as a promotional vehicle is not something with which all its contributors are 100 percent comfortable. A few months ago I met the well-known freelancer Rhonda Lieberman, who has been writing for the magazine since 1989 and on the masthead as a contributing editor since 2003. Given the heavily
hämisch
quality of her written voice, Lieberman was unexpectedly slim and stylish in person. “In the art world, a critic is an exalted salesperson,” she told me. “When you are writing a feature, no matter what you write, you are contributing to a super-glossy brochure, and when you whip up a review, you’re little more than a glorified press agent. If I were into that, why in the world wouldn’t I be a dealer?” Lieberman contended that honest criticism must contextualize. “I can’t
not
notice the market. A lot of artists notice it and play with it. Writers shouldn’t bury their heads in the sand,” she said, wagging her finger. “Within
Artforum
’s sleek upmarket exterior is this endless blowing of windbags who lift and separate art from the marketplace through a strategic use of theory.” Lieberman suggested that the loftier the writing is, the more effectively it legitimates. “We are supposed to commune with their self-contained emporium of fine ideas,” she concluded. “And transcend the fact that certain things are supervaluable to shopping fetishists. It’s repression by omission, and it’s mind-boggling!”

Artforum
is often under attack from a number of sectors. As Guarino explains, “People feel ambivalent about the magazine. We’re resented by the artists who never got what they deserved, the dealers who owe us too much money, and the critics who were never asked to write for the magazine. And while a lot of collectors subscribe, many complain that they just can’t read it.” Korner regrets that the editor in chief is always under intense scrutiny. “
Artforum
is establishment in a funny sense,” he said. “And therefore people want to pull it down. They’re always trying to catch us out.” When I asked him which segment of the art world was most vociferous, he responded, “Academics, without a doubt.”

2:00
P.M.
I leave
Artforum
’s offices and head to the Hilton Hotel in midtown, where six thousand art historians and other art-oriented scholars are converging for the annual conference of the College Art Association (CAA). I’ve made back-to-back appointments with two art historians in order to flesh out my understanding of the magazine. The generic hotel is outstandingly bland except for the shock of the garish wall-to-wall carpeting. Art historians wearing Banana Republic and designer diffusion-line suits swarm the building seeking to improve their positions, recruit colleagues, and win publishing contracts. Some network on their own; others parade the corridors with entourages of grad students nipping at their heels.

The CAA bears comparison to an art fair. It’s a market, albeit one in which art historians are selling themselves within an economy of modest scale. For the cost of a work by a mid-ranking German photographer (one in an edition of six), a collector could obtain a unique art historian for an entire year. Like the fairs, the conference is also increasingly focused on new art. Doctoral theses used to be written about work that was at least thirty years old. Now, artists unheard of six months ago are being “historicized” at CAA.

I take the elevator up to the top floor of the hotel, where I’ve arranged to meet art historian and
Artforum
contributing editor Thomas Crow, who has just moved between two pinnacles of his profession. Head of the Getty Research Institute for seven years, he now holds the Rosalie Solow Chair in Modern Art History at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. A compact man with a high forehead, black hair, and a gray beard, Crow has published much-admired books on eighteenth-century, modern, and contemporary art. According to Crow,
Artforum
’s strength is that it embraces history: “They have a major historical piece in virtually every issue.” Moreover, when Crow writes for
Artforum
, he doesn’t approach it any differently than he would a scholarly journal. “It’s simply how compressed you have to be,” he explains as he sips his filter coffee. “The articles are shorter, so you don’t have the luxury of building up and you need more dramatic hooks, but I don’t try to write anything less ambitious. I have never been asked to make my argument more accessible or dumb it down in any way.”

Artforum
’s strategic ties to the art-historical world may contribute to the way it “maintains its dominance with impressive acuity” over competing art titles, according to Crow. “
Artforum
is like the dominant athletic team who always finds a way to win,” he says. “It’s like the New York Yankees or Manchester United. It’s always there, and you have this sense that it always will be.” Although all contemporary art magazines attempt to make something more permanent of the ephemeral,
Artforum
makes it an overt policy. As Griffin told me, “I want to go to art history and make it look contemporary
and
go to contemporary work and make it look historical.” The result may be a publication that provides a context for what Crow calls “art at its highest level”—in other words, the art destined for art history.