 | |
 May 2019 Artforum Cover | |
| Editor | Tina Rivers Ryan (March 2024–) |
|---|---|
| Former editors | Tim Griffin,Michelle Kuo,Ingrid Sischy,Jack Bankowsky,David Velasco |
| Categories | art magazine |
| Frequency | Monthly |
| Founder | John P. Irwin, Jr. |
| Founded | 1962; 63 years ago (1962) |
| Company | Artforum Media, LLC (Penske Media Corporation) |
| Country | United States |
| Based in | New York City |
| Language | English |
| Website | artforum |
| ISSN | 0004-3532 |
Artforum is an international monthlymagazine specializing incontemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ × 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notably, theArtforum logo is a bold and condensed iteration of theAkzidenz-Grotesk font, a feat for an American publication to have considering how challenging it was to obtain fonts favored by the Swiss school via local European foundries in the 1960s.[1]Artforum is published by Artforum Media, LLC, a subsidiary ofPenske Media Corporation.[2]
John P. Irwin, Jr named the magazine after the ancient Roman wordforum hoping to capture the similarity of the Roman marketplace to the art world's lively engagement with public debate and commercial exchange. The magazine features in-depth articles and reviews of contemporary art, as well as book reviews, columns on cinema and popular culture, personal essays, commissioned artworks and essays, and numerous full-page advertisements from prominent galleries around the world.[3]
Artforum was founded inSan Francisco in 1962 by John P. Irwin, Jr. Irwin was a salesman for Pisani Printing Company and would make frequent stops to the galleries around Brannan Street and the Financial District for deliveries. Gallery curators and artists, like Philip Leider, suggested to Irwin that he should start a local arts publication that catered to the West Coast arts scene since they were tired of reading about the same New York-based artists inArt in America,Arts Magazine, andArt News. Through the backing of Pisani Printing Company, Irwin successfully launched the magazine in a small office off ofHoward Street. The first issue featured a cover with a work by the kinetic sculpture by Swiss painterJean Tinguely suggesting the inchoate and indistinct identity of the fledgling publication. "That center section will contain a lot of divergent and contradictory opinion[s]," reads an editorial note in the first issue.[4]
The next publisher/ownerCharles Cowles moved the magazine toLos Angeles in 1965 before finally settling it inNew York City in 1967, where it maintains offices today.[5] The move to New York also encompassed a shift in the style of work championed by the magazine, moving away from California style art tolate modernism, then the leading style of art in New York City. One of Leider's final essays for the magazine, "How I Spent My Summer Vacation, or, Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco and Utah," is a reflective first-person account of a cross-country road trip visiting earthworks, such asMichael Heizer'sDouble Negative (1969) andRobert Smithson'sSpiral Jetty (1970). The essay grapples with the relationship between politics and art.[6]
The departure of Philip Leider as editor-in-chief in 1971 and the tenure ofJohn Coplans as the new editor-in-chief roughly coincided with a shift towards more fashionable trends and away from late modernism. A focus onminimal art,conceptual art,body art,land art andperformance art provided a platform for artists such asRobert Smithson,Donald Judd,Sol LeWitt and others. In 1980, after opening his own gallery in New York City,Charles Cowles divested himself of the magazine. A sister magazine,Bookforum, was started in 1994.
In 2003, the Columbia-Bard graduateTim Griffin became the editor-in-chief of the magazine. He sought to bring back a serious-tone and invited academics and cultural theorists who were mostly suspicious of art and the market. The writers were mostly European male theorists likeSlavoj Zizek,Giorgio Agamben,Alain Badiou,Toni Negri, andJacques Rancière.[7] The magazine shed light on a new emergence of digital neo-appropriation artists such asWade Guyton,Seth Price, andKelley Walker and eventually featured a cover by artistDanh Vō.[7]
Michelle Kuo, a PhD candidate at Harvard and respected critic, was announced as the editor-in-chief in 2010 after Tim Griffin resigned to pursue other work. The magazine followed a similar, sober tone of under its new leadership with round-table discussions, book and exhibition reviews, and lively hyper-academic discourse.[8] In October 2017, publisher Knight Landesman resigned in the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct with nine women including a former employee who filed a lawsuit.[9][10][11][12]Artforum initially backed Landesman, saying the allegations were "unfounded" and suggested that lawsuit was "an attempt to exploit a relationship that she herself worked hard to create and maintain."[13][14] The magazine's editor Michelle Kuo resigned at the end of the year in response to the publishers' handling of the allegations.[15] Kuo released a statement inArtnews noting, "We need to make the art world a more equitable, just, and safe place for women at all levels. And that can only be achieved when organizations and communities are bound by shared trust, honesty, and accountability."[16]Artforum staff released a statement condemning the way the publishers had handled the allegations.[11][17]
A new era ofArtforum emerged under the leadership ofDavid Velasco in January 2018. In his first issue, featuring a self-portrait by the born HIV-positive artistKia LaBeija, Velasco wrote a poignant statement: "The art world is misogynist. Art history is misogynist. Also racist, classist, transphobic, ableist, homophobic. I will not accept this. Intersectional feminism is an ethics near and dear to so many on our staff. Our writers too. This is where we stand. There's so much to be done. Now, we get to work." Art critic Jerry Saltz immediately praised the new direction the magazine had taken, noting, "And just like that, anArtforum that needed to disappear was gone." The new editorial direction included writing and photographic essays byMolly Nesbit, philosopher and curatorPaul B. Preciado, criticJohanna Fatemen, and artists such asDonald Moffet.[7]
ArtistNan Goldin published a harrowing text and photographic account of her addiction to the prescription pain-relief drugOxyContin in a 2018 piece that prompted the founding ofP.A.I.N., a campaign to expose the role of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family in theopioid epidemic in America.[18] This campaign coincided withChristopher Glazek's breaking report inEsquire[19] and several weeks laterPatrick Radden Keefe's report inThe New Yorker[20] on the Sacklers' "criminal misbranding." Both journalists reported that the drug that led doctors to believe Oxycontin was less addictive that had been reported. Goldin demanded in her essay that the Sacklers donate half of their fortune to drug rehabilitation clinics and programs.[21] Thessaly La Force of theNew York Times Style Magazine wrote of the artist, "It is rare these days to see a lone artist like Goldin — especially one both critically and commercially successful, whose work is in dozens of important museum collections, including theMetropolitan Museum of Art and theMuseum of Modern Art — step into the ring as an activist."[18]
In 2019,Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett published an essay inArtforum titled "The Tear Gas Biennial," decryingWarren Kanders, co-chair of the board of theWhitney Museum, and his "toxic philanthropy."[22] Although Kanders had donated an estimated $10 million to the museum, the source of his fortune comes fromSafariland LLC, a company that manufacturesriot gear,tear gas and other chemical weapons used by police and the military to impose order by force.[23] Although theGeneva Convention in 1925 outlawed the use of tear gas in all international military conflict, the tear gas fired at peaceful protesters and civilians by the police and military during theGeorge Floyd protests in 2020 as well as on migrants on the US-Mexico border is the same brand of tear gas manufactured by Defense Technology, a subsidy of Safariland.[24] A wave of artists from the Biennial, includingKorakrit Arunanondchai,Meriem Bennani,Nicole Eisenman andNicholas Galanin, demanded immediate removal of their work from the Biennial within hours after the essay was published.[25] After mounting pressure from artists, critics, and gallerists urging the public to boycott the show, Kanders stepped down from his leadership position at the museum.[26] The essay was instrumental in his resignation, and in the museum cutting ties with Kanders' financial endowments that were directly connected to the promotion and use of military weaponry and violence during peaceful social unrest.[27]
In December 2022,Artforum was acquired byPenske Media.[2]
On October 19, 2023, in the aftermath of the2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel,Artforum published an open letter signed by roughly 8,000 artists and cultural workers that expressed support forPalestinian nationalism in response to theGaza war. Some of these artists includedNan Goldin,Peter Doig, andKara Walker. Specifically, the letter pressured national governments to support a ceasefire and humanitarian aid in theGaza Strip.[28] The following day,Artforum published a letter from art dealersDominique Lévy,Brett Gorvy, and Amalia Dayan (granddaughter of Israeli military leaderMoshe Dayan), which criticized the magazine for not explicitly denouncingHamas' October 7 attacks on Israelis, which included hundreds of kidnappings.[29] Notably, the letter did not mention Hamas or the Israelis who were killed.[30] Many artists condemned the petition for itsantisemitism.[31][32] A key passage from the letter, which was criticized for being antisemitic, is as follows.[33]
We support Palestinian liberation and call for an end to the killing and harming of all civilians, an immediate ceasefire, the passage of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the end of the complicity of our governing bodies in grave human rights violations and war crimes.
In response to media pressure leading some artists to withdraw their signatures from the original letter, the Chilean poet and artistCecilia Vicuña commented that "tampering with the opinions of artists is to not understand the role of art".[34] On October 23, the magazine's website amended the letter to denounce Hamas' violence and hostage-taking.[28]The Intercept investigated modern art curator Martin Eisenberg's campaign to pressure artists into retracting their signatures.[35]Vanity Fair similarly reported that Lucas Zwirner, the son of art dealerDavid Zwirner, supported the Lévy-Gorvy-Dayan response letter and stopped purchasing advertising from the magazine.[36]
On October 26,Artforum's publisher stated that the October 19 letter was published without the typical editorial process, suggesting that the letter should have been presented in the news section with relevant context on the 2023 Gaza war.[37] That same day,The New York Times reported that editor-in-chief David Velasco had been fired, leading to the resignations of senior editors Zack Hatfield and Chloe Wyma.[34] DocumentarianLaura Poitras, musicianBrian Eno, artistsBarbara Kruger andNicole Eisenman, philosopherJudith Butler, academicSaidiya Hartman, and photographerNan Goldin signed the original letter and called for a boycott ofArtforum in response to Velasco being fired. They praised his leadership increasing the magazine's prominence and denounced Velasco's firing as limiting their free speech.[38]
As the magazine and its sister publicationsARTnews andArt in America lacked editorial leadership,[36] the December 2023 "Year in Review" issue ofArtforum was trimmed because critic Jennifer Krasinski, art historianClaire Bishop, filmmakerJohn Waters, curatorMeg Onli, and artist Gordon Hall withdrew their writing from the magazine in protest of Velasco's firing.[39] The following March,Tina Rivers Ryan was named editor-in-chief.[40]
Note: Please keep the names in alphabetical order when adding yours to the lists. Thank you.
(Philip Leider left the magazine at the end of the Summer 1971 issue, but remained on the masthead until December 1971)
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