Back in August, while I was on vacation, Laurie Fendrich, a painter and fine arts professor who blogs for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm site, raised an interesting point about art magazines. Comparing the table of contents from ARTnews of 1957 with those of today, she wrote:
I’m not one to dwell on the idea that civilization is in decline. It probably is, but I try my best to follow Schiller’s advice that you must embrace your own times, yet not let them consume you. Reading the ideas of previous eras is important for thinking men and women; wallowing in nostalgia for the past is destructive to life lived now.
Sometimes, however, you stumble across something that makes you realize, with a jolt, just how far we’ve fallen from what things were like fifty years ago.
Continuing, she said:
Here, verbatim, is the list of the articles and authors in that summer 1957 issue:
The Creative Act, Marcel Duchamp
The place of painting in contemporary culture, Stuart Davis
The age of the chimpanzee, Randall Jarrell
The liberating quality of avante-garde art, Meyer Shapiro
Fifty-five years of U.S. Museums, Alfred Frankfurter
My friend Picasso, Gaston Palewski
Pure paints a picture, Elaine de Kooning
New York painting only yesterday, Clement Greenberg
And later says:
If it were to go head-to-head with any table of contents, from any issue of any art magazine published during the past decade, there’d be no question as to the winner.
Well, she is entitled to her point and her preference, but I think I disagree — and not just because if artists filled the art magazines and wrote so much about art, what would I do?
I disagree because even though the portion of the population that cares about art is still small, it’s much bigger today than it was then — a point she also considers.
But Fendrich dismisses that, because she believes the art world is full of hangers-on, more interested in money, glamour and parties than the art. On occasion — Art Basel Miami Beach, for one — I would have to agree.
Looking for evidence for my view, I checked the circulation of ARTnews in 1957 — it was about 25,000. Today, it’s more than three times that, at a tad over 80,000. Even allowing for the increase in U.S. population, which has grown about 75% since 1957, that suggests art is of interest to a larger part of the population now.
There’s another thing that bothers me about the ARTnews of 1957, so laden with writers within the profession. It was the art world was talking to itself. Today, with journalists writing, I’d bet the articles are more accessible to newcomers, less didactic, less insider-y. Spreading the word is a good thing.
And it’s not as if the writing Fendrich yearns for isn’t found elsewhere. It has merely migrated to other, more academic magazines. I was in a museum library recently, and there were plenty of them on the shelves. If artists aren’t writing for them, maybe they, too, have changed — not just the magazines.
BTW, Milton Esterow, editor and publisher of ARTnews, declined to comment. He purchased ARTnews in 1972. But here’s a link to Fendrich’s post.