A Tale of Two Art Magazines: 1969-1974

ArtNews, Summer 1970

In 2000, Amy Newman published “Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974,” an oral history of the magazine’s founding, its move from San Francisco to New York, and its quick evolution into the leading art-critical publication.  As Artforum ascended, it eclipsed Art News, the magazine where I published my first gallery reviews, in 1969.  Newman interviewed me because, in 1972, I was invited to contribute to Artforum by the magazine’s new editor, John Coplans.  As a poet who happened to write art criticism, I remained an Art News writer at heart and thus my sympathies were with John Ashbery, Frank O’hara, Gerrit Henry, John Perrault, Bill Berkson, and the other poet-critics at Art News.  Nonetheless, Coplans was receptive to ideas I proposed for Artforum, despite my far from hidden distaste for the magazine’s formalist dogma.  At Artforum, I was an outsider and that, no doubt, is why Newman wanted to include my comments in the account she assembled from dozens of disparate and sometimes contentious voices.  What follows is a spliced-together selection of my thoughts on New York art magazines and the writing they published in those days.

When I started writing reviews for Art News in 1969, the gulf dividing Art News from Artforum could not have been deeper—or clearer.  Like the gulf separating Dodgers fans from Giants fans.  It was part of each magazine’s being that it was not the other. The veteran Art News writers never wanted to write for Artforum, and vice versa. It was a matter of two different worlds, two completely different sensibilities. 

Art News was a writers’ magazine, a poets’ magazine. The style of New York poetry is no less arrogant than any other, but this isn’t obvious to everyone at first glance because it’s a style of off-handedness and understatement and occasional silliness. No one at Art News made grand, Oscar Wildean comments about how criticism is a creative art, just as painting and sculpture are, and yet that was always implied.  So the Art News writers aspired to literary qualities parallel to whatever pictorial or sculptural qualities they might be celebrating. The idea was that the artists and writers were in the same world and part of a conversation sustained by a shared sensibility.

There was no notion of objectivity and no parading of critical judgments. If you were Bill Berkson and wrote about Philip Guston, you didn’t waste time making an argument for the greatness of Philip Guston. The very fact that you were writing about him and you were Bill Berkson meant that he was great. And the same with Tom Hess, the editor of Art News, and Willem de Kooning. I don't think Hess ever did state de Kooning's importance; he just wrote about him all the time in terms that were, on the one hand, intimate and on the other hand exalted, so the critical judgment was unstated but obvious. And unquestionable.

The Artforum writers had no interest in literary matters—or in writing well, as an Art News writer might put it.  I remember Robert Pincus­Witten, an Artforum regular, talking about John Ashbery as a belle-lettrist, a term he gave a derogatory twist.  Like the other writers at Artforum, Pincus-Witten was trying to adapt art historical method to the moment.  Not that the poet-writers at Art News were indifferent to art history.  Each would invent a private history, a personal history, in relation to the history of modern life, and write out of that.  By contrast, Artforum’s art-historian-critics wanted to establish some objectively defensible scheme, a schematic of history, and place the newest thing in relationship to that.  They thought they could keep track of art history as it happened.  This seemed absurd to me—the idea that you could write the history of the vast, immeasurable moment in which you were immersed.  It was imaginable to the Artforum writers only because they left so much out, reducing art to nothing more than the so-called issues subject to formalist analysis, in all its relentless reductiveness.

The hard-core formalist writers at Artforum owed just about everything to Clement Greenberg and his idea of kitsch, which led to the further idea that there is a precious, elitist activity in perennial need of being defended against popular junk.  It’s not that the Art News people were not elitist, but their elitism was not programmatic; no ideological machinery supported it, and it tended toward irony.  Frank O’Hara loved Lana Turner no less than he loved de Kooning.  There was a camp quality to the Art News sensibility, around the edges, anyway.

At Artforum the hard-liners would push their hard lines month in and month out, and so they never managed to be much more than producers of routine, Artforum-type prose.  Their workaday authoritarianism gave me the creeps.  Michael Fried also had an authoritarian stance, but with his invocation of Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth-century theologian, and his talk of “grace,” he stood apart from his Artforum colleagues. He was exercised by a kind of spirituality—not just a narrowly specialized kind of aesthetic transcendence, but transcendence of a quasi-, or maybe not even quasi-, religious kind that had a passionate, ecstatic quality, and was quite extraordinary. The other Artforum writers were just humdrum authoritarians and one would object to them as one objects to that sort of thing. But Fried’s was a case of misguided passion, so my objection to him was not quite the same.

There was something apocalyptic about the formalist support of the color field painters, in particular, because what the formalist critics were saying—and the painters, too, at a certain point—was that they were getting to the final revelation of what painting ought to be. What history demands that it be.  And the Artforum writers advanced their historical vision with a stubbornness that was as much moral as it was aesthetic.  If you want to be a good person, on the right side of history, you have to see art as we do, think the way we do.  This sort of apocalyptic yearning thrived on the panic that filled the late ’60s, and it’s different from the morally tinged aesthetics of John Ruskin, the great Victorian art critic. 

Ruskin never argues that the moral decisions one makes in making aesthetic judgments are important because we’re heading for the waterfall, the end of the world, and you’ve got to be on the right side at this apocalyptic moment. He feels that the need to make these choices is abiding, not that the moment is coming when you’re going to get your last chance to make the right decision.  For Ruskin was not a reductionist.  He acknowledged a large and complex world that’s natural, that’s cultural, that’s social, that’s artificial, that’s real, etcetera, etcetera, and the grand energy of his prose allows him to deal with it all in extraordinary detail.

As he does, he displaces everything onto an equally complex web of aesthetic concerns which are, at base, ethical concerns. In the late 1960s everyone from hippies to Michael Fried were paring things down, driven by a sense that we’ve got to dump a lot of baggage because we’re getting to the last days. Ruskin is nothing but baggage, there’s endless baggage that he carries from one day to the next, never mind one season to the next. But in the ’60s everybody’s getting rid of baggage, because of this apocalyptic feeling—which I didn’t share, though I couldn’t help feeling pressure from every direction to get in the apocalyptic mood. People seemed to think that you could jump-start the apocalypse by having lots of intense apocalyptic feelings.

In 1974-75, I wrote a series of essays on art criticism for Art International.   Among the many things I objected to in the formalism of the Artforum writers was its basic premise: works of art are raw material, stuff that is mute and meaningless until the critic applies an analysis guided by a strict methodology.  These critics depreciated art by reducing it to an almost preconscious status, as if it’s just part of a chaotic world that has no meaning, no intelligibility, until it has been run through a certain analytical process.

Though I never claimed that I could know an artist’s intention, I felt we should acknowledge that artists do have intentions, like everybody else, and that these intentions are extremely complex, with all sorts of personal and social and cultural and historical origins.  And that is what’s interesting.  Because art has no meaning that I care about until I see it as part of the web of intentions and interactions that have such a large part in generating the thing we call “culture.” The Artforum method was designed to extract works of art from that cultural web.  So my strongest indictment of that magazine’s writers would be that their style of analysis doesn’t just distort or obscure what it analyzes but destroys it.