When I started writing reviews for Art News, in 1969, it was a poet’s magazine, and I was one of the young poets that John Ashbery recruited to write gallery reviews. The New York School poets are no less arrogant than any other, but this isn’t obvious at first glance because they cultivate off-handedness and understatement and occasional silliness. None of us made grand, Oscar Wildean comments about criticism as a creative art, and yet that was always implied. The criticism in Art News had literary qualities that ran parallel to the pictorial and sculptural qualities that the critics celebrated—as you might expect, because the artists and writers lived in the same world and carried on a conversation in the celebration of a shared sensibility.
No yearning for objectivity plagued the Art News writers, and their critical judgments were usually implicit. If you were the poet Bill Berkson and wrote about the paintings of Philip Guston, you didn’t waste time making an argument for the greatness of Guston. The fact that you were writing about him and you were Bill Berkson meant that he was great. It was the same with Willem de Kooning and Tom Hess, the editor-in-chief of Art News. I don’t think Hess ever stated de Kooning’s importance; he just wrote about him in a manner that was, on the one hand, intimate and on the other hand exalted, so the critical judgment was unstated but obvious.
Launched in San Francisco in 1962, Artforum set up shop in New York five years later and provided a congenial home for Greenbergian formalists, Minimalism and its advocates, and all the post-Minimalist developments: process art, performance art, earthworks, and conceptualism. Art News, devoted to painting in general and Abstract Expressionism in particular, had at best a glancing interest in all that. So a gulf quickly separated the two magazines. It was part of each one’s being that it wasn’t the other. Attending closely to every new medium and mode, Artforum established itself as an artworld institution in a very short time. The Art News writers saw that they had cast their lot with the declining institution, and yet they stayed loyal to the magazine because they wanted to write a certain way that you only Tom Hess would let you get away with.
The Art News critics never wanted to write for Artforum, and vice versa. It was a matter of different art worlds shaped by incompatible sensibilities. On one side were the poetic art critics, many of whom were actually poets, and on the Artforum side were critics trying to adapt an art historical methodology to the moment. Though the poet-critics were soaked in art history, each writer had a personal sense of it, and write out of that. The art-historian-critics at Artforum, by contrast, would place the newest thing in a niche provided by some historical scheme. In that way they could keep track of art history as it happened. Or so they claimed, despite the glaring absurdity of presuming to write a history of the present. Plausible history emerges from a responsible examination of the past. History in the present tense can only be a tendentious, ideologically driven polemic parading as truth.
In 1972, Artforum’s old guard departed and John Coplans became the magazine’s editor-in-chief. Seeing the magazine’s various critical methods as so many intellectual straightjackets, he set about to liberate the magazine from its past. Recruiting a disparate crew of critics from various art-world outposts, he changed the tenor of the magazine in just a few months. Though I continued to write for Art News and had begun to contribute to Art International, I was one of the newcomers. I think Coplans liked my interest in artists who had received little or no institutional approval and my skeptical attitude toward art-world orthodoxies.
I disliked especially the hard-core formalist idea that art is a precious, elitist activity that must be defended against popular junk. Or kitsch, as Clement Greenberg called it. It’s not that the Art News writers were not elitist, but no ideological machinery supported their elitism; moreover, it was ironic. The poet, critic, and MoMA curator Frank O’Hara loved Lana Turner as well as de Kooning. John Ashbery wrote a poem entitled “Daffy Duck in Hollywood.” His “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape” features Popeye and his family. There was a camp quality to the Art News sensibility, around the edges, anyway.
In 1972, the year when Coplans took over at Artforum, Art News was sold to a publisher who wanted to turn it into “the People magazine of the art world.” Tom Hess and John Ashbery were out, though Betsy Baker, another senior editor, stayed on for a few years. Not being a People person, I stopped writing for Art News. Then, in 1974, Betsy became the editor-in-chief of Art in America and I began working with her again. It was as if I had returned to the old, vanished Art News, only now I felt even more at home.
Many of the other poet-critics appeared on the masthead and in the table of contents of the new Art in America. Betsy’s eye for art is both generous and acute, and she has a great ear for critical prose. Moreover, she is fearless, so she never felt the need for ideological justification or validation from the attitudes and assumptions that prop up so many art-world sensibilities. Under her leadership, Art in America became an open space where I was free to elaborate my ideas and intuitions as fully as I could. For a quarter of a century, I exercised that freedom, and felt, from year to year, the excitement I felt when my first reviews appeared in the pages of Art News. It is unwise, of course, to ascribe great influence to any art magazine. Nonetheless, I believe the art world would be a better place if Betsy were still running Art in America.
This is a very moving essay because it memorializes a period that was characterized by personality. Artists, Writers and Poets, Musicians, are all unique and fascinating, wild and wonderful in all their variety. It was a period of acquaintance and interaction. I was still an 'art kid'. I studied on the street and in others studios. I met John Cage on the street and enjoyed his odd person. Don Judd was a mentor; I studied with George Segal directly, and he guided my growth. Leon Golub and many others became friends, all of distinctinction and diverse practice. We grow through interaction and excellent colleagues.
The era you describe may be a model for a near of far future, if we can find communications and forums that those journals represented. Art news, Art in America, Forum... yes , let's get Betsy out of retirement !