Seven Days in the Art World

by Sarah Thornton

  10:00 A.M. The editorial department is located on the west side of the nineteenth floor, while the advertising department sits on the east side. Production acts as a buffer in between. The managing editor, Jeff Gibson, is quadruple-checking a feature to make sure it is “squeaky clean.” The soothing hum of low-volume dub music and the smoky scent of Lapsang souchong tea pervade his small, orderly office. Gibson likens his job to that of a traffic cop, maintaining relationships and filtering copy from eighty to a hundred writers. Before joining Artforum, he coedited a magazine called Art & Text and wrote a dictionary of delusional conditions common to artists and critics, titled Dupe. In the latter he defined schizophrenic appraisal as “wild swings in evaluative criteria brought on by competitive envy” and sideline omniscience as “a heightened sense of enlightenment based on inexperience.”

  A few doors down, senior editor Elizabeth Schambelan is waking up to another round of editing an article “written by a foreigner in a rush.” She’s already had a “painful back-and-forth” with the author, so she’s resigned to spending the morning on more revisions. Schambelan worked as an assistant editor at the book publishers Serpent’s Tail and Grove Atlantic before coming to Artforum. “I kept making proposals to publish books that nobody wanted to publish,” she says. “I had unbelievably uncommercial ideas.” Schambelan thinks there is some credence to the adage that writing is fifty years behind painting. “I was so sick of reading Hemingwayesque novels full of muscular lyricism,” she explains. “Contemporary art seemed to be taking more interesting risks than contemporary fiction.” She fingers a printout as if she were eagerly dreading her work. What about the writing that Artforum publishes, I ask—what are its conventions? “I honestly don’t think we have a dominant discourse,” she replies. The etymology of the word magazine suggests a place where diverse goods are stored. “We’re committed to being a portmanteau for different things,” she explains. “Some of our writers are very academic, very theory-driven. Others come from literary or journalistic backgrounds.”

  Between the managing and senior editors’ offices lies the larger corner lair of thirty-six-year-old editor in chief Tim Griffin. An avalanche of books, magazines, and packages slides over his leather couch, armchair, and desk. On the floor, a television sits on top of a DVD player next to more landslides, while on the desk the clearing between the keyboard and the screen is demarcated by a can of Dr Pepper and a navy New York Shakespeare Festival mug. With an MFA in poetry from Bard College, Griffin follows in a venerable tradition of poets (from Charles Baudelaire to Frank O’Hara) who have turned to writing art criticism. “You sit wherever you want,” he tells me as I enter. “I’ll move a few things out of the way so we can actually see each other’s faces.”

  Dressed entirely in black, with a hairless head and a solemn manner, Griffin comes across as an embattled, half-hip, half-geeky cleric. He sits still, his hands in his lap. Since his first issue as editor in October 2003, the magazine is generally perceived to have become more serious. He tells me, “Art is an intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual endeavor.” Before leaving home this morning, Griffin made a couple of calls to Europe, and while traveling down on the subway from Harlem, he read some “galleys” (that is, page proofs). When he arrived at the office, he checked in on the cover, made sure a key article had arrived, and confirmed that “there were no holes or emergencies.” Griffin is busy trying to close an issue, a monthly ordeal that involves long hours of relentless word-crunching, so I jump straight into the interview: What makes a good editor?

  “You have to be willing to exchange ideas,” says Griffin. “You have to have your ear to the ground. You have to be open to all factions…while exercising judgment.” He quotes the lyrics of a Kenny Rogers song about knowing when to hold your cards and when to fold ’em, then adds, “Ideally, Artforum ends up telling the story of art in its day.” The editorial pages convey the critical tale. The ad pages deliver the market narrative. “If you can’t have intellectual dialogue in an art magazine,” he asserts, “then where in the world are you going to have it?”

  How would you describe the influence of Artforum? I ask.

  “I’m still trying to wrap my head around that one,” says Griffin earnestly. “There’s an argument out there that once upon a time the critic led the dealer led the collector, whereas now, supposedly, the collector leads the dealer leads the critic. You’d be a fool to argue that the landscape hasn’t changed, but we still try to drive the discourse, or at the very least give a perspective.” Artforum’s content focuses on exhibiting artists, so galleries would seem to sift and sort first. But then, artists often pick up dealers in other cities after they’ve received an endorsement from a convincing critic. Rather than being a linear chain of influence, each player has sway, and consensus tends to swirl.

  How would you describe your relationship with dealers?

  Griffin shrugs. “You might think that dealers have a taxpayer sensibility—‘I’m paying your salary so I’d better see all my interests reflected’—but to date, people have been generous,” he says. “I think everyone recognizes that we could lose the whole game if we don’t have a meaningful dialogue happening somewhere.” Griffin takes a sip of his coffee, then returns his hands to his knees. “I don’t want my editorship to be associated with the rise of a handful of artists,” he continues, “but rather with a shift in the language used—a substantive change in the discourse around art and the kind of attention that this community brings to it.” Griffin loathes anything that he sees as trivializing art, which is one of the reasons he scorns artforum.com’s online diary, Scene & Herd. “It risks simply mirroring the ‘celebrification’ of the art world and its creation of veiled coteries,” he declares with distaste, as if my writing for that far too well-read part of the Artforum organization were tantamount to whoring myself in a brothel.

  A fire alarm abruptly pounds through the building. Griffin glances out the door but stays still. Apparently the alarm has been going off several times a day. On Griffin’s desk is an old Christmas gift from the Norton Family Foundation: a music box by the artist Christian Marclay, which says SILENT on top and opens to reveal the anagram LISTEN. As ignoring the siren is obviously the thing to do, I ask: When was the last time you were caught between conflicted interests?

  “It must be more recently than I think,” he says. “But if you start supporting artists who don’t deserve it or in a manner that seems like overkill, you will drive your readers away and undermine your own credibility.” When Griffin believes in an artist, he is devout, but when he doesn’t, well…“There’s some art that we just don’t touch,” he says. “I have no idea why it sells or why people care.” The alarm stops and he looks relieved.

  Griffin’s eyes drift to his computer screen. Do you have time for another question? I ask.

  “Okay, lay it on me. Then I might have to tune out,” he says.

  There are many metaphors for the function of art critics, like “Art criticism is to artists what ornithology is to birds” or “Criticism is the tail that wags the dog.” What’s your analogy for the role of the critic?

  Griffin glances at the Venetian blinds that block his spectacular westward view, then at the cover of the Collier Schorr catalogue sitting atop one of the mounds on his desk. “A critic is a detective,” he says finally. “You look at all this, and you just try to make it mean something.”

  Hmm…So a critic is a private eye? I ask. Does that mean that artists are murder victims and their work is evidence? I would hate to think that you were investigating something as dreary as insurance fraud.

  “It’s an existential thing,” replies Griffin. “Nothing is ever evidence in and of itself. You have to decide what might constitute a clue. Perhaps, as was the case in John Huston’s noir classic The Maltese Falcon, there isn’t even a crime that can be solved. It’s a matter of trying to create meaning in these things in the world around you and giving art a place where it can resonate.” Griffin takes another s
ip of coffee and adds, “My favorite detective is actually Marlowe in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye.” In the surprising final scene of this film, Marlowe kills a friend who faked his own death in order to escape conviction for the murder of his wife.

  As I get up to leave, Griffin, who is acutely aware of Artforum’s intellectual legacy and not altogether comfortable with its commercial status, says, “Just don’t make me out to be the toothpaste salesman for a counterculture.”

  Not so long ago I had coffee with a very different kind of poet-critic, Peter Schjeldahl, the chief art critic for The New Yorker. In his East Village flat, surrounded by artworks presented by friends during his freelance days, Schjeldahl told me that he dropped out of college. “I was an impatient, undisciplined, drug-using narcissist,” he said. “It was the early sixties. It seemed like the thing to do.” At that time the poetry world bled into the art world. “All the poets wrote criticism for ArtNews,” he said. “Little by little, I discovered that there was nothing else I did well that they paid you for.”

  For Schjeldahl, the purpose of art criticism is “to give people something to read.” He sees it as a “minor art, like stand-up comedy,” rather than a metaphysical endeavor. “A great art critic is the last thing any civilization gets,” he explained. “You start with a house, then you get a streetlight, a gas station, a supermarket, a performing arts center, a museum. The very last thing you get is an art critic.” Moreover, “You’re not going to get a good art critic in St. Louis. To be a good critic, you have to be able to make a new enemy every week and never run out of people to be your friend. In this country, that’s L.A. and New York. Otherwise you’re going to be moving a lot.”

  Whereas Griffin has edited “feature packages” on European cultural theorists and has no fear of jargon, Schjeldahl is a populist who complains about professional intellectuals who “think they are scientists and aspire to some kind of objective knowledge.” He takes solace in the fact that “bad writing is a self-punishing offense. It doesn’t get read, except by people who have to read it.” Nonetheless, he’s willing to be amused by jargon’s function as shoptalk. “You hear two auto mechanics and you have no idea what they are talking about,” he explained. “There is a kind of poetry in their impenetrable phrases. Why shouldn’t art criticism have that?”

  Schjeldahl often feels like he has “seen it before,” so he looks at contemporary art for pleasure less than he used to. “Art is generational, and Artforum is a magazine that identifies with youth,” he explains. “It’s the art magazine, whose role is to hold up a two-way mirror to the rising generation, so they can see themselves and we can see them from the other side.” Many Artforum writers are either young people or academics trying to earn a reputation rather than a living. “Those who write for the little they are paid by Artforum are writing for glory,” said Schjeldahl. “But there is a point when your glory meter smiles and you notice that you are starving to death.”

  Critics’ poor pay means that their personal interests and social relationships can easily overshadow their professional obligations. “It is a conflict,” affirmed Schjeldahl. “I really like artists, but I find that I’m hardly friends with them anymore. I had to stop accepting work.” Back in the 1980s, a dealer who still has a gallery in Chelsea tried to hire Schjeldahl. “She offered me tons of money. I said to her, what you don’t realize is that all the value that you want would be gone the moment I took your check. Later she called and said, ‘I know you wouldn’t take money. I wouldn’t dream of offering you money. But I tell you what I’m gonna do—I’m going to pay for your daughter’s education.’” Schjeldahl laughed and added, “Another time she said, ‘Tell me again about your ethics.’” At The New Yorker, which the critic described as “so high up the food chain that I’m drifting on a cloud,” Schjeldahl is vigilant about his agendas. “One of my principles,” he explained, “is that my reader has to know or intuit my interest in the situation. If there is anything bearing on my opinion that I don’t declare in the course of the piece, then I am picking their pocket.”

  Outside Griffin’s office, the clickety-click of keyboards and the white noise of giant printers override the low buzz of the fluorescent lights. I walk along a row of cubicles where everyone is worrying over texts under Anglepoise lamps. Griffin’s assistant, a smart twenty-five-year-old with a copy of Vanity Fair under his desk, sits next to the fact-checker, an art history graduate who wears vintage furs. Next to them are two associate editors, one with a degree from Harvard, whose work uniform includes high heels and earplugs, the other with a degree from Oxford, one of the few here who hangs his coat on a hanger.

  Perpendicular to “pod row” is a corridor, which acts as “the library” (a floor-to-ceiling wall of books) on one side and “the kitchen” (a grungy sink, half fridge, and microwave) on the other. Two women from advertising and the reviews editor stand by the water cooler, waiting for the kettle to boil. I pass a well-fingered map of Europe and a sequence of red-pen-on-yellow-Post-it notes written in Landesman’s distinctive handwriting (imploring late-leaving staff to lock up and clean up), then skirt a corner and find myself back by the entrance. The reception desk is now manned not by a chirpy girl but by a gangly male artist who answers the phone in a morose monotone.

  I wander through the congenial all-female space that deals with advertising, circulation, and accounts. Artforum has a circulation of 60,000 copies; roughly half are mailed to subscribers and half hit the newsstands. Sixty-five percent of the issues stay in North America, while the other 35 percent fly to foreign, mainly European countries. Although both ArtNews and Art in America have higher circulations, they do not have the professional readership that makes Artforum the art world leader. “We are not going to admit that anyone is our competitor. We’re Artforum and they’re not,” says Guarino with a grin. “We keep an eye on [the British art magazine] Frieze. They do a good job, but we like to think that we do better,” says Landesman.*

  Beyond the accountants’ corner sits the enclosed office of Bookforum editor Eric Banks. On his door, a postcard declares, NO MORE ART. His desk is a cityscape of neatly stacked new releases, but the office itself is empty. I feel a cold draft and step over the threshold to investigate. “I’m on the ledge,” Banks announces in his deep southern drawl. He has climbed out the window onto a balcony to chain-smoke a few Marlboros. “Don’t you love my Warholian view?” he adds, pointing toward the Empire State Building. Banks worked at Artforum for eight years before taking over the helm of its bimonthly offspring, Bookforum, a literary review for “intellectually curious, not quite eggheads, I would never use the word hip, but certainly younger, smarter” readers. I sit down on the peeling radiator and Banks begins to enthrall me with insights into the psychological dynamics of Artforum. “The family structure is beneficial and not so,” he says. “Some days it feels like the Brady Bunch, other times it’s more like the Manson family. I love the Mansons. They’ve always been my favorite killers.”

  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 i
deal 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.”