Seven Days in the Art World

by Sarah Thornton

  As we were draining our soup bowls, Saltz arrived and took a seat next to his wife. Jerry and Roberta are about the same height. They don’t look alike—she has brown eyes, he has blue—but they match perfectly. Despite the years of mirroring, however, they have markedly different voices. Saltz is a critic-boxer; he writes about the art world as well as art and often picks fights on matters of principle. Smith, by contrast, is more of a figure skater. She glides in and out of arguments before her readers notice she’s had them. When I asked the pair how it felt to be the king and queen of criticism, Saltz declared, “We’re just a couple,” while Smith confessed, “We have an amazing time. We’re able to do as much as we do because writing doesn’t mean we have to be alone. We’re just totally in it.”

  Do your deadlines coincide? I asked.

  “He has Monday and Tuesday. I have Tuesday and Wednesday,” replied Smith.

  “But we don’t talk about a show if we are both writing about it,” said Saltz. “That is an absolute rule.”

  How often do you write about the same thing?

  “Not so often,” said Smith. “Our method of keeping out of each other’s way has evolved over the years. We almost never overlap anymore where galleries are concerned, unless it is an artist whose blue-chip status is beyond dispute. In certain cases, each of us will warn the other off a show that holds a special interest, on a kind of first-come, first-serve basis. It is somewhat different where museums, especially big museum shows, are concerned.”

  “I feel that artists deserve exposure in the New York Times,” affirmed Saltz. “Sometimes I’d like to review the show, but I think it is unfair, especially to a living artist, to take the Times away from them.”

  How do your tastes differ? I asked.

  “Taste is a hard one,” replied Smith. “We both tend to see it as inherently polymorphous and fluid, but I think our approaches to art differ, and this probably affects the kind of art we’re drawn to. Mainly, I’m more of a formalist. I’m more concerned with materials and how they’re used. I’m probably more interested in abstract painting. Jerry has a much keener sense of psychological import—deep content and narrative—than I do.”

  “I’m interested in all those formal things,” said Saltz, “but I came to art through a different door. In Chicago, where I grew up—a world away from the New York discourse about abstraction—I remember being in the Art Institute with my mother and seeing two paintings of Saint John the Baptist by Giovanni di Paolo. I was ten years old. I kept looking back and forth. On the left, Saint John was standing in a jail cell. On the right, his body was still in the cell, but a swordsman had just cut off his head. Blood was spurting everywhere and the head was in midair. Suddenly I understood that paintings could tell a very complete story.” Saltz scratched his head. “As I’ve gotten older, the telling part has gotten more layered. I’m looking for what the artist is trying to say and what he or she is accidentally saying, what the work reveals about society and the timeless conditions of being alive. I love abstraction, but I even look at that kind of work for narrative content.”

  Saltz looked affectionately at Roberta to see if she wanted to add anything. She returned his gaze with a smile.

  7:00 P.M. I’m stuck in slow traffic on my way to Chelsea, the gallery district that Saltz refers to as “the trenches.” Not long ago I had a conversation with Jack Bankowsky, the editor of Artforum between 1992 and 2003, now an editor at large. Dressed like a dandy in a jacket, vest, and tie of remarkably well coordinated plaids, he has a style that contrasts markedly with Griffin’s. Bankowsky became editor of Artforum shortly after the art market collapsed in 1990. “It was close to the bone when I took over,” he explained. “The health of the magazine was in question. We all worked on the assumption that no money was being made and that we were benefiting from the largesse of Tony” (Tony Korner, the principal owner). By the time Bankowsky stepped down, Artforum was no longer operating in the red, but a “hard times” mentality nevertheless pervaded the corporate culture of the magazine. “It has always been grueling to produce Artforum,” said Bankowsky. “People work extremely long hours and they’re always on the edge. I had this fear when I was the editor that it was my fault, but now that I’m gone, producing the magazine is just as much like passing a stone as it ever was.” In fact, Bankowsky may have inherited the magazine’s extreme work ethic from his predecessor Ingrid Sischy, who was notorious for conducting all-night editing sessions.

  In describing his editorial approach, Bankowsky spoke about the importance of being a connoisseur of art criticism. “It’s typical for people who are interested in theorists like Rosalind Krauss to abhor writers like Peter Schjeldahl, but I like the best work from the warring camps and attempted to court them both,” he explained. Even though the supplementary status of criticism makes it a “fraught enterprise,” Bankowsky believes that criticism influences the way people think about art. “Trickle-down criticism plays a big role in the market and the way art moves through the world,” he said. “Someone like Benjamin Buchloh—counterintuitively, given his leftist disposition—has an enormous amount of influence on the way art is validated in the marketplace.”

  The power of Artforum, according to Bankowsky, lies in its seriousness. “You have to understand the pieties,” he told me. “Seriousness at Artforum and in the art world in general is a commodity. Certain kinds of gallerists may want the magazine to be serious even if they have no real coordinates for distinguishing a serious article from the empty signifier of seriousness abused.” Bankowsky implied that mainstream New York intellectuals’ disdain for “art world yahoo faux scholars” was often well founded. “I was always trying to combat art world quackery, but I found that it was next to impossible,” he said. “There are structural things about the magazine that make sustaining basic professional standards tough. Its internationalism necessitates reviews in translation; they’re often delirious and/or wacky and present editorial difficulties that you just don’t get in a mainstream magazine. And Artforum’s relationship to academe means that some contributors are trafficking in academic lingo but don’t know what they’re talking about, while others have an important point to make but they’re accustomed to contributing to specialized journals that don’t put a premium on graceful essay-writing.” Either way, art criticism’s “weird lingua franca” was at its worst when played back in gallery press releases.

  As we were concluding our conversation, I mentioned an artist friend without a dealer who hated Artforum because it was “exclusive, incestuous, self-important, and self-congratulatory.” Bankowsky laughed and said, “All those things are true. That’s its brand identity, but it could be self-satisfied about worse things.”

  My cab pulls up at Paula Cooper Gallery, which sits on both the north and south sides of West Twenty-first Street—and on chapter 1 of the February issue of Artforum. Founded in 1968 and having represented many important minimalists, not to mention having paid for the notorious 1974 Lynda Benglis ad, the gallery has a long history with the magazine. Nowadays most of Paula Cooper’s ads contain no image. Every month the gallery issues a straightforward announcement in a no-frills font of the artists’ exhibitions, their opening dates, and the addresses of the gallery’s two spaces. The color of the lettering and background changes, but the format remains the same. An aide told me that Cooper doesn’t like to run text over an image and she wants the work to have a lot of space around it. She has always sought a purist experience of art, so she struggles with illustrations.

  A glance in the guest book and the sight of a red signature confirms that Artforum’s front man is here. Landesman likes to be out seeing and understanding the art. “If you’re tuned into the galleries’ programs,” he told me earlier, “you have a sense of when it is an important moment for them, when they are ready to step up the size of their ads or take out another one for a museum show. In general, you never push for an ad, but sometimes you know when it is smart for them and when they’ll be happy they did it
.” I eventually spot the elfin publisher chatting up a long-legged gallery assistant and recall that he loves the art world because “it’s a neutral ground where people meet and interact in a way that’s different from their class ghettos.” I try to get a view of the Walid Raad exhibition, but the large rectangular room is so crowded with students from Cooper Union (where Raad teaches), CAA art historians (where the Lebanese conceptualist is fashionable), fellow artists (like his stablemates Hans Haacke and Christian Marclay), and assorted others that I can’t do so without backing into people and stepping on toes.

  9:00 P.M. takes me back to Artforum’s offices. The building feels entirely empty except for the group of editors who sit around the production table eating Thai noodles out of cardboard takeout boxes. “Come, join us around the campfire,” says Griffin as I enter. “We were just having a bona fide editorial exchange, but you missed it,” he adds as he takes a swig of beer.

  “We can recreate it!” offers Schambelan, to whom I had been voicing my frustration that their office didn’t offer enough dynamic interaction.

  “Yes, Elizabeth, please lead us in prayer,” says Griffin.

  There is silence while the editors eat. Fresh red gerbera daisies now dignify all the desks.

  “We were talking rather aimlessly about the next few installments of ‘1000 Words,’” offers Griffin. “1000 Words” is a regular Artforum column in which artists discuss a recent or upcoming project in their own (by necessity often highly edited) words.

  “1000 Words for the summer issue…,” says Scott Rothkopf, a senior editor who has gone part-time to finish his PhD. “I did recently hear from our dear friend Francesco Vezzoli about his project for the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. It sounds like a made-to-measure ‘1000 Words.’”

  “Francesco’s been working you like a flower in a window box,” teases Griffin with a typically outfield simile.

  “He’s going to stage a series of mock election campaign commercials, vaguely Republican versus Democrat, starring Sharon Stone and Bernard-Henri Lévy,” says Rothkopf, undeterred. “People will read the issue, then four days later get on a plane and see it in Venice.”

  “Then they’ll reach for a drink.” Griffin chuckles. “That sounds fine. Let’s go ahead, but carefully, because I’m sure there’ll be plenty of press. Could you tell him that it would be a huge turnoff if he gave the same statement to Flash Art?”

  One by one, the editors return to their desks to resume sweeping and clarifying their texts. “I’m groggy because I just crossed one finish line and we’ve all got a few more to run,” explains Griffin with a groan. “We have finally come to a point where we are closing the issues in a reasonable fashion, and at this point in the season we’re all fried.” Indeed, the art world has expanded and picked up speed. With all the money flowing in and the extra editorial pages to fill, I imagine, it is difficult to keep up the pace. As an editor in boom times, Griffin has the luxury of ignoring commercial pressures and pursuing a rarefied exchange about art. “The mission of the magazine is to privilege the art.” He sighs. “It’s the only way to bring meaning to all of this. Otherwise, we’re just killing trees.”

  6

  The Studio Visit

  9:04 A.M. The glossy red marble lobby of the Westin Tokyo, like most hotels in the city, is dotted with stewards who bow their heads as guests walk by. Tim Blum and Jeff Poe, whom I last saw in Basel, stand by the front doors with their arms folded, their feet planted firmly apart. They glare at me through their Ray-Bans when I arrive a few minutes late, then we set off on our day trip to see an important new work. For seven years the Los Angeles dealers have been observing the artistic evolution of Takashi Murakami’s Oval Buddha. It still needs to be covered in platinum leaf, but the sculpture, with the budget of a small independent Hollywood film, is otherwise finished. The eighteen-foot-tall self-portrait is sitting in a foundry in Toyama, an industrial town on the northwest coast of Japan, awaiting an audience.

  “Haneda Airport, please,” says Blum in fluent Japanese. The taxi is polished black on the outside with the conventional white lace seat covers on the inside. The driver is wearing white gloves and a surgical face mask. He looks like an extra in a bioterrorism B movie, but here it’s the sartorial norm for those with colds and bad allergies. On the back of his seat, a sign informs us that our driver’s hobbies are (1) baseball, (2) fishing, and (3) driving.

  Poe is sitting in the front seat. He has jet lag and a hangover. Blum and I have taken the back. Blum lived in Japan for four years. “I really enjoy speaking the language,” he tells me. “It’s theater to me. I would have loved to have been an actor.” He is tanned and has a week’s worth of stubble. He wears a skull ring that sometimes brings him good luck. “Schimmel says that I look like a deranged movie star,” he adds, flashing his white teeth self-mockingly. While Blum may be a generic leading man, Poe resembles the Dude as played by Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski.

  Paul Schimmel, the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, will also be flying to Toyama today. His solo retrospective of Murakami’s work, entitled “© MURAKAMI,” opens in four months and is supposed to culminate with Oval. Blum leans toward the front seat. “Schimmel has been quadruple-dipping!” he complains with a half-laugh. “First we donate a hundred thousand dollars toward the exhibition. Second, Larry, Perrotin, and we pay for the advertising.” He is referring to Murakami’s New York and Parisian dealers, Larry Gagosian and Emmanuel Perrotin. “Third, we have to air-freight Oval so it arrives on time. And fourth, we’re expected to buy a few twenty-five-thousand-dollar tables for the gala.” Blum turns to me. “Ask Poe about money. That’s a trauma. He hates to spend.”

  Poe slowly shakes his head without lifting it from the headrest. “Schimmel has made history repeatedly,” he says in a monotone. “He’s done some scholarly shit and some spectacular shows. It’s money well spent—peanuts compared to what we’ve poured into fabricating Oval.” Poe swigs his spring water, then hugs the two-liter bottle. “Oval has enormous significance to us, and not just because it’s the gallery’s biggest-budget production to date.” When Blum & Poe opened in 1994, the partners sold Cuban cigars out the back of the gallery to help make ends meet. Even in 1999, when they showed Murakami’s work in an “Art Statements” booth at Art Basel, they had to ask people from other stands to help them lift the work because they couldn’t afford installers. “Seeing this piece,” continues Poe, “will be emotional.”

  A living artist’s first major retrospective is a time of reckoning, not just for critics, curators, and collectors but for the artist himself and his dealers. According to Blum, it is not surprising that the forty-five-year-old Murakami should be “validated” in a foreign land. “Japan is a homogeneous culture. They don’t like it when someone sticks out too much. They want to pound ’em back in.” Blum looks out the window as we drive through an intersection with dizzying electronic signage. “The status of creativity is much lower here,” he continues. “The art market is weak, and there isn’t a well-established museum network for contemporary art. Dissemination is difficult.”

  In order to maximize his impact and pursue all his interests, Murakami runs a company called Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., which has ninety employees in and around Tokyo and New York. The company is involved in what his dealers call an “insane” range of activities. It makes art. It designs merchandise. It acts as a manager, agent, and producer for seven other Japanese artists. It runs an art-fair-cum-festival called Geisai, and it does multimillion-dollar freelance work for fashion, TV, and music companies. (When said in reverse, Kaikai Kiki forms a Japanese adjective, kikikaikai, which is used to refer to uneasy, strange, or disturbing phenomena.)

  “Takashi is an incredibly complicated man, but he’s not precious, and there’s no horseshit,” says Blum. “His father was a taxi driver, but Takashi has a PhD…and he has curated a truly epic trilogy of exhibitions exploring Japanese visual culture.” The third exhibition, entitled �
�Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture,” which was installed at the Japan Society in New York in 2005, won several awards.

  One of Murakami’s most visible commissions has been for the accessories giant Louis Vuitton. In 2000 the company’s artistic director, Marc Jacobs, asked Murakami to reenvision “monogram canvas,” the company’s century-old signature pattern in which the beige and brown initials LV float in a field of four-petal flower and diamond shapes. Three Murakami designs were put into production, and one of them, “multicolor,” which used thirty-three candy colors on white and black backgrounds, was so successful that it became a standard line. Murakami then turned the tables on the big brand by pulling it into his own oeuvre with a series of paintings that consist of nothing but the multicolor LV pattern. “The Vuitton paintings are going to be important later on,” declares Poe. “People just don’t realize it yet. They look at them as branding and that’s boring, but they’re as superflat as anything he’s done,” he says, using Murakami jargon to refer to the way the artist’s works flatten the distinctions between art and luxury goods, high and popular culture, East and West.

  As we drive by a canal and catch a glimpse of the red-and-white Eiffel-like structure called the Tokyo Tower, I ask, What is a dealer’s role in the studio?