Art magazines and their impact (1976)
artdesigncafé | Creative Business & Entrepreneurship | 23 December 2011
This article was previously published in Studio International, (193/983), September / October 1976 with the title "Internal memorandum".
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A display unit produced by Nicholas Wegner shown at The Gallery, London in March-April 1976. Wegner, the artist-director of The Gallery, is developing the notion of "Standard art". He argues that since art marketed through the gallery system becomes standardised, this process should be made explicit. The standardisation and packaging of art is carried to greater extremes in art magazines. Wegner’s display is based on the premise that the package— the art magazine— has become more impressive as art than most of the art it describes and illustrates. The Artforum display unit— and art gallery’s homage to an art magazine— is also a tribute to the fact that in recent years the power of the art magazine to define and legitimise new developments in art has become greater than that of the art gallery and museum.
The art press: an exhibition on the history of art periodicals at the Victoria & Albert Museum... an international conference on the art periodical at Sussex University in April 1976 and another at Bologna the following month... a surge of new art magazines in recent years... a spate of articles on the new magazines in established art journals... a display featuring Artforum at The Gallery, London... a whole issue of Studio International devoted to the subject of art magazines. There is no doubt that at the moment there is an unprecedented interest in the art magazine.
A harsh critic might argue that the burgeoning of titles is a forced growth caused by the frustrations of too many artists chasing too few galleries and collectors in a period of economic recession. And that the art magazine’s current self-obsession indicates that the diseases of narcissism and cannibalism typical of avant-garde art have now spread to the support languages of art. There is some truth in these views but they are not the whole story.
All magazines address themselves to readerships which are delimited in some way, either by age, sex, race, subject matter, locality, income, class, or by combinations of these factors; consequently all magazines may be described as specialised. Nevertheless, the charge of over-specialisation so often levelled against art magazines is a just one. In size the audience for an art magazine can extend from a few hundred to 50,000, a highly educated readership of cognoscenti located primarily in the urban centres of Europe and North America. The ingrown character of this art world is confirmed by the fact that most advertisements for art magazines appear in the columns of their rivals: they all compete for the same restricted readership. It is clear that the art magazines cannot themselves externalise beyond this narrow readership until the art they feature itself addresses a different audience. However, as the “Art & Social Purpose” issue of Studio confirmed, a significant number of artists are now working to that end. This welcome change of direction came about, in part at least, as a result of a process of self-reflection and self-criticism on the part of artists. An auto-critique by art magazines is therefore a necessary prelude to change.
The power to define art and to make art history
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Promotional claim by Studio International.
"Art has entered the media system", remarks Harold Rosenberg. [1] To the question "How then do we distinguish between the products of the media and works of art?" he answers: "The power of defining art is vested in art history, whose physical embodiment is the museum." The art magazine can also be regarded as a museum— in the sense of Malraux’s "museum without walls"— and given the expansion and growth in influence of the art magazine and art criticism in recent years, its power to define art and to determine art history is greater now than at any time since its emergence in the 18th century.
Art magazines: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Footnote:
[1] Harold Rosenberg. "Art and its double". Artworks and packages. (Dell, New York, 1971), pp. 11-23.
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