Got my Art Forum today. Removed the protective plastic and had an unusual haptic experience; one I don’t usually associate with the handling of this age old art world "institution": I could lift the thing with one hand! I could roll it, I could wave it, I could play with it, I could easily open it to read. I knew something was seriously weird because, for the first time in years, it looked like a magazine and not a cube!
In the summer of ’07 I got an Art Forum I could barely carry from the mailbox to my house; it was the fattest Art Forum I had ever seen. And the haptic experience I had then has led me to want to dissect the damn thing and get to know it intimately by reproducing it by hand like an illustrated manuscript (not quite, but sorta). That issue, at the height of our lend and spend spree, had grown to the whopping size of 541 pages, with 3/4 of them being devoted to advertising. This latest issue has a mere 240 pages! The magazine has not been this thin since 2004! I have not done a head count of advertising pages versus “content” yet, but my guess is that advertising is down my a good 30-40 %, mirroring the plunge in the Stock Market; after all, auction house sales are down by that much.
In the summer of ’07 I got an Art Forum I could barely carry from the mailbox to my house; it was the fattest Art Forum I had ever seen. And the haptic experience I had then has led me to want to dissect the damn thing and get to know it intimately by reproducing it by hand like an illustrated manuscript (not quite, but sorta). That issue, at the height of our lend and spend spree, had grown to the whopping size of 541 pages, with 3/4 of them being devoted to advertising. This latest issue has a mere 240 pages! The magazine has not been this thin since 2004! I have not done a head count of advertising pages versus “content” yet, but my guess is that advertising is down my a good 30-40 %, mirroring the plunge in the Stock Market; after all, auction house sales are down by that much.
Although I am delighted to have a magazine I can actually carry around with me, this is a bad thing; just one more concrete sign of the troubles around and ahead of us (translate into: job losses for thousands). The economic downturn in the '70's led to conceptual art and art of the Other, and the one in the 80's gave us Uber-macho post-modern art; now that this latest bubble has burst, it remains to be seen what kind of art will be produced in this market.
Thank "god" you exhist.
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