The deadliest conflict for journalists in the history of the Modern state. The most diabolical work of art in art history. The mother of all issues. Artforum’s original design and logo was not set in Anzeigen-Grotesk nor the highly similar Akzidenz-Grotesk. That would have been too expensive for a graphic designer at the San Francisco Art Institute to afford, even if he could get his hands on The original Artforum logo was cut with a razor blade and black tape. One must not forget that objectivity and utility are also a punk ethos.
Machiavelli talks about how a people that is ruled is easier to conquer than a people that has no ruler, because the people who are used to freedom will want their freedom, whereas to discipline those already disciplined is much easier.
Strange that companies don’t hire individuals anymore: they hire networks. Here’s what we can expect in the near future, not just at Artforum, but amidst any institutional restructuring: the greater the turn in the labor force, the greater the need for bureaucracy.
References to norms, criteria or other results-based coordination mechanisms cost less than training.
-must invent new goals -must control or eliminate resistance -must mediate tensions -must keep job
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Rising from the collapse of protocol around a conflict that changes the costs of war correspondence, because it is so deadly, is a political form of fiction that troubles the dominant class of figurative expressions used when talking about institutions. Last November, Vanity Fair broke news of the brittle costs of corporate consolidation in the Cool Industry: a violent (i.e. heavyhanded) purge of senior leadership, a moral upheaval for the reinstatement of bureaucratic norms, a swift spin on turn of events. Did the thousands of of institutional actors who signed “An Open Letter from the Art Community to Cultural Organizations” have a political motive? Or are individuals, like the institutions they enact, susceptible to reinterpretation as they try to align with how they are seen and want to be remembered? In a 2013 issue of Artforum, Bob Niklas recalled the August 1969 issue of Artforum as a “slender affair”. Nicklas writes: “In a notebook entry dated May 8, 1969, Lee Lozano proposed Throwing Up Piece: ‘Throw the last twelve issues of Artforum up in the air.’ Today, this would be a near impossibility—a clear sign of the current weight of commerce and how it has tipped the scales in recent decades.”
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Responding to “distress” on the part of the greater insitutional community that an “open letter recently posted on Artforum,” endorsed by “…producer and musician Brian Eno, designer Martin Margiela…writers for Artforum, both freelance and staffers,” Penske gave Velasco two hours to neutralize the most polarizing and complex issue facing 21st century journalism, or lose his job. The letter, supporters around Dominique Levy rallied, did not go far enough to “acknowledge the ongoing mass hostage emergency, the historical context, and the atrocities committed in Israel on October 7, 2023—the bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust.” Velasco couldn’t reconcile the political question with his professional obligations. Neither could his staff. When Velasco was fired, Artforum’s editorial board, its readership and an army of international freelance art workers stood with him. For the past nine months, the reinterpretation as Artforum tries to align with the way it sees itself as an institution and wants to see itself in the future has been up in the air. Vanity Fair’s coverage traces a few premises under which institutional collapse could be causally necessitated by a Google doc. But, like Charlotte Kent’s survey of recent museum protests in this summer’s slender affair, these narratives stop short of throwing up into the air the ‘pile of show announcements, press release material, all printed matter related to the art scene’. This is what we talk about when we talk about institutional policy.
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“For me,” writes the artist Andrea Fraser, “the idea that some of us are born with greater sensitivity to beauty, or a greater ability to perceive form, or a greater capacity to be moved by color and line, can never be anything other than a figment of what Bourdieu called the ‘self-legitimating imagination of the happy few’: one of those essentialist ideologies deployed by the culturally—and generally also economically— privileged in order to convince themselves and others of their entitlement.”
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Here’s what happened, “really”: often, deadline pressure overpowers a team. Artforum has been accostumed to this since 1962. But over the course of the 2010’s, the pace of progressive media through social media platforms such as instagram or twitter overwhelmed already tight schedules with changing requirements, an uncertainty of audience and an uneven distribution of skills amongst generational actors. Oh, and by the way: everyone has a new computer. And an $800 calculator. And a social media reach.
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I think what surprised everyone about the Artforum fallout was the Cargo Cult. Yes, market forces were at play. But the way rumor, interference, demands and fix-it-now-or-else intervened with what—a decade ago—would have given rise to a dedicated working group and shift in organizational principle, amounted to no more than a “someone must be punished” solution. Let’s look at the contours of what went down earlier this Eternal October: “We can’t control this” “We need to act fast” “This is going to hurt” “We will get our message across” “We’re only going to say this once” Sound familiar? An editorial community faced with the risk of publicity’s waywardness found its containment strategy inadequate when it came to Penske Media. The writers stuck to their guns. At the end of the day, an organizational failure is an organizations failure. Why is it so often necessary to pin the failure on the donkey that we burdened with leading the whole stupid ritual in the first place? And this is what’s primitive: a round of fires like a round of chemo, targeting a person or people particularly troublesome, at the cost of a body politic. At the great cost of a body politic. Velasco’s value becomes someone to fire without damaging the organization, the same way as before— when his value was someone to speak without damaging the organization. We mourn the loss of humanity that weighs like the knowledge of the valley of death over the entire world. We fear the fragmentation of an art institution already in decline. But we ask: how much of this institution’s method was fixating and normalizing in the face of inhumanity to begin with? How much of Artforum sustained a needlessly decadent architecture of responsibility-passing that limited its substantial evolution— despite the magazine’s identity as an “evolved” platform?