PARTISAN REVIEW
565
ignored by museums and attacked by everyone else.
Art News
was an insider's
magazine, the house organ of action painting. Its contents usually came
straight from conversations at the Cedar Bar, translated for the outsider public
by editor Thomas B. Hess or critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Green–
berg. A coterie magazine, committed to the New York School,
Art News
nevertheless ran hundreds of reviews in every issue, thereby deflecting some of
the spotlight to cover the whole of the art community.
In addition the art community in those days was considerably smaller than
it is today. In a recent filmed interview, Robert Motherwell commented that
there were "perhaps fifty modern artists in New York" in the late forties,
and that for the most part, they all knew each other, visited each other's studios
and gave each other the courage to survive. Today, by contrast, there are tens
of thousands of artists in New York, not to mention the rest of the country.
They do not generally know each other, nor do they frequent the same
restaurants and bars, exhibit together in mutual recognition of common
ground, or give each other solace. Instead they compete for the attention of
critics and curators which may raise them to prominence above the burgeoning
crowd of their peers. While personal communication has broken down, the
network of information provided by the widely disseminated art press has
grown in importance. In addition to the regular artjournals,
Art in America, Art
International, Arts, Art News
and
Artforum,
there is a raft of new internationally
distributed tabloid magazines such as
Art Press, Artetudes, Avalanche, Flash Art,
and
Data
that document earth works, conceptual art, performance and
ephemeral art, video, etc.-in short, all those activities that reject the context of
the museum and , theoretically, in their refusal to create-object-commodities,
the ethics of the marketplace. Functioning as a substitute frame of reference
for the museum, the total art press now represents a media alternative to
exhibitions. As a result, art concepts, if not art works, can be disseminated via
documentary photOgraphs, artists' journals and critical commentary on
ephemeral events. Because of the transient, topical quality of media, which
appear in a timed sequence, but can be stored indefinitely, as opposed to the
stable context of museum exhibitions which have an afterlife only as
catalogues, artists today can have careers that are as insubstantial as the Paris
air bottled by Marcel Duchamp, who anticipated this whole phenomenon in his
portable
Boile-en-Valise,
containi~g
printed reproductions of his works.
Indeed it is no exaggeration to say that all the latest developments (with the
possible exception of "land art" or Earthworks which uses landscape as a
canvas) were already quite thoroughly explored by Duchamp; and that the
minions ofartists crowding the field of his lengthening penumbra are involved
in little more than illustrated exegeses of his work. It seems noteworthy in this
connection that no one seems capable of dealing with the complexity of
