wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

sean. wha? isn't that how everything works? so that's bad?

In one sense its safe to say that Artforum is owned by its advertisers, and in this sense, its editors and contributers are just stockholders, and the start scholars are it's guarantors. It would be impossible for the publication to exist without them, and not only that, its status and symbolic value would cease to have weight too.

Speaking of the Russians and the art world, there is interesting writing by a Russian art historian and philosopher Boris Groys called On the New. There he arues that the very art concepts (and subsequently its representations in art forms) are being generated in the ways not unlike market commodities, where the ultimate value is innovation.
It is difficult not to agree with Sarah Thornton in that the relationships between the arts and economics are not that conceptually obvious.

Here is the link to Boris Groys's text:
http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/eng/art/groys1002/groys1002.html

A little inside dirt (pun intended) on Christie's. Employees must enter the building via a run down freight entrance. The department where I applied for a job was extremely run down in appearance: very old paint job, old and dirty carpeting and old (beige) out of date computers.
I was shocked because, before I went there for the interview, I said to myself that if I got the job (I didn't), Christie's would offer an excellent work environment.

I would like to know who owns Artforum
Jean-Marie

Isn't a lot of this frenzy of the finish-fetish a cynical or suicidal embrace of capitalism as described by Hal Foster in his book The Return of the Real? It's like today were repeating all all of what went on in the 80's and 90's.

I'm in the art field. It really sounds like she only did cursory research regarding the current art world. Why did she use such a small sample group and then claim they represent the whole picture? What is here background? She is right that there are compeeing factions, but very clueless about student's attitudes towards the market, curators, etc. They are very aware of this.

And what subculture is she talking about? And what about art bloggers???

One of your sponsors, a NYC auction gallery, has has several sales recently that came in at around 60% of their low estimate for the sale. This is consistent with what you're saying on the show today. Their figures are public information, btw, which is how I know this.