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Contemporary art, uncovered: a survey of major newspapers and weekly magazines suggests that visual art is steadily losing ground in the popular press, even as its audience—and market—grows exponentially

Art in America, Feb, 2007 by Peter Plagens

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When I started at our newspaper [more than 10 years ago], I filled two positions: the art job and [another field's] as well. I am now covering [still another field] as well. I am the arts writer at a newspaper that used to have three.

In spite of the fact that I'm the only staff critic of my kind in the whole region, I could well lose my job next month or have it reconfigured out of existence. (I'll be an arts critic/ suburban police beat reporter/newsboy.)

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National general-interest magazines haven't been doing any better. In what now seems like a golden age--the 1950s and '60s--the likes of Gene Baro, David Bourdon, E.C. Goossen, Thomas B. Hess, Barbara Rose, Harold Rosenberg, William Seitz, Alan Solomon and even Leo Steinberg wrote fairly frequently for glossies like Vogue about such artists as Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Bridget Riley and Ray Johnson. Although Life magazine famously ran a headline for a spread about Jackson Pollock that read, with what could easily be seen as sarcasm, "Is Jackson Pollock the greatest living painter in the United States?," the magazine did print a long piece under it. And at one time, it published the transcript--running into thousands of words--of a discussion about avant-garde painting among art luminaries who included Meyer Schapiro and Clement Greenberg. Art-friendly editors like Alexander Liberman at Vogue, Kermit Lansner at Newsweek and Dorothy Seiberling at Life established patterns that kept art coverage in popular-press magazines at a respectable level through the 1970s and '80s.

Then things started to change. Newsweek--which treated me most kindly as a staffer for 15 years and has treated me respectfully as an occasional contributor since 2003--and Time turn out to be subject to the same larger forces affecting daily newspapers in the heartland. Their subscriber bases, which account for more than 90 percent of total circulation, are aging. Younger readers are difficult to get into the fold. Competition from the Internet is forcing news magazines to morph even more radically than they had to when TV news came into its own in the late 1960s. Slender profit margins have become anorexic. Everybody must make do with less. When I joined Newsweek in 1989, writers more or less singly dedicated to their fields of expertise covered theater, music concerts/opera/dance, and art. No more. And while I don't know the inner workings of Time magazine, I do know that there's no full-time staff replacement for the retired Robert Hughes.

When I joined Newsweek, I went to work in the "Culture" section; by the time I left the staff, the section's name had become "Arts and Entertainment." A more accurate rubric would have been "Entertainment and Arts." Paired with the word "arts," the word "entertainment" has something of the same delegitimatizing effect it has when attached to the word "sports." Of course, all spectator sports are entertainment, but the overt addition of the E-word indicates that the contest in question, e.g., professional wrestling, is just a tarted-up facsimile of a real sport. The combat is phony and the outcome is scripted. When "entertainment" is caboosed to "arts" a somewhat similar adulteration occurs.

Contemporary art, uncovered: a survey of major newspapers and weekly magazines suggests that visual art is steadily losing ground in the popular press, even as its audience—and market—grows exponentially

Art in America, Feb, 2007 by Peter Plagens

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