ART : Playing to the Galleries : Artspace moves west and raises new hopes (and old doubts) about whether the city can support a glossy cultural magazine

Never mind the recession. Forget that art journals are shrinking and dying all across the country. And don’t even think about the notoriously short lives of art magazines that have tried to make a go of it in Los Angeles during the last few decades.

Artspace: A Magazine of Contemporary Art has moved here from Albuquerque with the support of mega-collector Frederick R. Weisman and a plan to turn a 16-year-old regional publication into the high-profile magazine that the local art community has long believed it needs.

“From one of the country’s most active and influential art centers, Artspace will be monitoring the shock waves and seismic shifts as the art world of the ‘90s sorts itself out and finds a new balance in the midst of flux,” editor William Peterson writes in the January-April “special relaunch” double issue that recently arrived in mailboxes and appeared on news racks.

“The new Artspace will be flavored by its surroundings and by the challenging and original artists and critics who have chosen this place as their home. But Artspace will not be a regional publication. Its scope will be international, and its view of world art will be informed by fresh insights from around the globe.”

In person--now ensconced in sleek new offices in the Metro Arts building on Wilshire Boulevard--Peterson speaks in more restrained terms, but excitement permeates his conversation.

Well aware that he must slog through a recessionary climate and battle a chronic lack of confidence in L.A.-based art magazines, he bases his optimism on a few facts.

Most important, he says, is that “Artspace is not a start-up publication with no track record or established readership.” Unlike Los Angeles’ past publishing failures that had similar aspirations--including Images & Issues (1980-84) and Artcoast, which was launched with great fanfare in 1989 but died after the second issue--Artspace has been continuously published since 1976, expanding its coverage into California three years ago.

“It would take $1 million to get where we are now,” Peterson says. Artspace already has a circulation of 15,000 and it is available at more than 2,500 outlets including 50 museums. A subscription drive currently under way aims to boost circulation into the league of New York’s top four art magazines: Artnews leads with a circulation of about 75,000, followed by Art in America, 69,500; Artforum, 30,000, and Arts, 27,000.

Artspace’s annual subscription rate for six issues is $29.95--the same price as Art in America, a monthly. Artnews costs $32.95 for 10 issues; Arts, $34.95 for 11 issues; Artforum, $46 for 10 issues. Advertising rates at Artspace, ranging from $450 for a quarter-page in black and white to $2,095 for a full page in color, are about half to two-thirds of those charged by the East Coast competition, however.

Weisman, who is acting as a guarantor rather than an investor in Artspace, required Peterson to drop the publication’s nonprofit status and to design a business plan for a self-sufficient operation. The subscription drive is crucial to that plan; so is a campaign for advertisers.

The current 94-page issue contains ads for the Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Helter Skelter” exhibition, the L.A. County Museum of Art’s IBM-sponsored George Bellows show, Art Center College of Design’s educational program, Hal’s Bar & Grill, Rebecca’s restaurant and 46 galleries--32 of them in Southern California. It’s a respectable beginning, but Artspace will be in direct competition with many other magazines for advertising budgets as it struggles to win contracts and establish a strong commercial base.

“The major hurdle that Artspace faces is gallery support,” Peterson says. “Many of the leading galleries have made a commitment, but we must be able to create a strong unified front that adequately demonstrates the strength and complexity of the West Coast scene. We must have the major players strongly represented in the magazine. An art magazine without the leading galleries making an advertising commitment would be like Vogue without Armani and Chanel.”

One of the toughest questions about economic survival is how to win the loyal support of dealers while maintaining a distance between advertising and editorial content. Dealers are unlikely to advertise consistently in a magazine that never covers their shows or artists, but any appearance that ads buy reviews can quickly undermine a publication’s reputation.

“I feel that if I advertise in serious journals and I put on serious exhibitions, I won’t be overlooked,” says David McAuliffe, director of Angles Gallery in Santa Monica. But there are no guarantees. He has done most of his advertising in Artforum over the years because of the magazine’s prestige and readership, he says, but Artforum has reviewed his gallery less frequently than other magazines.

The current issue of Artspace also has an ad for Angles. “I think there’s a need for a publication coming out of Los Angeles, and I’m supporting those efforts,” McAuliffe says.

In terms of the economy, the timing of Artspace’s expansion is not fortuitous. Much better-established art magazines have experienced a sharp drop in advertising, reflected in decreased size, during the last year. Artnews averaged about 200 pages per issue from 1987 through 1990, but fell to an average of 168 pages in 1991 and slid to 150 pages early this year.

The plunge is even more precipitous at Art in America and Artforum. Both grew steadily through 1990, but Art in America dropped from an average of 224 pages in 1990 to 168 in 1991, and to 144 this year.

In the same period, Artforum fell from an average of 196 pages to 156, then slimmed down even more: 132 pages in January, 148 in February, 144 in March. Arts published 112-page issues quite consistently until last year when it slipped to 96 pages per issue.

Four other prominent art publications have folded in the last year:

- Contemporanea, an international contemporary art forum;

- The Journal of Art, a Rizzoli-owned newspaper that covered international news, features and reviews;

- Connoisseur, a Hearst publication for collectors;

- Artscribe, a London-based contemporary art magazine.

Faced with declining advertising, delayed payments and defaults, the Chicago-based New Art Examiner issued a plea for $60,000 in donations in its January issue and announced plans to combine the February and March issues to “buy some time.”

Economic realities aside, Peterson believes that his magazine has come to Los Angeles at the right time. “Our feeling is that Los Angeles has reached a stage of development in which it can confidently enter into the international dialogue and influence its course. The resources are in place. There are vast numbers of challenging and extraordinary artists working and showing here. The museums are operating at a high level,” he says.

“Despite the sluggishness of our national economy, a wide range of quality galleries has made Los Angeles one of the most active art scenes in the country, attracting artists and collectors from all over the world,” he says.

While the contemporary art scene has been hit hard by the recession, at least one new gallery seems to open for every closure. Sales of high-priced contemporary art have fallen sharply, but dealers report that the low end of the market is doing well and such areas as photography and early 20th-Century California art are thriving.

One reason for Artspace’s move to Los Angeles is “a surprising number of informed, qualified and talented critical writers who are now based here,” Peterson says. “As these voices join the international debate, drawing on the resources around them, the level of sophistication that exists here will have to be acknowledged and reckoned with on its own terms.”

Artspace will continue to publish the work of many free-lance writers. Peter Clothier, a poet, author of art-world mysteries, art critic and longtime observer of the L.A. art scene, is associate editor. Dave Hickey, Kenneth Baker, Peter Frank, Gus Blaisdell, Ben Marks, V. B. Price and Kathleen Shields are contributing editors.

Jan Schmitz, Peterson’s wife, is circulation director. Faye Stephenson recently moved to Los Angeles from the Bay Area to become advertising director, and Ruanna Waldrum is office manager.

Peterson’s pro-L.A. pitch should be music to the ears of a large segment of the local art community, which has long expressed dismay over Los Angeles’ lack of a glossy magazine that can stand up to New York’s big four. Ever since 1967, when Art and Architecture ceased publication and Artforum moved from Los Angeles to New York, many cultural critics have contended that the main obstacle to Los Angeles becoming a major art center is its failure to cultivate and sustain a significant art press.

The printed word is one of the most powerful reasons for artists to move to New York, according to painter and Newsweek art critic Peter Plagens, who left Los Angeles a decade ago. “In New York, ideas on pages simply matter more than they do in L.A. . . . The upshot is that L.A. has no venue for the sustained discussion of art. It lacks, in short, a viable art magazine,” he wrote in the 1989 inaugural issue of Artcoast.

Artcoast failed to become that “viable art magazine.” But contrary to popular belief, Los Angeles is the home of several periodicals devoted to visual art, including three nonprofit magazines:

- Art issues., a slim, bimonthly journal of criticism founded in 1989, is highly respected for the intellectual level and originality of its editorial content.

- Visions, a substantial quarterly established in 1986, covers the West Coast art scene, concentrating on artists who are emerging or approaching mid-career.

- High Performance, a quarterly founded in 1978 by Linda Frye Burnham to document performance art, now addresses a variety of new art forms for an avant-garde audience and is published in association with CalArts.

(Art Scene, a commercial publication now in its 10th year, is primarily a guide to Southern California art exhibitions, but it includes critical previews and commentary on current issues.)

All these publications have survived on small budgets, enormous effort and finding a market niche. They would be sorely missed if they ceased operation, but they tend to be overlooked in laments about Los Angeles’ art publishing failures because they don’t fit the model of New York’s prominent magazines, which have grown from European art traditions and view themselves as arbiters of the international art scene.

What Peterson has in mind is the familiar New York model--with a West Coast viewpoint. Indeed, he calls his concept “an Art in America for west of the Hudson”--a magazine that would have the same scope as the best-known New York publications but be grounded in the West. Instead of running a couple of token Los Angeles exhibition reviews in the back of the book, he envisions publishing critical letters from New York and other cities in the context of Los Angeles.

As to the content, Peterson says, “Our main focus has always been on individuals and that will continue.”

The magazine dropped its review section when it began to cover California three years ago, but it will begin publishing exhibition reviews in the next issue along with longer articles on artists. “We may add a little section of news or lighter feature items . . . to balance weightier discussions,” he says, “but we don’t want to duplicate Art in America’s news pages.”

Peterson’s plan is ambitious, but it’s also a bid for survival. Artspace, which was founded as a nonprofit corporation, nearly perished a year ago when advertising fell 30%, Peterson says. Forced to cut his bimonthly publishing schedule in half, he began looking for investors. Eventually Weisman agreed to back the magazine, not by pouring money into it but by guaranteeing its financial operation and agreeing to take it over in case of default.

What are Artspace’s chances of success? The magazine’s champions point to the fact that it has already come a considerable distance, while detractors say it still has a long way to go to achieve commercial and critical success.

The magazine has grown from a narrow, regional journal about Southwestern art to a broader forum with grand ambitions, but it has picked up expensive baggage. Peterson started the magazine with $500 in the bank in 1976 while he was working on a doctorate in art history at the University of New Mexico. In those days, it cost about $1,200 to publish 1,000 copies of a 50-page magazine. The first year’s expenses added up to about $8,000, he says. Now it costs $30,000 to print one issue, and the full cost of production per bimonthly issue is $60,000.

Artspace also faces perplexing philosophical questions about the kind of magazine that can be successful in Los Angeles in the ‘90s and beyond. Gary Kornblau, editor of Art issues., for example, questions the logic of publishing a traditional art magazine in Los Angeles.

“The city doesn’t have a history of being steeped in European art traditions, which is the basis of most art magazines,” Kornblau says. Its traditions are different, which is why his magazine publishes critical commentary on relationships between art and film, television, architecture, pop culture, celebrities and Hollywood. “That’s Los Angeles,” he says.

High Performance editor Steven Durland also believes Los Angeles is in a distinctive position in terms of publishing.

“When you are on the West Coast, you have to be aware that people on the East Coast and in Europe aren’t interested in what you have to say unless it’s about something they aren’t already thinking about,” he says.

But Durland believes that Artspace may be in a good position to survive. “It has an infrastructure and a track record. It won’t have to go through a major marketing campaign. It could be a model for success,” Durland says.

On the other hand, he says, “If it fails, that will tell us something.”