L.A.’s Successfully Serious Art Magazine Turning 5 : Publishing: Editor Gary Kornblau’s bimonthly, Art issues., survives despite the volatility of the art audience.

Gary Kornblau admits it. He’s off-kilter, and so is his magazine, Art issues. A book-and-movie devotee who doesn’t even like magazines, Kornblau started his publishing venture five years ago for two reasons: to avoid writing his dissertation on 17th-Century French philosopher Rene Descartes and to have something to read.

“I was always interested in visual culture. It was just something I liked to do, but there wasn’t anything (in the field) I liked to read,” says the 32-year-old editor, who holds forth in a tiny office adjacent to his hillside house near Hollywood Bowl. “I wanted to read interesting and coherent writing about issues of art, so I scrounged together enough money for one issue--about $30,000 in start-up costs.”

Suspicious of art magazines that he believes are driven by theory or commerce, and intrigued by a wider range of subjects than those publications cover, he set out to create something entirely different: a forum for serious but readable discussion on the relationships between popular culture and fine art.

“I had no idea if it would fly,” he says.

Kornblau wasn’t the only one who had doubts. New York-based critic Peter Schjeldahl recalls “laughing in Gary’s face” when Kornblau spoke of his plans and solicited contributions.

“I thought he was crazy,” Schjeldahl says. “I thought it would be a silly vanity magazine.” But Schjeldahl, who has cheerfully eaten crow and even contributed to a recent issue, now praises the magazine’s “great pitch of seriousness and insouciance.”

Being off-kilter by art-world standards seems to be Kornblau’s secret to success. Art issues. is celebrating its fifth birthday in a city that is not known for supporting art publishing--and in an economic climate that has killed several magazines, closed dozens of galleries and reduced the operations of major museums all across the country.

Furthermore, Kornblau’s publication is receiving critical accolades. Most impressive is that Art issues. Press’ first book, “The Invisible Dragon,” a collection of four essays on beauty by Dave Hickey, has won the College Art Assn.’s 1994 Frank Jewett Mather Award. The award, granted each year for distinction in art criticism, will be presented on Feb. 18 at CAA’s annual meeting in New York.

The recognition is gratifying, in part because the prize is a symbolic vote of confidence in a projected series to be published in lieu of the magazine’s summer issues. And although the Hickey book is a small paperback, its very existence and relative permanence gives the magazine “more of a life,” Kornblau says.

Talking about the development of his vision, Kornblau makes quick work of his life before Art issues. For the record, he grew up in Pasadena, studied philosophy at UC Berkeley and Columbia University, and returned to Los Angeles to write his dissertation on Descartes’ theory of knowledge, which he calls “pretty dry, analytical stuff.”

Instead, he started a magazine that prints everything from heretical views of Disney fantasies to reviews of exhibitions in Los Angeles galleries. A essay by Hickey on the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas was featured in what Kornblau calls his “most famous issue.”

Other numbers have carried such offbeat fare as a treatise on hair by David Humphrey and an essay on collecting baseball cards by Colin Gardner. In the current “fifth anniversary” issue, Bernard Welt’s “Mythomania” column addresses “St. Dorothy of Oz,” while Libby Lumpkin’s “A History of the Smile” traces the subject of upturned mouths from archaic Greek statues and Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” to smiley face buttons.

“We treat all different aspects of culture, but in the context of the art world,” Kornblau says. “I don’t have a theoretical or political ax to grind. I let art and culture dictate subjects. The idea is to look at things intelligently and turn them upside down.”

Although the magazine has evolved over five years, it has always focused on relationships between art and entertainment.

“It’s not about treating popular art as distinct from high art--or saying that the two come together--but treating entertainment seriously and treating art seriously,” Kornblau says.

Fundamentally, however, the point is not to “teach or inform through art, but to live through art,” he says. “I’m not interested in art that critiques culture or informs people, or in art that is didactic, cynical or ironic, but in art that lives with people.”

He founded the magazine in 1988 with designer Linda Norlen, who came up with a scheme for a black-and-white-plus-one-color format that sets Art issues. apart from the usual throwaways and full-color glossies. Her ongoing contributions as the magazine’s designer are essential to its survival, according to Kornblau.

But Art issues. is “Gary’s show,” as Hickey puts it. He’s talking about a one-man operation in which Kornblau functions as editor, secretary, ad salesman, fund-raiser and strategist. Having sunk a total of $50,000 into the enterprise, Kornblau ran out of money in 1991 and decided the solution was to apply for nonprofit status. It was granted the following year when the Foundation for Advanced Critical Studies, a nonprofit, public-benefit corporation, became publisher of the magazine.

“The magazine isn’t mine anymore. I only run it,” Kornblau says. About 70% of the budget is funded through contributions, including grants from the Lannan Foundation, the Peter Norton Family Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council and the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. The remaining 30% comes from advertising. Kornblau raised $14,000 during the first year of the magazine’s nonprofit existence and $20,000 this year.

Kornblau says he spends too much time on fund-raising and hates every minute of it. To make matters worse, he doesn’t believe in nonprofit status. “I think that if there isn’t enough money to keep something alive, there’s no reason for it to exist,” he says, “but here I am running a nonprofit. This is the only way that this kind of thing can exist.”

The bimonthly magazine reaches about 9,000 people in the course of a year, he says. In addition to 2,000 paid subscriptions (at $35 a year), free copies are mailed to artists, writers, libraries and art schools. About 60% of the circulation is in California, 30% is in New York and the remainder is scattered across the country.

Although he claims emotional and financial support from New York, Kornblau believes Los Angeles is where it’s at, culturally speaking.

“Art issues. is an American magazine about American culture,” he says. “Everything is being Americanized. European art is interesting to the extent that it is dealing with American art, and American art is interesting to the extent that it is dealing with Los Angeles . . . I think we should be provincial as hell. Who cares? We’ve got it all.”

While depending upon such well-known figures as Hickey to get the unorthodox word out, Kornblau makes a practice of working with young, inexperienced writers. Indeed, he says, “What I feel most proud of is giving voices a forum from which they can develop.” The magazine currently has about 30 writers, 15 of whom are regular contributors.

The writers are encouraged to pursue their own interests, but Art issues. is not a democratic operation. “It’s about developing taste,” Kornblau says. “Writers develop more thoughtful taste in the process of writing, and then they have something to say . . . One of the most sophisticated relations one can have with art is sitting down and writing about it.”

But success--no matter how modest or hard won--creates a sense of duty.