Taking Issue With Ideas About Art

By CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT

Jan. 7, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES ART CRITIC

When Gary Kornblau launched his magazine, Art issues.--as in, Art issues, period--in 1988, he thought it would keep him busy for a while until he figured out what to do with his life. The magazine’s 10th anniversary issue, which hits newsstands this week, was not part of the plan.

A Los Angeles native with degrees in philosophy from UC Berkeley and Columbia, Kornblau began the magazine with a strong interest in contemporary art and an equally forceful disinterest in most of what he was reading about it. With no experience in publishing and $25,000 to print the first issue, he has since grown a publication that, together with the London-based journal Frieze, has been very much in sync with the 1990s. Readership, the publisher and editor says, has risen to about 10,000--approximately 25% of that in Southern California, 25% in New York and the remainder throughout the rest of the country.

Through the magazine and hseveral books published by his press, Kornblau was instrumental in igniting the surprising recent debate about the once-taboo subject of beauty’s role in contemporary art. Editorially, the magazine is identified with several intellectual positions: an absence of hostility toward entertainment; big hostility toward the institutionalization of culture; a commitment to the independence of his writers’ critical opinions; and an atypical gay sensibility.

Question: Are there differences between Art issues. and other art magazines?

Answer: The main one is simply that we’re not in New York, which isn’t just a matter of geography but is also a matter of sensibility. Editorially, we’ve tried to create a magazine that is neither academic--meaning heavily footnoted and art historical--nor promotional and fluffy. Probably all of the other art magazines fall into one or the other of those two camps. Both have influenced the kind of writing that we have, but we’ve tried to do something in between.

This is sometimes perceived as a threat. The promotional types think we’re elitist; the academics don’t like it because we don’t follow current academic theory.

Q: How has art produced in L.A. changed in the 10 years you’ve been publishing?

A: One big change has been that we’re now seeing a successful younger generation influenced by an earlier generation that made it here. When I started, the generation of artists now in their 40s were not part of the international circuit--artists like Charlie Ray, Mike Kelley, Lari Pittman, even slightly older artists like Alexis Smith and Chris Burden. But they’ve become icons.

Now you have a radically changing art world, with lots of younger artists breaking the molds of what their teachers did, or else trying to emulate what their teachers did, as a second generation.

Q: How has the scene, as distinct from art, changed?

A: L.A. has become much more bureaucratized. We’ve had an extraordinary growth in art institutions, both large and small. The more money there is in the art world, the more people cry poverty--which is an interesting phenomenon. Museums and budgets get bigger and bigger, and the claims of crisis get bigger and bigger with it, because there are more and more people to support.

In the same way that publications tend to become either academic or promotional, institutions do too. In response we see a phenomenon like the Museum of Jurassic Technology by David Wilson, an artist who conceived of a museum itself as a work of art.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is not an artist-run alternative space the way LACE or L.A.C.P.S. or Highways or any of the others have ever been. It wouldn’t have made sense 20 years ago, but it’s a true alternative space for today--an alternative to the large institutions that dominate. It functions just like the Getty, only tiny. It’s not about creating a community, it’s about an artist creating a vision.

Q: If you create a convincing vision, doesn’t a community automatically form around it?

A: Exactly. You do your work in the world, and if you do it well, communities grow around what you do. Those are real communities, built out of passion.

There are other, pre-defined communities: the community of artists, communities based on sexual orientation, the L.A. community. With them, the job is less interesting; you just figure out how best to serve the community. As a gay Jewish man, I supposedly belong to “the gay community” and “the Jewish community,” but the community I really belong to is one that includes people of every stripe, people who share certain kinds of passions.

Q: Serious postwar American culture had been constructed on the idea of a sharp division between avant-garde art and kitsch--sort of a separation between church and state. But Art issues. is identified with an absence of hostility toward entertainment. Why?

A: We’re not hostile to entertainment as a category, but we are hostile to bad entertainment. If entertainment is a dominant sensibility within our culture, then it’s already infused in art. So art that is generically hostile to entertainment is going to be bad art. “Us vs. Them” art is never interesting.

One way art culture has historically remained separate from entertainment culture has been through a tone of irony. Andy Warhol saw that the distinction made between avant-garde and kitsch was no longer a relevant distinction; but, unfortunately, some defenders of art culture have misrepresented Warhol as having been ironic toward pop culture--as not really liking Hollywood and all. That’s wrong, but it’s a position being advanced by many academic writers, art museums, even the Andy Warhol Foundation itself! So we want to strip away irony, which threatens many people.

Q: Speaking of philanthropies, your magazine is published by a nonprofit organization, the Foundation for Advanced Critical Studies. What’s the funding situation like these days?

A: Big philanthropic foundations are generally not creative. When you give millions of dollars to big bureaucracies, you’re not really doing much except shifting money around. But it’s comfortable, and you can feel like you’re doing good. It’s also safe to give $5,000 grants or even $50,000 grants to lots of small organizations, but it’s risky to give big amounts of money to places that aren’t just about employing people. Because then the world might change!

Funding institutions usually give money to things that look like themselves. Publishing criticism doesn’t look like what most foundations do, or like how they operate internally.

Q: Art issues. has a distinctly gay sensibility, which was never prominent in L.A.’s art life prior to the 1980s and 1990s.

A: We don’t believe in themes, gay or otherwise, either for the magazine or for art. Rather, our point of view is about turning things on their heads, which is something gay people traditionally have to do to survive. In an illiberal age, you either had to hide yourself or hide from yourself.

In the magazine, we look at things from a queer perspective--queer not meaning gay, but meaning skewed. Let me give you an example: In our 10th anniversary issue, we wanted to cover the opening of the art gallery at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, but we didn’t want to just do another journalistic story or review. We contacted an artist who’s also an ordained minister--the Rev. Ethan Acres--and commissioned a sermon from him on the occasion of the Bellagio’s opening. It’s an artist’s perspective on a cultural event, written without cynicism or irony, but with a lot of biting observations. The article isn’t gay, but it’s definitely queer.

Q: How would you describe the state of art criticism today?

A: I think it’s flourishing like never before. There are so many interesting writers--”many” meaning that I can’t count them, like I used to be able to. With art criticism, 5% is great, 20% is fine and 75% is [expletive]. Just like art. Just like television.

Q: Don’t people generally dislike criticism, as a genre of writing?

A: We published a piece by [critic] Dave Hickey that explained that people hate critics because they know instinctively that critics have no real power. People hate powerlessness.

Q: A general audience would likely disagree and say that critics do have considerable power.

A: People want to think there’s an art world power structure that, if they can get into it, they’ll win, and if they can’t, they’ll lose. They like to think there’s five curators, a handful of writers and some dealers who control the art world. The art world is actually a place where the power structure is extraordinarily fluid. The truth is, as Hickey said, that power is just laying around on the ground waiting to be picked up.

Q: What’s the most significant challenge facing art now?

A: The challenge for art is not to disdain anything. In the magazine I always edit out cynicism and irony, because it’s too easy. Disdaining entertainment or academics or institutions is easy. The hard thing is to create within a culture where all those things exist.

Q: What’s your aspiration for the magazine in the next 10 years?

A: I want it to be Vogue--but tiny.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Crossroads

The daily Calendar section today concludes its series of interviews, conducted by Times critics, with leaders in the arts and entertainment. The interviews were published on the following days:

DEC. 28

Movies: Steven Spielberg

DEC. 29

Classical music: MaryAnn Bonino

DEC. 30

Television: Jeff Greenfield

DEC. 31

Jazz: Tommy LiPuma

JAN. 1

Dance: Garth Fagan

JAN. 2

Restaurants: Nobu Matsuhisa