List of ironies – www.kunstforum.de

International art journals in tension between criticism, market and public
von Judith Elisabeth Weiss

Protei capers

John Baldessaris It’s not worth looking at (1966) can be interpreted as a critique of art history cast in art.¹ [siehe Abb. S. 51] This landmark piece reinforces sentiments about the art magazine industry, particularly Artforumwhich hovered in the air for a long time. In the 1960s and 70s, as a gesture of self-expansion, art literally took matters into its own hands. Like their classical avant-garde predecessors, artists’ magazines became important channels of communication for aesthetic practice. To this day, they care little about the editorial rules of ordinary periodicals and rely on their exemption from the corset of publishing laws. They reproduce the excess of anti-editorial and non-editorial possibilities in ever new twists.²

Art magazines reveal their effect by breaking the canon of form and content, as they cannot always be opened and read in the usual way. Their processing sometimes needs to be tested, and since the proposed content is not chewed didactically, often first you need to find the ingredients, make the connections yourself – “think: yes”, think for yourself! [07]

To talk about the freedom of art in this context would sound too banal, because the fact that art destroys the given and claims its own thinking is precisely its systemic task, its burden. And yet: their greatest freedom arises instantly, arises through an artistic feature. C’est à l’ironie que commence la liberté,…