Lindsay Pollock Named Editor in Chief of Art in America

Lindsay Pollock

I don’t usually follow the ins and outs of who is in and out at the art magazines, but the news that Bloomberg and The Art Newspaper reporter Lindsay Pollock had been named Art in America’s new Editor in Chief did catch my eye–admittedly, only via this post by András Szántó in Artworld Salon yesterday. I thought Szántó’s directives about where AiA should strive to fit within the art mag landscape were particularly interesting, and worth sharing:

“So what now with Art in America? It clearly needs an energy boost. Its detached, ivory-tower approach, where long reviews dutifully appear long after exhibitions have closed, seems like a quaint anachronism. The magazine has a reputation for pulling its punches. Its cautious academism is out of synch with a culture where opinions are supersized. What new leadership can bring to the magazine above all, I think, is a fruitful demolition of the walls that divide scholarly and aesthetic writing, on the one hand, and thoughtful journalistic appraisals of the “dark side” of art as an institutional and – gasp – commercial system.

No one’s better suited to open up those fertile pathways than Lindsay, who sees the life of art as an all-encompassing totality that spans from the artist studio to the scholarly study to the champagne and canapé-besotted halls of Art Basel.”

So far, from what I can tell AiA’s announcement has been greeted with a giant snore, but I guess it does provide an opportunity for some of us to opine on the relative importance of the (printed) art mag at this particular historical moment. I continue to be surprised at the reverence that people feel for print publications (even, on occasion, myself). Beyond that, I don’t have an opinion – but if you do, go on over to Artworld Salon and tell ’em what you think.

UPDATE: Charlie Finch weighs in on Pollock’s appointment over at Artnet. Some funny lines delivered by Finch here, but WTF is “andropause” supposed to mean?

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Claudine Isé

Claudine Isé has worked in the field of contemporary art as a writer and curator for the past decade, and currently serves as the Editor of the Art21 Blog. Claudine regularly writes for Artforum.com and Chicago magazine, and has also worked as an art critic for the Los Angeles Times. Before moving to Chicago in 2008, she worked at the Wexner Center in Columbus, OH as associate curator of exhibitions, and at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles as assistant curator of contemporary art, where she curated a number of Hammer Projects. She has Ph.D. in Film, Literature and Culture from the University of Southern California.

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