Artforum

What happens when museums, universities, galleries, foundations, and publishers repeatedly circulate an interpretation whose original artistic objections remain unanswered? The following is an excerpt from the book.

Reviewing Louise Nevelson's Mrs. N's Palace at Pace Gallery in 1977, Hal Foster scoffed in Artforum at the work in terms strikingly consonant with the problem Judd had identified.

He called it, "...as bad as it sounds." a kind of designer boutique of sculpture, a Bloomingdale's chapel.

The hushed space and subdued light were deep and latanic and hokey.

To withhold judgment is to remain inside the system that confers visibility.

This dynamic clarifies the significance of Artforum's 2025 year-end feature, in which Mungo Thompson selected Richard Prince's deposition as an important historical artifact and a great trickster move.

Selection without judgment is not neutrality, but abdication disguised as openness.

By treating inclusion as sufficient validation, criticism relinquishes its evaluative function while preserving the appearance of discernment.

The result is a critical culture that no longer evaluates but stabilizes.

Thompson's unexplained appearance in Artforum's year-end feature, and his selection of deposition as an important historical artifact and great trickster move, is not incidental but symptomatic.

His own practice illustrates the condition.

His long-running Time Mirror works appropriate an object that was already a mass-culture promotional item, then memorably popularized by the Coen brothers in The Big Lebowski, thus commercially and popularly ubiquitous long before Thompson recredentialed it as conceptual.

You know, you get Zing Magazine.

How does that start? Well, it starts because the first thing I'm doing is reading Art Forum, and they've got artist projects.

And I was like, well, the magazine is an in-between place.

It's where they report on their artwork.

And I love they had these round tables.

And I thought that's really, really cool.

And I loved Art Forums Artist Project.

So my idea was to... have all different kinds of people, like somebody from a mathematician, an artist, a dancer, a writer, a poet, you gotta have the poets, and put them all together in a curated magazine.

Her last book, May We Be Forgiven, was the winner of the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction.

She's a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and Bomb magazine and appears regularly in several publications, including The New York Times, Harper's, Art Forum and many others.

She also writes for film and television, including writing the adaptation for Showtime of her very first novel, Jack.

In addition, she teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University.

Image and form is not only constantly at the forefront of the reading experience of your new book, but it's contemplated within the language itself, where, for instance, you say that Diné blue corn mush and Hopi piki bread both have the same three ingredients, but they have entirely different forms.

And in Art Forum, you speak of how you tell your students that content and form are like a bicycle.

[clears throat] Content, content is one wheel, form the other wheel.

Jake's latest poetry collection is Horses.

The same could be said for Chucky, the Cenobites, the Blob, or any other high-concept hit that that relies on the conflict between our experience and our imagination.

So you'd think a mutant sheep could have a shot if you had a creature designer who'd been profiled in Artforum magazine and has had work in the permanent collections of both MoMA and The Met, along with a director who was hailed as a genius by Variety and compared to Fellini by Rolling Stone.

This should be a monster in the Hall of Fame alongside H.R. Giger's alien or Rimbaldi's creature from Possession.

This should be a monster that lingers in our nightmares and lasts in the public imagination for decades.

By that afternoon, the apartment is unbearable, each room echoing deflated.

I busy myself, making the bed, stacking old copies of Artforum, shifting shoes in the entry.

Each task is small, but it eats minutes hours.

I find an old note in the bathroom, a reminder to pick up dry cleaning, scrawled in Emily's tiny angular print.

Julie?

Well, I'm an academic, so I will, uh, recommend an academic article, um, that maybe isn't the most accessible, accessible thing in the world, but Annette Michaelson, um, shortly after the movie came out, she's an academic, and she wrote an article called Bodies in Space that appeared in Art Forum initially.

And it's just a really, um, amazing article, uh, academic article about the way that the movie is, uh, about its themes.

Um, and so it says, "A space movie that's about space." It's a, um, you know, an, a, an evolution, a technol- a technologically advanced movie that's about technology.

...

Artforum articles mattered.

Now we don't even understand them, much less read them

I haven't, I will admit I haven't cracked an Artforum in years.

In years.

Because when you try to explain something, you're not really making people understand anything.