C105 article

WHY NY? "Only the exaggerations are true..."

Cabinet is one of the best-regarded New York Art Magazines. Here Sina Najafi explains its success.

Every project requires a 'primal scene' whose traumatic effect propels you into action. In the case of Cabinet, it was an afternoon spent watching two artists read a Famous Art Magazine. After looking at the ads to see who is exhibiting where, they flipped through the back and read two reviews of shows by colleagues. Those long articles in the middle, over which the editors had labored so intensely, went unread. Like all primal scenes, part of the memory of this afternoon may be exaggerated, but as Adorno said of psychoanalysis, only the exaggerations are true.

Art magazines are typically made from the critic's perspective, relying on the notions of judging, evaluating, excluding, canon-building, and myths such as 'critical distance', etc. It is true that artist's books still plod on but they are at this point usually available in the ghetto of super-specialized stores either at exorbitant prices in editions of fifty or in cheap photocopied editions stapled together. But why are art magazines no longer a primary venue for presenting ideas that artists will find interesting for their work? Who is their intended reader of these glossy publications that travel the world?

Cabinet was founded in part in order to offer a venue that explores art and cultural issues with the same sense of curiosity, seriousness, lightheartedness, and commitment that artists today bring to the world around them. During the course of making Cabinet, one thing we have found is that an art magazine that genuinely tries to reflect an artist's approach to the world is often no longer recognizable as an art magazine. This is because artists now approach every nook and cranny of the world in every possible way. A quick look at the bookshelves of any given group of artists will show them reading books on gardening, space travel, the history of Scottish tartans, the Beat movement, spiders, horror films, and weather-prediction systems. The range of subject matter in Cabinet was to be as diverse as what artists are interested in. We would not ask artists to speak about their work but to present their ideas visually in ways that play to the strengths of a magazine format. Our primary commitment has been to make the magazine into a sourcebook of ideas for artists.

We are, paradoxically, an art magazine that rarely writes about art.

Sina Najafi is founding editor of Cabinet magazine, based in Brooklyn. More on Cabinet at www.cabinetmagazine.org.

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