Check Your Cathexis

"The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution." - Arendt

In honor of its 60th anniversary, Artforum felt moved to publish a credo from executive editor Elizabeth Schambelan to open its September 2022 issue.

We publish everything from experimental literature to footnoted scholarly articles, from riffs on pop culture to high theory. We don’t champion one particular school of art or aesthetic or approach to artmaking. This refusal to settle in any one place is an expression of editorial sensibilities. But it also facilitates resistance to rigidity, conformity, reification, and the kind of cathexis to the status quo that can lead to reactionary politics. It’s basically a commitment to the cultural tradition that Artforum and contemporary art more broadly are part of—the avant-garde, for lack of a term that doesn’t feel a bit grandiose in its evocation of a bygone era when épater la bourgeoisie was actually possible. You could also call it the modernist tradition, if you believe that reports of modernism’s death were greatly exaggerated and that its sequels have been as much a continuation as a series of ruptures. Whatever name you give it, and without denying the extent to which its most consistently professed values (egalitarianism, anti-capitalism, etc.) have been honored in the breach, this globe-spanning transnational tradition is interwoven with the politics of the left, and so is Artforum’s project, past and present.

Riffing on Adorno’s “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home,” she opines,

In some way or other, good criticism, maybe all good art, should instruct you in not being at home in your own home. An ethos of critique in this sense aligns with Artforum’s participation in urgent larger efforts to expand art history and remedy its vast erasures; to confront how racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy shaped and continue to shape art and culture; to address inequities of representation; and to give platforms to abolitionist voices and art and writing that envision new possible futures.

In summary:

Our core values point toward a metavalue of being circumspect about the very concept of core values.

What does it mean then, when not being at home in your home is your home, where you feel right at home? When even your credo recognizes that your vaunted avant-garde has no effect on the bourgeoisie, and that the magazine’s professed egalitarianism and anti-capitalism are “honored in the breach” (a corrupted bit of Shakespeare that means, here, that they are not being put into practice in any meaningful sense)?

What does it mean when your erudite if not hand-dirtying commitment to egalitarian politics, thanks to government-recommended and government-mandated Covid measures that were the greatest assault on the bodies of the working class since the days of armed strikebreaking, makes it so that you no longer even have to commute to your magazine’s offices in Chelsea, and may pen your anti-capitalist art criticism without having to emerge from the thousand-threadcount bed linens that you bought on Amazon?

What does it mean when your values are so entrenched in the art institutions that the Wall Street Journal could back up its claim that “connoisseurs have been replaced by commissars—ideologues for whom aesthetics is less important than ensuring we view art through progressive lenses” with a half dozen examples? And when two of those examples are the ideologues most responsible for the Guston cancellation?

What does it mean when your famously white-progressive-female-dominated profession goes the way predicted by Mary Harrington, as your invocations of social justice come to serve no more serious purpose than “enforcing equality and weaponizing social ostracism” and “the bureaucratic regulation of personal identity and interpersonal interactions”?

What does it mean when the issue of the magazine in which your credo appears is so protective of the progressive brand that it refuses to examine the harms perpetrated by displays of racist imagery that would be regarded as crimes if they originated from conservatives, or were directed at any historically oppressed group besides the Jews?

It means that whatever you call your “globe-spanning transnational tradition,” you are not the counterculture, you are the culture that needs to be countered.