AICA PANEL AT THE CAA CONFERENCE IN LOS ANGELES
Every year the CAA invites its affiliate society members to hold a session at the CAA Annual Conference. Art Criticism and Small Independent Magazines will be this year’s AICA-USA Panel Discussion. It will be held Thursday, February 23, 2012, at the CAA Annual Conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Concourse Meeting Room 409AB, 5.30-7.00PM
Panel synopsis: We live in a time of a reduced readership for newsprint art reviews and dwindling subscriptions to the specialized art magazines, does this indicate that the public for art writing is seriously in decline?
The panelists and the audience will have their own answers to this question. But there is strong evidence of a young demographic eager to read about art in print or online if this material is embedded in a broader editorial mission.
Some of the publications represented on this panel publish art exhibition reviews and articles on contemporary art side by side with other content that might include critical commentaries of events in the community, local, national and international politics, and a broad coverage of subjects that frequently focuses on the margins of culture. These publications also have a willingness to express opposing and minority viewpoints. Coming out of the tradition of early 20th century “Little Magazines”, today’s small independent publications strive to embed art criticism in a broader coverage of our common experience of the world.
Irving Sandler, AICA Board member, expresses the hope that our panelists will take time to address practical issues. How did your publication get started? How do you stay afloat financially? Who are your contributors? Who are your readers? What distinguishes your magazine from others in the field? His idea is that practical information might help inspire some in the audience to go out and start their own publications – print or online. We need more, not fewer outlets.
The panelists:
Josephine Gear, NYU, Associate Professor in the Program of Museum Studies, and a founder member of WFTE radio station, Scranton, Pa
Phong Bui, Publisher, The Brooklyn Rail, Brooklyn, New York
Shana Lutker, Managing Editor, X-TRA, Los Angeles. Thank you to Shana who is replacing Anjali Gupta, formerly editor of ART LIES, Tx., who is unable to attend the conference
Robert Herbst, “Member” the Llano del Rio Collective and Co-founder and former Editor of The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, both of Los Angeles
Josephine Gear will give a brief history of the “Little Magazines” that were published in the years leading up to World War I and were the precursors of today’s independent magazines. Phong Bui, Shana Lutker and Robert Herbst will discuss their publications and their relationships to the panel’s themes.