If commitment to reductive art and hairsplitting differentiation between one manifestation of it and another (Color Field painting, Minimal art) were two ways in which Artforum exuded purism, then another was its refusal to accommodate the dark sides of modernism: desire and irony, as manifest in Dada, Surrealism, and Pop.
Viewed through the lens of Challenging Art, the focus of October magazine on Continental theory seems to represent a swing of the pendulum back in the romantic direction, however remote and displaced the sensibilities of the journal are from the poets of Art News and the existentialism of Harold Rosenberg.
Leider and his star writers were apolitical in their art writing although increasingly engaged in their personal lives (Leider essentially walks away from the journal, exhausted and disillusioned).
While art collecting has always been a pursuit of the wealthy, little glamour accrued to the field as a whole, and the wider public had little interest in the seemingly arcane personalities who populated the art world.
The Art Dealers Association of America grew out of the belief that it would be in the interest of both dealers and the community-at-large to bring order to this free-wheeling art scene by promoting superior rules of conduct.
The Art Advisory panel, on which several ADAA members have always served, became a key means of legitimizing and thereby safeguarding the tax deductions on which our museums depend to build their collections.
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