The loft space that houses the New Art Examiner on South Wabash is pin-drop silent. It is not at all the scene one would expect at a magazine on deadline. In fact, the NAE has got two: the one for its 20th-anniversary October issue, which is several weeks past, and the one for its November issue, which is a couple days away. The three women who edit the magazine–Ann Wiens, Deborah Wilk, and Kathryn Hixson–agree, the situation is a mess, but it’s a mess they’re happy to be in. A couple years ago the finances of the journal were so shaky that getting even one issue out required begging readers and friends for last minute donations. Today, however, the NAE is on sounder footing than ever, with foundation and corporate support, a real budget, and real cash flow. That money helps the editors stay off the phones and buckle down to the hard work of wading through manuscripts and editing them.
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The change in fortunes of the NAE is something of a puzzle to the magazine’s workers and supporters. When the art world boomed in the 1980s, other art journals thrived. Art News and Art in America grew fat on a rich diet of gallery and auction-house ads–and on the commercial art world’s contributions to their editorial pages. When those magazines print four-color reproductions in an article, it’s usually the artist, or his gallery, that pays for the printing. The mainline journals appeal to collectors, and when collecting slows, as it has in the last few years, they trim down.
“Intimacy, self-defining and anti-rhetorical powers, materials often fluid and quotidian, and qualities more beguiling than bombastic are characteristics we would perhaps have thought to be on craft’s side and not on art’s in the days of the Cold War aesthetic dialectic.”
