The recent publication by TIME magazine of its “100 most influential people in art” illustrates a broader trend, namely the transformation of publishers into something like event production companies. Magazines in this model serve less as forums for critical discourse than as vehicles through which to publicize their diversified income streams. Celebrating high-profile individuals who can be relied upon to communicate the honor to their followers (or have galleries to do it for them) is an efficient means of embellishing publishers’ brands and promoting the sponsored events (like the “TIME100 Impact Dinner” due to take place this week) on which they are increasingly dependent.
This isn’t to cast the first stone. All publishers need to make money, the world is changing, and there are always conflicts (e-flux Criticism, following an older model, often covers exhibitions at the same institutions that take out the exhibition announcements on which it depends for revenue, for instance). But the example does lay bare the extent to which the cultural cache that has accrued to “legacy” publications over decades of journalistic excellence and critical independence is presently being extracted to substantiate (or at least lend a veneer to) commercial activities that bear little relation to its original mission. Again, the exchange of cultural for financial capital is hardly a new development. The question is whether that former is being replenished—by the commissioning of new writing, by the development of new ideas and perspectives—at the same pace at which it is being extracted. This varies, it is fair to say, from one publication to the next.
The most obvious indicator of its continued health (writes this editor) is the publication’s editorial independence, the separation of its opinions from its revenues. Much else can in that case be forgiven. So it might be worth restating what editorial independence means to us, by reference to the diversely opinionated reviews and features that e-flux Criticism has recently published. In giving a platform to different—sometimes conflicting—takes on different artists and exhibitions, the aim is not to develop a perfectly consistent editorial line that aligns with the organization’s brand but instead to constantly challenge and unsettle it.
This involves publishing reviews that might not only contradict the opinions of the editors (whose job is to defend the freedom of writers to articulate their position rather than impose their own), but also be damaging to the short-term commercial interests of the publication in deference to the long-term (by preserving the reputation for independence that brings people to its pages in the first place). And this also involves challenging rather than merely reinforcing the convictions of its readers, who might by those means be forced to articulate better defenses of their own beliefs (or change them). That is the aim, at least. Because if publications don’t preserve that freedom, we risk a sealed and stagnant intellectual culture, from which dissenting voices are excluded in favor of mutual back-slapping. As the world outside that circle burns.
