Art-Rite

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We felt none of us knew anything alone, but maybe the three of us together had a better chance of knowing something. Each page of an issue was manually created with sourced images (which needed to be reproduced to scale and often converted to half-tone) and long columns of typed texts, which were cut up and laid out across multiple columns before being glued to a mounting boarding. Within this space, the possibility exists for the next generation to produce a revolutionary new publication to examine the art world, which has had its own radical transformation worth examining in detail. Given the established links between the banking system and the art market, Art-Rite promotes collaboration with financial institutions and operators as well as the investment in art as an asset class.

The foundation of Art-Rite’s work is intended to help collectors approach diverse segments and genres, as well as introducing new collectors to the art market, thanks to sales at various levels of accessibility and investment. But New Yorkers, living by Plato’s dictum, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” created brand new forms of art and culture—and nobody could stop them. In keeping with the times, their stance was a demilitarized opposition to what they saw as the establishment. DeAk, Robinson, and Cohn met in 1972 in an art criticism class taught by Brian O'Doherty at Barnard College in New York. Through its auctions, Art-Rite Auction House hopes to offer a curated variety of works of art, able to add value to the most prestigious and historical collections.

The magazine had a different purpose, sociable, sharp, in touch; its strengths were collective and magpie, not the magisterial grand récit but the agglomerative ground-level view. The insert idea died but the larger idea stuck, and to make it happen they enrolled in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, for which they proposed to publish a magazine as their class project. The fanzine image carries, since Art-Rite had a loving relationship with the art world and particularly with its own generation. Contributors included Lucy Lippard, Gordon Matta-Clark, Barbara Radice, Laurie Anderson, John Baldessari, Julian Schnabel, Daniel Buren, Jack Smith, Sol LeWitt, and many, many others.

O’Doherty remembers, “ Artforum had the inside track, it was the hot center, which Art in America was trying to nudge into. Ingrid Sischy, who had become the magazine’s editor a year or so earlier, had made Edit a regular contributor, and besides writing unorthodox articles—I remember, for example, a spectacular piece about the hip-hop artist Rammellzee, and another on, of all things, those Cabbage Patch dolls—she served as an all-purpose one-person think tank.

They are authoritative in the art they promote, and are creating or are committed to the avant-clique.

Back then, critics—and Artforum critics in particular—had an influence over American artists that today is diffused across a much wider spread of agencies both within and outside the media. Inside, it featured an “Idea Poll” that asked the same topical question to 45 contemporary artists ranging from Kathy Acker to Adrian Piper; a “Thematic Anthology” spotlighting artists’ books; “Features and Reviews,” delving into the issue’s theme; and interviews with art critics including feminist Lucy Lippard and art historian Leo Steinberg.Asked to name a highlight of Art-Rite’s run, deAk and Robinson independently choose the same issue: no. is pleased to present From the Margins: The Making of Art-Rite, an exhibition coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the legendary underground arts magazine.