The Essential New Art Examiner

IV—Ann Wiens Editor

IV Ann Wiens E ditor 1993–1997 Introduction “We write about what artists talk about in bars.” That simple mantra, more than any other, informed my tenure as editor of the New Art Examiner. To the best of our ability, we covered the issues and influences affecting how art was being created, exhibited, transmitted and discussed, and we did so “without fear or favor,” as founding editors Derek Guthrie and Jane Addams Allen had emphatically promised in the magazine’s very first issue. I initially became a subscriber to the magazine when I was an art student at the University of Oklahoma, and continued it without interruption as I moved around the country, to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute, to New York for graduate school, and back to Chicago to begin my career. I appreciated that the Examiner wasn’t focused on collecting, or the New York scene, or art-making techniques. It was about the ideas that informed the making of art—which is, by and large, what artists talk about in bars. I was 27 years old when I answered an ad in the Chicago Reader seeking an editor at my favorite art magazine. Armed with a new MFA in painting, a fledgling resume and a sheaf of graduate-school writing assignments that invoked the overbearing, pointlessly dense writing style Part IV— A nn W I E N S    Introduction   203 favored at the time by self-important critics when contributing to the deconstructivist postmodern discourse, I somehow got the job. I loved it. When Allison Gamble departed a year later, I ascended to the top of the masthead, becoming the first editor of the Examiner who had never worked under its founders, Derek and Jane. I had never even met them. This was significant. They were an incredibly strong presence in the Chicago art world in the ’70s and ’80s, and their influence was broad. They had moved to Washington, D.C. before I joined the NAE, so their significance was an abstraction to me—my allegiance was to the mission of the magazine as I understood it, not to its founders, despite my immense respect for their ideas and ideals. By the time I took the reins, the economic downturn that had brought an abrupt end to the go-go days of art-world excess I’d witnessed as a graduate student in New York had made its way to Chicago. A few galleries had closed, and the giddiness of the ’80s was waning—at least in terms of the market. But the market had never been a primary focus of the Examiner. My fellow editors—Kathryn Hixson and Deborah Wilk— and I looked at this somewhat more sober climate as a return to reality of sorts, a perfect opportunity to outline our philosophy for the magazine as it entered a new phase of its life, and a chance to clarify its relationship to artists. In an April 1993 editorial I wrote: While it’s a serious mistake to buy into the “starving artist” myth and assume that difficult times produce better art, after a decade of viewing art surrounded by the context of money it’s refreshing to look at art as art again, to think about things like form and content free from the distracting influence of a spectacular price tag. I went on to discuss the approach we planned to take: It is a dedication to providing an open forum for the exchange of ideas based on a strident belief that our word should not be the final one, that not all the good ideas (or good art) come from urban centers, and that many diverse voices can describe a scene better than a few similar ones can. As the hegemony of New York and a handful of other major art centers dwindles and geography plays a decreasingly important role in artistic activity, the New Art Examiner’s established network of writers is already providing the framework to facilitate this open forum and to promote diverse critical viewpoints. 204   T h e E s s e n t i a l N ew A rt E xaminer Looking back at what we were trying to do in 1993 from my perch here in the twenty-first century, I wonder what we might have done if we’d had the means to draw upon the wisdom of crowds...