Soho Press - Challenging Art by Amy Newman

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Artforum radically transformed the rules of the game.... This lively book, in which gossip becomes oral history, records how and why.... Newman should be commended.
—Artforum

December 2003 | Art History/Art Criticism
$24 Paperback
ISBN: 1-56947-352-8
All rights: Soho Press

“An accurate, honest, even-handed portrait of an extraordinary era in the words of the key players at the most important journal.... A great read.” —Chuck Close, artist	“Newman’s book [makes] the activities of a handful of magazine editors and art critics seem totally fascinating.... [It] provides an incredible amount of information about the evolution of American art, perhaps even more than can be found in the pages of Artforum itself.” —Art in America
“Incisive and absorbing.... An absolutely indispensable resource for anyone studying the field.” —Irving Sandler, American Art of the Sixties	"Provides densely layered and exceptionally vivid first hand accounts of a perios in America when artists and intellectuals urgently debated and defined why art truly matters. Absolutely required reading for younger artists and for students of American intellectual and cultural history." —Ellen Phelan, Artist and Chair, Dept. of Visual and Environmental Studies; Director, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University
"A fascinating account in many first person voices of an extraordinary period in American art." —Nan Rosenthal, Consultant, Dept. of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art
"This is an invaluable book. For anyone who has been fascinated or affected by the art of the past quarter century, Challenging Art is the new source text." —Ealan Wingate, Director, Gagosian Gallery, NY

In 1962 the magazine Artforum was founded on a shoestring in San Francisco to challenge the East Coast art establishment. Soon thereafter, it moved to Los Angeles, and then to New York City. Suddenly it was "the establishment," setting the terms according to which art was to be judged.

Amy Newman has spent nine years interviewing the participants in this amazing critical venture — Philip Leider, John Coplans, Rosalind E. Krauss, Michael Fried, Barbara Rose, Max Kozloff, Annette Michelson, Sidney Tillim, Robert Pincus–Witten, Peter Plagens, and Charled Cowles, as well as Lucy Lippard and John Baldessari, among others — about their backgrounds, their views on art, and their disagreements with one another. In their own words, they tell us what motivated them as arbiters of our culture and how they view their accomplishment in retrospect.

This inside look at an astonishing cultural phenomenon is an intriguing read for a lay audience and an essential source of information for artists, students, and critics.

AMY NEWMAN, a former managing editor of ArtNews and co–editor of Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., lives in New York City.

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