Robin Cembalest on ARTNews

Description: What role does ARTNews play in the art world?

Transcript: ARTnews is the news magazine of the art world. It has the larger circulation of any the art magazines, and the audience is composed of people who are in the art world, art world professionals, but it’s also people who are outside the art world who have a general interest in culture, and it’s written in way that it can be accessible to the people in the art world and to the general broad audience.

Question: How do you write about art?

Transcript: Well, the process a journalistic process. It’s the same as any kind of journal. Well, in ARTnews we have two kinds of writing. We have the feature well, which is the journalism, which is reporting, which are the profiles, the trend stories, the investigative reporting that might be on art restitution of works that were looted during the Holocaust or antiquities or something like that, and then we have the critical section, the reviews. The writing is slightly different, because in the review section you are talking about giving a value judgment of whether or not the show was good or bad.

Question: Do you view ARTnews as a tastemaker?

Transcript: Well, I think that the role of ARTnews is kind of painting a broader picture of all the people, the intuitions, the places that are shaping the world of art. So, I think it’s less maybe in terms of shaping taste as on reporting all the different things that are going on out there.

Question: Why is ARTnews still important?

Transcript: Because, I think that the writing is excellent. I think the writing is accessible. The way that we write about art isn’t based on theory. I mean it’s not kind of through the lens of post-modernism, post-structuralism, different theory. It’s, it’s—the writers certainly know about those things--but the writing itself is clear and accessible and it’s another case, even in the criticism, where we try and be as accessible to the insider as to the general audience.

Recorded on: 1/14/08