We wish that we could be as sanguine about Modern Painters, the well-known English art quarterly founded in 1987 by the late Peter Fuller. Mr. Fuller, who died suddenly in 1990, was a man of extraordinary energy and unstoppable passions. A robustly polemical ex-Marxist, he started Modern Painters to promulgate the Ruskinian aesthetic principles he had lately embraced and to oppose the headlong progress of vulgarization in the British art world. Modern Painters, he wrote in an editorial for the first issue, “will seek to uphold the critical imagination and the pursuit of quality in art.” Mr. Fuller was particularly severe about those institutions—increasingly, the dominant institutions—of modern art that
promote a tacky preference for the novel and fashionable, exemplified in the taste of the Saatchis, the patrons of New Art, successive Turner Prize juries, and journals like Artscribe International. . . . All too often, their first concern seems not to be with the good, the true, or the beautiful—but rather with the advancement of their own careers: they tend to debase and to affront public taste, rather than to challenge, or, least of all, to nurture it.
We were inevitably, and sadly, reminded of Mr. Fuller’s declaration of purpose when the first-ever New York issue of Modern Painters recently arrived in our offices. A more thorough-going repudiation of everything that Peter Fuller stood for can scarcely be imagined. To be sure, Modern Painters continues to publish some intelligent criticism. But the dominant note of the magazine is now set entirely by that addiction to trendiness and shallow celebrity that Mr. Fuller warned against. Today the presiding spirit of Modern Painters is not John Ruskin but David Bowie, an aging rock star who has lately supplemented the sodden hedonism of androgynous rock music with the glitter of art-world chic. Mr. Bowie—who now, mirabile dictu, sits on the board of Modern Painters—is featured on the cover of the New York issue. He is joined by Jeff Koons, a grinning, kitsch-peddling artist of precisely the sort that Peter Fuller would have anathematized. Behind them, leering out at the viewer, is a typically garish, cartoonlike example of Koons’s current “work.” The occasion for the tableau is a conversation between Messrs. Bowie and Koons, a driveling exercise in narcissistic exhibitionism more appropriate to a Hollywood fan magazine than a serious art journal.
We were inevitably, and sadly, reminded of Mr. Fuller’s declaration of purpose when the first-ever New York issue of Modern Painters recently arrived in our offices.
People in the art world first learned about the special New York issue of Modern Painters when they received a fancy invitation to a party at Jeff Koons’s SoHo studio. The party was meant to celebrate not only publication of the special issue of Modern Painters but also the publication of books by two regular contributors to the magazine: a new edition of Matthew Collings’s Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop: The London Art World from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst and the novelist William Boyd’s biography of an American artist called Nat Tate. A few days after the party, the London newspapers were full of the news that “Nat Tate” was a fictional character and that denizens of the New York art world had “turned up in droves to . . . celebrate Tate’s work, and laud Mr. Boyd’s 66-page monograph.” In fact, people showed up out of the morbid curiosity that celebrity inspires: the party, after all, was at Jeff Koons’s studio and the great David Bowie was listed as one of the hosts. The London Daily Mail gleefully reported that the snobbish New York art world “had fallen victim to a well-executed, and thoroughly British, practical joke.” That is true. But the practical joke for which they fell was not Mr. Boyd’s fantasy but the more melancholy joke that Modern Painters has now become.
