Artforum

Artforum. Periodical (ten issues a year) devoted to contemporary art, founded in San Francisco in 1962. The place of publication moved to Los Angeles in 1965 and to New York in 1967, and the title changed to Artforum International in 1982. It is the leading American journal in its field, well produced and illustrated, attracting contributions from many well-known avant-garde artists, and often serving as an arena for controversy. The critics particularly associated with Artforum include Michael Fried (1939– ), who is regarded as one of the main disciples of Clement Greenberg. Fried's essay ‘Art and Objecthood', originally published in its pages in 1967, is one of the most frequently reprinted theoretical texts of its time. It was a riposte to the Minimal artists Donald Judd and Robert Morris, whom Fried designated ‘literalists'. They had questioned the continued viability of painting, believing that ‘the tendency of modern art was progressively to expunge relational composition in the quest for a more unitary, less illusionistic form of work’ and proposing instead ‘the substitution of “real” relations in “real” space for the illusionism in which painting, by its very nature, was forced to trade’ ( Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory 1900–1990, 1992). Fried, on the other hand, believed that ‘there is a conflict between our readings of physical works of art as art, and as objects; he claims that when we view a painting as an object we are regarding it as a non-art entity. He believes that Modernist Painting, to be valid, must find a way to defeat or suspend its own objecthood but without resorting to illusionistic pictorial devices of the past’ ( John A. Walker, Glossary of Art, Architecture and Design Since 1945, 1973, 3rd edn. 1992). A collection of pieces from the journal was published as Artforum Anthology in 1984.