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He wasnt just a salesman, however.
He made connections and helped out young dealers, artists, critics, and curators.
Velasco then issued his own ardent statement: The art world is misogynist.
Art history is misogynist.
Also racist, classist, transphobic, ableist, homophobic.
I will not accept this.
Intersectional feminism is an ethics near and dear to so many on our staff.
This is where we stand.
Theres so much to be done.
Now, we get to work.
And just like that, anArtforumthat needed to disappear was gone.
Not all was bad; there were great articles and many good writers all this time.
KuosArtforumexcelled at roundtable discussions and thematic issues.
Still, these good points and others were invariably drawn into the grim vortex of all the impenetrable hyperacademicism.
Against this parochial purity was the whiplash of actually holding the magazine.
Every month this house organ of the high priests was thick with expensive, full-page glossy ads.
Sometimes more than 300 pages of them!
It was the porn of the art world.
Thats straight-up privileged insularity and boutique radicalism.
Which makes those pages a strange place from which to stage a revolution for the soul of the magazine.
Which bring us to Velasco.
I know him by talking to him in galleries and museums for the last eight years.
I think this more having just read much of his first issue of the magazine.
I was bowled over by a batch of the pieces I read.
I actually felt hope.
Velascos opening letter, The Power of Goodbye,is candid, urgent, and angry.
Many of these writers then wrote catalogues or curated shows for these very spaces.
It was monolithic and enervating.
When was the last time we read the words a desire to do right by others inArtforum?
Imagine working atArtforumwith an editor that had just written this!
Richard Deming writes of John Ashberys luminous way in which art … imparts a deep pleasure.
This is the first appearance of the word pleasure in this usage in at least a decade.
The ice has been broken.
In this way, they give hope by taking us out of our private isolations and political solitudes.
Each is a pleasure to read, returning bodily confirmation toArtforum.
They remind us that change can happen with only one person or a handful of people acting up.
Having a hot faith in art has always gotten us through times like these.
I havent felt this way about this magazine in a long long time.
As of todayArtforumis no longer a lost cause or a dream anymore.
It may be the real thing.
