The bright creaminess of what was the newly completed sculpture has darkened to a warm sepia, almost as if it were an aged photograph of the thing in addition to the thing itself. The expansion is expanded, in the past. It is done.
SIXTY YEARS AGO, in Artforum’s very first issue, our founding editor, Philip Leider, threw down the gauntlet for art’s autonomy. “Art and artists will flourish when an admiring public buys paintings because they love them; if the myth that buying art is a good investment (in the Wall Street sense) is perpetuated, the result can only be disaster for both.” I took his words from a blistering review of two 1961 publications on art and money as an early expression of the magazine’s ethos, which made speculation a constitutive exclusion. The keyword for me here was not myth or disaster but love.I