The Climate Forum is a space of dialogue and exchange with respect to the concrete operational practices being implemented within the art field in response to climate change and ecological degradation.
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
First-hand witnesses to the events that began 75 years ago are fast dwindling; the exhibition acts as a repository, collecting histories and ideas in an ever-changing, ongoing process of memorialisation.