WHAT YOU WILL FIND IN THE PAGES OF ART MONTHLY...

Art Monthly is an indispensable guide to the contemporary art world, publishing features on major issues in the visual arts, interviews with leading and up-coming artists, profiles on emerging artists and up-to-the-minute coverage of trends from independent and opinionated critics.

Art Monthly is renowned for its incisive commentary in the form of polemics and editorials.

Art Monthly also includes art world news, exhibition and book reviews as well as articles on artists' books/multiples and regular columns covering art law and salerooms.

Below is a selection of past articles.

FEATURES

Dada Daddy
Jennifer Thatcher on what masculinist revisionism could learn from feminism:
At the very moment that women's studies is dropped from the university curriculum in Britain, a rash of books about masculinity appears on the shelves. An optimistic interpretation might imply that the women's movement has been so successful that it is handing over the theoretical reins to help men achieve a greater degree of self-understanding. However, Goldsmiths professor Angela McRobbie, commenting on the issue in the Guardian in March, proposed a different, more unsettling context for the change in focus from women to men: 'Often it seems feminism has become a kind of private passion, a way of working through the intractable issues of the day in regard to sexuality ... But so denigrated and devalued is the women's movement that it is often hard to dislodge the assumptions that it routinely required hostility to men.'
Read the full feature.
Read more Art Monthly features.

EDITORIAL

Mayday Mayday
The sad truth about art education today is that New Labour has finished what Thatcher started.
Ironically, Thatcher's plans for factory-style education were only to be truly achieved under New Labour. It was the setting up of the dreaded inquisition, the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), by the first New Labour government in 1998, barely one year after the election, which made the institutionalisation of what Stephen Lee in his letter aptly describes as 'educational Taylorism' possible. The QAA, and its spawn, the Teaching Quality Assurance (TQA), became the means by which the product, broken down into bite-sized pieces as a result of the imposition of American-style modularisation, could be tested. Since the government had already begun to refer to the arts as the 'creative industries', a term first coined when Labour was still in opposition, this must have seemed like a perfect fit between the so-called 'aims' and 'outcomes' of an art education.
Read the full editorial.
Art Monthly is organising a public debate on the future on art education. See art education debate for more information.

INTERVIEWS

Since it was founded in 1976 Art Monthly has consistently published interviews with leading contemporary artists. The interviews collected in this book offer unique insights into the thought processes and working practices of artists. More than 70 of the interviews that have been gathered together to form the volume Talking Art: Interviews with Artists since 1976. See www.artmonthly.co.uk/interview book for more information.

Taking Responsibility

Martha Rosler interviewed by Iwona Blazwick:
What do you feel about the success of Semiotics of the Kitchen in relation to your current work?
MR: I was a success as a young person only ten or 20 years after I was that young person. Everybody hates my work when it's made. Except the feminists - I have my audiences. But mostly the audience sneers at whatever it is I do. You can't imagine that anyone wanted to show The Bowery when I made it, or Vital Statistics, or Semiotics of the Kitchen or Losing or any other tapes that I made. I have the luxury of being a success at an early age only in retrospect.
Read the full interview.

REVIEWS

Cathy Wilkes
Reviewed by Cherry Smyth
Read the review

Gregory Crewdson
Reviewed by Alison Green
Read the review

Jeff Wall
Reviewed by Cherry Smyth
Read the review

Kerry James Marshall
Reviewed by Eliza Williams
Read the review

Joseph Beuys
Reviewed by Deborah Schultz
Read the review
Read more Art Monthly reviews.

POLEMIC

JJ Charlesworth on art education, autonomy and opting out of state provision:
'It's your world. What will you change?' It sounds like the heady rhetoric of liberation or collective revolution that harks back to the days of May 68, where anything seemed possible. It is in fact the strapline of an advert for Middlesex University's Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, run in last month's Art Monthly, and it's ironic that it followed directly on from the troubled debate on the state of art education in Britain. It reminds us that higher education has become a business, a business that does not necessarily sell knowledge, but rather the potential experience of individuated, personal transformation, which reduces learning to no more than a set of purchasable access points to the development of a secure, professional career.
Read Charlesworth's polemic

BOOKS

The Hornsey Sit-in
David Briers reviews Hornsey 1968: The Art School Revolution by Lisa Tickner:
Usually cited as a contrast with the perceived or supposed passivity of today's fee-paying art students, the Hornsey sit-in has become one of the cultural myths of the 60s. With the LSE sit-in the year before as a model, in May 1968 Hornsey students ousted the principal from his office and took over direct control of the college for two months. ... Localised grievances interacted with equivocation about countrywide structural changes in higher education to provoke a demand for an 'analysis of art education nationally and the relations between artists, designers, and society', and thus 'opened onto political territory'.
Read Briers's book review
Read more Art Monthly book reviews

REPORT

Letter from Istanbul
Sarah-Neel Smith reporting from Istanbul.
Read the report

Letter from Berlin
Sarah James reporting from Berlin.
Read the report

Recollecting Beuys
Linda Morris on the time she spent at the Dusseldorf Art Academy.
Read the report

FILM

Oberhausen
Ian Hunt reports from the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival.
Read the article

VIDEO

Dennis Oppenheim
Lisa Le Feuvre reviews Dennis Oppenheim, Tooth and Nail: Film and Video 1970-74.
Read the article

SALEROOMS

Auction sales holding steady
Salerooms is a regular column in Art Monthly.
Colin Gleadell's brief is to report the facts and the gossip from the world's busiest auction houses. If you want to know who is buying or selling what and for how much you need to read Salerooms.
Read the column

ARTLAW

Artlaw is a regular column in Art Monthly in which Henry Lydiate unravels some of the more complex legal problems facing today's artists.

Art Monthlyis pleased to support Artquest and visitors to www.artquest.org.uk can read all of the Artlaw articles published in Art Monthly online.