We wish that we could be as sanguine about Modern Painters, the
well-known English art quarterly founded in 1987 by the late Peter
Fuller. Mr. Fuller, who died suddenly in 1990, was a man of
extraordinary energy and unstoppable passions. A robustly
polemical ex-Marxist, he started Modern Painters to promulgate
the Ruskinian aesthetic principles he had lately embraced and to
oppose the headlong progress of vulgarization in the British art
world. Modern Painters, he wrote in an editorial for the
first issue, “will seek to uphold the critical imagination and
the pursuit of quality in art.” Mr. Fuller was particularly severe
about those institutions
—increasingly, the dominant
institutions—
of modern art that

promote a tacky preference for the novel and fashionable,
exemplified in the taste of the Saatchis, the patrons of New Art,
successive Turner Prize juries, and journals like Artscribe
International… . All too often, their first concern seems not
to be with the good, the true, or the beautiful—but rather with the
advancement of their own careers: they tend to debase and to affront
public taste, rather than to challenge, or, least of all, to nurture
it.

We were inevitably, and sadly, reminded of Mr. Fuller’s declaration
of purpose when the first-ever New York issue of Modern Painters
recently arrived in our offices. A more thorough-going repudiation
of everything that Peter Fuller stood for can scarcely be imagined.
To be sure, Modern Painters continues to publish some intelligent
criticism. But the dominant note of the magazine is now set entirely
by that addiction to trendiness and shallow celebrity that
Mr. Fuller warned against. Today the presiding spirit of Modern
Painters is not John Ruskin but David Bowie, an aging rock star
who has lately supplemented the sodden hedonism of androgynous rock
music with the glitter of art-world chic. Mr. Bowie—
who now,
mirabile dictu, sits on the board of Modern Painters—is
featured on the cover of the New York issue. He is joined by Jeff
Koons, a grinning, kitsch-peddling artist of precisely the sort that
Peter Fuller would have anathematized. Behind them, leering out at
the viewer, is a typically garish, cartoonlike example of Koons’s
current “work.” The occasion for the tableau is a
conversation between Messrs. Bowie and Koons, a driveling exercise
in narcissistic exhibitionism more appropriate to a Hollywood fan
magazine than a serious art journal.

People in the art world first learned about the special New York
issue of Modern Painters when they received a fancy invitation to
a party at Jeff Koons’s SoHo studio. The party was meant to
celebrate not only publication of the special issue of Modern
Painters but also the publication of books by two regular
contributors to the magazine: a new edition of Matthew Collings’s
Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop: The London Art World from Francis
Bacon to Damien Hirst and the novelist William Boyd’s biography of
an American artist called Nat Tate. A few days after the party, the
London newspapers were full of the news that “Nat Tate” was a
fictional character and that denizens of the New York art world had
“turned up in droves to … celebrate Tate’s work, and laud Mr.
Boyd’s 66-page monograph.” In fact, people showed up out of the
morbid curiosity that celebrity inspires: the party, after all, was
at Jeff Koons’s studio and the great David Bowie was listed as one
of the hosts. The London Daily Mail gleefully reported that the
snobbish New York art world “had fallen victim to a well-executed,
and thoroughly British, practical joke.” That is true. But the
practical joke for which they fell was not Mr. Boyd’s fantasy but
the more melancholy joke that Modern Painters has now become.