Art-Rite

Product Information

For its collective audience, Art-Rite represents a restless but friendly, constantly evolving entity.

The edition collects the full run of the underground arts magazine, compiling all twenty issues in a single volume spanning 678 pages. The periodical has long been celebrated for its underground/overground position and its cutting, humorous, on-the-streets coverage and critique of the art world.Through its auctions, Art-Rite Auction House hopes to offer a curated variety of works of art, able to add value to the most prestigious and historical collections. We were accepted, with our project being to launch Art-Rite magazine, made welcome in both divisions of the ISP, and off we went. O’Doherty is distinguished and worldly, but he gets a little mushy about the Art-Rite editors: “They were three extraordinarily gifted people. The application form also asked whether or not the records were annually audited; deAk and Robinson tactfully declined to reply. Ingrid tended to keep her meetings with Edit à deux, I suspected then (and have not changed my mind) because Edit contributed more to her plans for the magazine than she wanted to let the rest of us see.

But since the magazine deAk and Robinson published and edited, and wrote and designed and typeset and distributed, out of their downtown-Manhattan lofts between 1973 and 1978 was so open, democratic, and fresh-faced, they may think the parallel fine, or at least poetic justice: They and a third editor, Joshua Cohn, staged an exhilarating deconstruction (if an exhilarating deconstruction isn’t a contradiction in terms) not only of art but of art writing, so they must take what they get. The magazine was famous for its covers, made by such artists as Alan Suicide, Carl Andre, Dorothea Rockburne, William Wegman, Christo, Vito Acconci, Pat Steir, Joseph Beuys, Judy Rifka, Robert Ryman, Rosemary Mayer, and Ed Ruscha.

Ingrid Sischy, who had become the magazine’s editor a year or so earlier, had made Edit a regular contributor, and besides writing unorthodox articles—I remember, for example, a spectacular piece about the hip-hop artist Rammellzee, and another on, of all things, those Cabbage Patch dolls—she served as an all-purpose one-person think tank.

how the covers of the issue were spread across the entirety of her SoHo loft as “a field of flowers. Only the rare, independent outlets escape the fetters of profit hungry power brokers by existing on a shoestring, their precarious state allowing them to stand beholden to none. While much of the creation of Art-Rite was done from Edit’s loft on Wooster Street, Walter also took advantage of his access to office space at the Jewish Week newspaper, where he had taken a job as a Production Manager.Among them were Walter Robinson, his roommate Joshua Cohn, and Edit DeAk, a Hungarian immigrant living with her husband, artist Peter Grass, in a 3,500 square foot loft on the top floor of 149 Wooster Street in Soho. Of a series of profiles of critics—Alloway, Lippard, Max Kozloff, Pincus-Witten—that ran regularly in Art-Rite’s first issues, for example, deAk says now, “I was naive enough to think that what we were doing was helping people focus on one critic at a time. They are authoritative in the art they promote, and are creating or are committed to the avant-clique. Among Art-Rite’s most ambitious projects were four thematic issues that offered roving investigations into ascendant art practices of the mid-1970s.