The New Art Examiner was dead, to begin with. Dead as a doornail.
Guthrie’s version starts with his account of the two blows, dealt to him and Allen in their early days in Chicago, that resulted in the founding of the NAE. He shared the sorry details in the lecture and in a conversation the next day.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Guthrie came here in 1969, when abstract and pop art from America was “overwhelming the UK art scene,” to see for himself what all the fuss was about. He met Allen when both of them were teaching at Chicago State College. By 1972, sharing a byline, they were ensconced as art critics at the Chicago Tribune. “We never missed a deadline and our copy was clean,” Guthrie says. But the city was enamored of its Imagists in those days, and if you weren’t cheerleading, he claims, the ruling clique gottook offense. “We took the position that to become a major art center Chicago couldn’t put all its eggs in one basket,” Guthrie says.
Ergo the New Art Examiner, started as an eight-page tabloid in 1973 with a measly $250. Their motto was “The independent voice of the visual arts,” and Guthrie says they were interested only in applying journalistic standards to art coverage and having a diverse discourse. But they still failed to understand that in Chicago “you’re either with us or against us,” he says. The NAE was “on the wrong side of the anti-intellectual machine that runs this city” and would never be accepted. Even now it pains him to recount how he and Allen were excluded from the guest lists for opening parties and the mansions of the North Shore. Artists were afraid to talk with them, Guthrie says, and though they launched “dozens, even hundreds” of writers, including New York magazine columnist Jerry Saltz, employed critics like Alice Thorson and James Yood as editors, and once published a major piece by Robert Hughes, “we were not invited to talk or visit at any university in Chicago.”
He also told his tale in a Bad at Sports podcast that inspired a lengthy comments brawl on the BAS Web site. And that’s when something extraordinary happened. Amid the bluster came a message from art fair impresario Michael Workman: “I know I could personally, pretty easily, given six months, work up roughly enough funds to underwrite NAE on its old bimonthly schedule and in its old saddle-stitched format for ten years.” (Workman, once an NAE bookkeeper, had to shut down his own magazine, Bridge, for financial reasons a few years back.) He invited Guthrie to come down to the Bridge Art Fair in Miami Beach to talk about it, expenses paid. And sure as I sit here under Chicago’s frozen grey sky, that’s where the old fellow is now—laughing heartily in the sunshine and making his plans for a new New Art Examiner.