Wise While Cracking Wise

The story I wrote a couple of months ago about Glenn O’Brien and Fabien Baron’s relaunch of interview Magazine has had nearly 1,000 readers. Quite a few have come through searches for David Carson’s design work (which I mention), and a lot through a link from a design blog I’m unfamiliar with. But most readers are searching for news about Glenn O’Brien and Fabien Baron. There was a profile of Fabien Baron in the New York Times on Sunday and it struck me as thin and mean spirited.

 There’s no mention of the manifesto as a conversation between Glenn O’Brien and Fabien Baron (via their Blackberries) in the current issue of Interview, which talks about Andy Warhol’s inspiration to use the new-at-the-time portable cassette recorders to catch the creative sparks flying between artists. I forget which classic artwork they mentioned, it might have been Paradise Lost. Let’s just say that it WAS Paradise Lost. Glenn and Fabien say there’s nothing new about creative types getting together to shoot the breeze and if they’d been putting out their magazine centuries ago, using Gutenberg’s new-fangled moveable type device, it would have featured Milton and Galileo discussing astronomy. Their inspirations for the magazine are drawn from its traditions, what they refer to as its DNA. What’s radical is that it’s very sexy because it’s formal and cerebral. It’s new, pussycat, by not being novel.

I’ve always been baffled why the sum of Glenn O’Brien’s media skills and activities isn’t more widely appreciated. From him you can draw a line back through every great comic media tradition of twentieth century New York and he’s brought them alive in his own time. The Thurber / Benchley comic sentimental essays in the New Yorker, the droll absurdity Steve Allen brought to tv talk shows, his ads for Barneys had the wild wit guys like Charles Addams brought to ad campaigns. He’s part of a traceable heritage but still his own man.

Extra Armchair by Fabien Baron

My previous story talked about Fabien Baron warming up haute coute and making high glamour goofy, as Audrey Hepburn did in Funny Face. The story in the New York Times gave me a deeper understanding of Fabien Baron’s terrior: “A son of a Parisian newspaper designer, he also brings a journalistic clarity to his pages. That’s what was missing, he said, with French Vogue, where he was art director from 2003 until this year, when he took over Interview. In terms of fashion, French Vogue’s stilettoed editor in chief, Carine Roitfeld, and her team were unbeatable – “they’re killers,” Mr. Baron said. But he felt the magazine lacked order. “I think I sharpened everything,” he said. I think that the new Interview design has the order and elegance of a “serious” European newspaper, it can sit on newsstands with the International Herald Tribune. While newspapers are tending towards being fluffy and celebrity-hungry, Interview has staked a claim on smart features rendered conversationally. I hadn’t followed his furniture and packaging designs but I was interested to read that he’s had a house in a rural European setting designed by John Pawson. I read an essay by Deyan Sudjic talking about the subtle purity of Pawson’s architecture that had a section on stores Pawspn designed for Calvin Klein and their mutual interest in Donald Judd’s furniture and interior spaces. The alternate view to the New York Times’s assertion that Fabien Baron is spreading himself too thin is that he’s drawing multiple finely nuanced projects from within a collaborative community. The confronting of the uncomfortable question of the hazy line between art and business and editorial and advertising and between fashion as art and fashion as commerce is a territory Andy Warhol made his own.

The mainstream journalist’s general discomfort with complexity, easy boredom and obsession with trends is disturbing. Journalists didn’t initially comprehend Al Gore’s re-invention of stewardship or Nick Cave’s scholarly spirit. Now one of our important tasks is to try and understand the enduring value of art, its soul strengthening qualities, rather than be dazzled by its price. One of the most unfortunate consequences of the march to extinction of the newspaper, magazine and record industries is the loss of the collective wisdom of the best journalists and impresarios. Financial forces compel journalists to flash bright shiny new things continually before reader’s eyes and their stories are garlanded with video ads. The frame of reference has become the next five minutes. Journalism now provides a fast food sugar rush that has no nourishment.

The wondrous, exhilarating aspect of the revamped Interview is the sense of ballast that it provides. What’s exciting about the new is seen in the context of the vast sweep of human history. It’s wise while cracking wise. We’ve gotten ourselves into a fine mess, as a species, by embracing novelty unconditionally and being a bit too smug about our ingenuity. We’ve made a lot of bad music with our ingenious financial instruments, for instance. Interview (and Art in America) are taking a harder and longer but ultimately richer view of innovation. It was a smart and sweet gesture to acknowledge Robert Rauschenberg’s passing with his archival Interview conversation with the late Australian art critic, Paul Taylor. Paul’s knowledge was expansive but his heart was bigger. In Melbourne when he began publishing his magazine Art And Text during the punk rock era he recognized the emerging genius in art school dropouts like Nick Cave and folded them back into the art world. He recognised the respect for art that they had that was hidden by their youthful volatility. That generosity of spirit and the ability to be able to see unique connections across disciplines is something Glenn O’Brien has too.

The Internet has given us a faster longer reach as we forage for information but if we’re going to turn it into knowledge we have to resume rather than suspend our capacity for disbelief says the scientist and artist Ken Goldberg, now the Director of Berkeley’s New Media Centre. A navigational feature on Interview’s website encourages one to linger, not surf. The scrollbar moves in a liquid manner and bobs, maintining its place in a text like a buoy on a calm sea. It’s a charming metaphor.
Sent from my iPhone

Interview Puts Media Back On The Rails

Glenn O’Brien and Fabien Baron have become the editorial directors of Interview Magazine and Art in America and Antiques. Twenty years ago they had a dress-rehearsal, Fabien Baron designing and Glenn co-editing (with Ingrid Sischy) about a year’s worth of issues of Interview that were the most effervescent things I’d ever seen on a newsstand. The editorial perspective was dazzling and sly, with a hip sense of sharp wordplay. There was something heart-warming about Fabien Baron’s design; the photos and typographical assemblages were silent sight-gags running along beside the conversations that were audacious, but sweet, in the way that Harpo Marx had been. Then it was all over, for complex managerial reasons. Their first new issue of Interview is on the newsstands and online at the moment, but that’s just the beginning and I’m hugely optimistic about the life they’ll breathe back into the magazine world.

Online media is becoming technically and philosophically refined: the self-publishing platform and toolkit being invented and constantly finessed by WordPress, the aggregation of city desks everywhere being pinned to dynamic maps on Outside.in, the thoughtful examination of the impact and quality of the media messages by Ken Goldberg (now director of the Berkeley Center for New Media), Peter Lunenfeld and Outside.in co-founder Steven Johnson, and the dreaming-out-loud being done by Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson (and his company Union Square Ventures) which have helped incubate the bookmarking system de.licio.us and the comments organising platform Disqus, as well as Outside.in. But the link to the old world, the traditions and innovations of the print world was missing. And now it’s arrived. In a conversational age there’s a lot of blather: ranting on blogs, awkward writing from amateurs and the declining standards in the large media organisations who keep firing editors and subs. Glenn has a grasp of the big picture, a wild, and deep ability to juxtapose, link and pare-down ideas to their essence, and a great sense of humour. I think his manner and style will bring order to conversations – online and on paper – without destroying spontenaiety and naturalness of expression.

Interview, Traditions and History

In the editor’s letter in the magazine and under the ‘about’ tab on the website Glenn writes about Andy Warhol’s artistic vision of business as art, and building the magazine around transcripts of conversations at a time when tape recorders were beginning to shrink in size and become truly portable. Blogs and their comments are based on a conversational model, but it isn’t always, or often, or maybe even ever, art. The templates that are offered with blogging platforms may be good design, but they aren’t profound. I’ll bet that Glenn and Fabien Baron will be able to make art out of Interview’s history and the opportunities the internet offers for wide-ranging conversations.