‘A high premium is placed on signalling this culturally aware urbanity and theoretical engagement, rather than necessarily enacting it. If the modern city displays, as Raban puts it, ‘a pornography of taste’, these signals are crucial to our recognition of the art professional’s authoritative self-image. It is a form of subcultural recognition, which can run from the micro – two students, for instance, who might each clock the fact that the other is wearing the current male art school uniform of deck shoes, waxed Barbour jacket and 1940s-goes-1980s short-back-and-sides haircut – to the macro, such as the way an art magazine squares up to its readers. Interviewed in Thornton’s book, the former Artforum editor Jack Bankowsky observes that ‘You have to understand the pieties […] Seriousness at Artforum and in the art world in general is a commodity. Certain kinds of gallerists may want the magazine to be serious even if they have no real co-ordinates for distinguishing a serious article from the empty signifier of seriousness abused.’10 You have to understand the pieties: the weight of an artist’s monograph or how many times their name crops up on e-flux announcements; someone’s preference for reading October rather than frieze; the internationalism of the contemporary art world – some romantic residue of the idea that, if you travel regularly by plane, you must be high-powered because your business reaches far outside your locality; artist names exchanged as collateral by those jockeying for position in the marketplace of curating or criticism. These are the little curlicues that adorn the edifice of the professional arts establishment.’
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