By now a practice that I’ve sometimes managed to maintain for long consecutive periods of time, is cover-to-cover ingest of certain things that I read. It’s standard practice to do this with books, right – novels, biographies, history. I do that, I usually don’t put books away without reading the whole thing. But I also do this with Artforum, the magazine. Excepting the dozens of pages of reviews at the end of each issue. But the columns and feature articles I read completely. At least when I’m firing on all cylinders and up on things, and I read so much and subscribe to enough podcasts that this has been increasingly difficult to accomplish. But I still have a certain dedication to it to establishing a long term home or habitation where I make myself consistently available to learning about things that I never would have had I been left to my own devices. It’s similar in spirit to a yoga practice where you kind of surrender to the class and do all the things that are easy for you and applying just as much attention and consistency to the things that are difficult, which your own might skip. So I do this same sort of exercise in other ways in other places but the mechanism with reading about art in Artforum is to simply read entire issues.

The March 2025 issue included a piece that I like a lot featuring a Native American artist called Kite. Many of her works of visual art (she is also a performance and technology artist) are described as scores, as in a score of music. A beautiful example of one of these is on the cover of the magazine. My favorite part of my March Artforum read was this passage of the artist explaining her mandate, which since reading it, I have liked to think about very broadly in terms of the definition of elders and community:

“All I can do is make good art and seek to be in conversation with elders in my community who are intellectuals, and make sure my art remains in conversation with their philosophical interests”.