I want to tell you why we built this, and I'm going to do it without the kind of careful institutional language that makes everything sound like a mission statement, because we don't have a mission statement — we have a conviction, which is a different thing entirely and considerably harder to put on a tote bag.
Here is the conviction: the art world is one of the most interesting places on earth, and it is covered, by and large, as though it were one of the most boring. I spent twenty years as a culture journalist going everywhere — war zones, festivals, elections, deserts, cities that were actively on fire — and the best writing I encountered, the writing that actually changed how I saw the world, was almost never about those things. It was about paintings. It was about the moment in a room when the noise stopped and something that had been made by one human being reached across whatever distance and landed, without warning, in another human being's chest. That moment happens in galleries in New York every single weekend. It happens for free. And the publications that cover it have somehow made it seem like something you need credentials to access.
"The art is not the problem. The language we've built around it is the problem. We intend to fix the language."
I walked into a gallery in Chelsea in the spring of 2019 — I will not tell you which one because I do not want to give them the credit — and I stood in front of a painting for forty minutes. I know it was forty minutes because a woman asked me if I was all right. I was all right. I was better than all right. I was having the kind of experience that the best journalism aspires to and rarely achieves: the experience of something real, something that could not be argued with or summarized or reduced to its context. I went home and tried to find something worth reading about the artist. What I found was press releases and auction results. I started building ArtDrop about six months later.
We have assembled, for this first issue, exactly the team I wanted. Claire Voss reviews shows the way a great critic reviews anything — with precision, without mercy, with the assumption that the reader is an adult. Marcus Bell writes about artists the way a good friend tells you about someone you have to meet. Dani Osei covers this city from the ground up, which is the only way to cover it. James Farrell knows where the money goes and is willing to say so out loud. Priya Kapoor covers culture — all of it, the films and the music and the buildings and the books — because art does not happen in a vacuum and it is tiresome to pretend otherwise. And Nick Caruso writes the column that needed to exist and that nobody else at this magazine would touch, which tells you something about Nick Caruso and also about this magazine.
We are going to make mistakes. We are going to have opinions that turn out to be wrong. We are going to publish things that make people uncomfortable, including, occasionally, the galleries and collectors and institutions that the art world depends on. We are going to do this because it is the job, and the job is worth doing right, and doing it right means doing it honestly even when honesty is inconvenient.
The art is extraordinary. Let's get into it.