Honigman roasts Artforum

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Ana Finel Honigman is one of our great satirists. In a hilarious, cloying post on the Guardian's excellent art blog, Honigman sticks her tongue firmly in cheek and roasts Artforum and its much-derided GawkerForum pseudo-blog.

"Every page in Artforum's annual ten issues, from the precious ad space through the erudite editorials, is devoured and savored by art students, artists and art professionals," Honigman writes. Ha! Stephen Colbert couldn't have said it with a straighter face. Maybe Honigman is hoping for a guest spot -- after all, Colbert occasionally invites smart, insider online figures onto his show.

Honigman continues: "ArtForum has retained its intellectual integrity and cultural relevance by responding substantively to seemingly superficial aspects of the art world with sober and informed commentary."

That's hitting the Artforum crowd where it's most vulnerable. After all, this is the same magazine that created a fake person to write about how much fun he had at excloo parties. (You may recall that Artforum knowingly presented a sockpuppet to its readers -- a fake writer that was apparently Jack Bankowsky-with-a-pseudonym. The sockpuppet vanished from AF.com after being exposed by MAN.) And later the magazine's website published an article in which one of its editors bragged about playing creepy children's' clothing dress-up games at the house of a person he was supposed to be covering. By referring to Artforum as "sober" and as having "integrity" Honigman is smartly zeroing in on the magazine's weakest spot.

As if that weren't vicious enough, Honigman then targets the pseudo-blog known in the art world as GawkerForum: "[The magazine's] sobriety is maintained on the website, even at Scene and Herd, the international art world's premiere social diary, where gossip and art star-spotting are interspersed with informed and insightful criticism of their work," she writes.

Which is borderline unfair, because to call further attention to the joke that is GawkerForum is to humiliate the magazine and its writers more than is probably necessary. After all, GawkerForum is best known for comparing visiting a Miami art fair to covering the war in Iraq, where 119 journalists have been killed on the job. It's "insightful criticism" has included this gem: "After the reception, the sluggish elevator to the dinner in Klagsbrun's West Village penthouse gave us time to reflect on [artist Billy] Sullivan's success." And: "I have not given [Tacita] Dean's work the attention it deserves..." Or: "I couldn't see everything, though, as I had to run to the Swiss Awards ceremony."

And as it turns out, Honigman is just warming up! Honigman goes on to critique Artforum's grossly out-of-date website, poking fun at it by describing it as a model even though the site is stuck in about 1999 and even though its most regularly updated feature, the headlines, frequently includes attribution mistakes. Obviously my ignoring AF's website hasn't exactly spurred it to change, but perhaps Honigman's biting critique will have more impact.

Honigman finishes her mini-essay with a bit of excess. By this point we understand the Jonathan Swift, let's-eat-the-babies treatment, so was this really necessary: "Don't you agree that artforum.com ought to be a role model for other art magazines, who can learn from it that there is life beyond the newsstands?"