Jerry Saltz Once Called Artforum Ads ‘the Porn of the Art World.’ A New Show Brings Together Some of the Best—See Them Here

In a 2014 article for  magazine, critic Jerry Saltz described ‘s ads as “the porn of the art world.” The glossy promotions comprised around 70 percent of the magazine’s pages. But these weren’t your typical ethereal, aspirational ads for perfume or jewelry. These are ads for , after all.

ads are often confrontational, cheeky, even raunchy. They are designed to start a conversation—and some have even earned their own places in art history.

The Brooklyn-based Gallery 98, which specializes in art-world ephemera like announcement cards and gallery posters, recently got ahold of a cache of old  magazines, from which they culled some of the most interesting and emblematic ads over the decades. Now available online to peruse or purchase is a wide swathe from 1970 to 2010 that feature portraits of artists.

The resulting images are a delightful time capsule of different decades in the art market: there’s a then-considerably-less-successful Ed Ruscha in bed with two women, shot by Jerry McMillan in 1967; Judy Chicago’s debut both in and the broader art world under her new name, in 1970; and an ad for a show of then 25-year-old Dash Snow at Peres Projects two years before he died.

See more selections from Gallery 98 below.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com