“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
— Michael Corleone, Godfather 3
“This is the business we’ve chosen.”
— Hyman Roth, Godfather 2
What could be more fitting at this moment of constitutional crisis and probable economic collapse under our crime family from Queens than a few choice quotes from the Godfather trilogy?
The relaunching of SquareCylinder.com, David M. Roth’s sterling online art magazine, by Bill Lasarow, Mark Van Proyen and me, would seem an odd occasion to drag the Corleonies into art discourse. I do this advisedly, sarcastically, jokingly. Only stupid people, failing, no-talent losers, would take it seriously.
I quote Michael Corleone for a personal reason. A few years ago, when the pandemic struck, many of the art publications for which I wrote and had been writing for, for twenty years or more, either went under or changed directions. Indeed, by comparison, the art world and its “carnival attached to a stock market,” as Robert Hughes characterized it, seemed trivial and irrelevant, even for dyed-in-the-wool artsters like myself. I gradually withdrew from the scene — especially with the proliferation of Covid masks dampening voices and spirits at art events — and resigned myself (literally) to memetic mockery of FDR’s “malefactors of great wealth,” bent now as then on wrecking the New Deal and with it American society as we know it.
The business we have chosen, however, proved irresistible in its siren call. When the opportunity arose to collaborate with art veterans as respected and esteemed as Bill and Mark, I was more than a little interested. It did take some doing to drag this Cincinnatius from his meme plow. The revival of SquareCylinder is doubly important, culturally as well as critically, at this crucial juncture in American history. (Remember The End of History, Francis Fukuyama’s capitalist-utopia bestseller?) We do not kid ourselves that our opinions, rooted in art criticism, are sufficient to topple the golden god; but we will not shirk our duty to speak out when and where we can (as we do in our sister publication, TheDemocracyChain.org).
Prior to the Civil War, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison wrote:
“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — and I will be heard!
American culture in general respects art primarily as a vessel of glamor, power, and money, not for its intrinsic aesthetic or moral worth. (Remember when even the elegant Barack Obama mocked art history degrees before apologizing?) We stand for a broadly humanistic conception of art as self-expression, no matter what art-establishment tastemakers may proclaim, with its roots sunk in the soil of prehistory and its branches ramifying — as in Ad Reinhardt’s famous cartoon of the art-style tree — into the airy future.
We hope to serve the Bay Area art community, and beyond, by interpreting and championing the art that excites us, and doing so with reason, passion, humor, and, horribile dictu, the occasional lexiphanic big word. It’s the most we can do, and the least. Teddy Roosevelt advised, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” Mahatma Gandhi said, “Whatever you can do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important that you do it.” He added: ”In a gentle way you can shake the world.”
This is the work we have chosen and have been chosen by.
