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Alexander Melamid Begins Artenol, an Art Magazine

Artenol’s mission, in part, is to talk about the arts in language intelligible to an educated, nonspecialist reader.Credit...Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

As the artist-provocateur Alexander Melamid sees it, modern art is deathly ill, but he thinks he has the cure. It is Artenol, his new quarterly magazine, described on its website as “a purgative for an ailing art world, a palliative for afflicted aesthetes.”

The magazine, whose name alludes to the pain remedy Tylenol, promises to apply the sweet balm of reason and linguistic clarity to relieve such alarming symptoms as galloping absurdity, inflationary fever and intellectual congestion.

“It will prescribe art that is good for your head and not hard on your stomach,” Mr. Melamid writes in an editor’s note in the first issue, to appear on newsstands June 23, at a price of $10.

The cover is eye-catching. A tinted engraving of Friedrich Nietzsche’s impressive head extends past the right margin, making his bushy mustache a convenient tab for turning the magazine’s pages.

Inside, the philosopher Richard Viladesau explores the relationship between art and God; Ross Kenneth Urken, editor of the financial website MainStreet, considers the aesthetics of the internal combustion engine; and the radical lawyer Michael Ratner recalls the heyday of the Guerrilla Art Action Group in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ian Frazier and Art Spiegelman, two of Mr. Melamid’s closest friends, chip in with a poem and a cartoon. All of this sounds fairly straightforward. Solid, literate contributions on intriguing topics. But on closer inspection, oddities surface. Among them: a fake obituary of Jeff Koons (“Jeff Koons, Creator of Inflated Art, Is Dead”), seemingly in The New York Times and written by Mr. Melamid.

Most peculiar is the cover article, “The Death of Art.” The author, a certain Rowling Dord, tells of a chance encounter with a plumber in upstate New York who turns out to be a once celebrated artist who “resigned” from the Mary Boone Gallery in the 1980s, on the eve of his first retrospective, convinced that art was dead. Now retired, he secretly labors on a “perpetually immobile machine” that will return art to a state of “pure authenticity.”

The article is a hoax, born of necessity.

In the planning stages for Artenol, Mr. Melamid was keen to go all-in on Nietzsche, famous for his pronouncement that God is dead. When the die-cut templates for a Nietzsche-shaped magazine came back from the printers in China, David Dann, the magazine’s sole editor and designer, asked Mr. Melamid for the Nietzsche article. Mr. Melamid, perplexed, responded, “What Nietzsche article?”

Scrambling, Mr. Dann came up with his fanciful tale about the artist “John Deaux,” written by a fictitious academic at the nonexistent Bayonne College. The college is a sly reference to the period, beginning in the late 1980s, when Mr. Melamid and his artistic partner at the time, Vitaly Komar, created a fictitious artistic movement that they called the School of Bayonne.

Artenol, in other words, seems very much like a cross between The New Criterion and Mad magazine — a platform for serious writing but also a kind of satellite dish tuned to receive and transmit Mr. Melamid’s wiggly brain waves.

It could hardly be otherwise, considering the source. Throughout his long career, both in the Soviet Union and the United States, Mr. Melamid, now 69, has perpetrated one long series of subversive stunts.

In the late 1960s he and Mr. Komar, influenced by Pop Art and Dada, turned the visual language of Socialist Realism into a series of wicked commentaries on the absurdities of Communism. After leaving the Soviet Union in the 1970s, the pair used the same approach but with different targets. In one project, aimed at the excesses of the auction market, they created a company that bought human souls (Andy Warhol donated his) and sold them to the highest bidder.

Mr. Melamid parted company with Mr. Komar more than a decade ago and began painting old master-style portraits of hip-hop artists and Russian oligarchs. More recently, he created the Art Healing Ministry, inviting the afflicted to enter a SoHo storefront for treatment by exposure to artworks by masters from Raphael to Roy Lichtenstein.

Artenol grew from Mr. Melamid’s increasing despair at the state of art criticism, and, more sweepingly, his conviction that modern art has been a colossal mistake.

“I started to read Artforum in the 1970s, and it made no sense, but I thought, ‘Perhaps my English is not good enough,’ ” he said in an interview in his apartment near Times Square, with Mr. Dann, and his publisher, Gary Krimershmoys. “But my English got better, and I still didn’t understand. I knew that the truth did not exist in the Soviet Union, but in America I expected to find it. Instead, I encountered the abyss of human thinking.”

Artenol’s mission, in part, is to talk about the arts in language intelligible to an educated, nonspecialist reader. “We want to fill the art space with some sense, to fill it with human thinking,” Mr. Melamid said. “It is the rehumanization of art.”

Mr. Dann described the target audience as “New Yorker readers looking for content that’s a bit more adventurous and irreverent,” a formulation that Mr. Melamid listened to raptly, as though hearing it for the first time. “Me, I have no clue,” he said. “Thank God my editor knows.”

The very compact staff consists of Mr. Melamid and Mr. Dann, who began working with Mr. Melamid in the early 1990s, during the School of Bayonne period. “I am the ideologue; he actually makes the magazine,” Mr. Melamid said, nodding in Mr. Dann’s direction.

Most of the money for Artenol comes from Mr. Krimershmoys, who is also a partner in the Art Healing Ministry. Like Mr. Melamid, he is an émigré from the former Soviet Union with a lofty sense of the magazine’s subversive mission.

This would seem to be a paradox. Mr. Krimershmoys left the financial industry to create an art advising business, and for a time was an art dealer as well. His wife, Denise, owns the Vohn Gallery and doubles as the accounts and circulation manager of Artenol.

“I left finance because it is too commodified, but when you are an adviser and dealer, it can become very similar,” Mr. Krimershmoys said. “This is our stand-up-and-scream moment.”

By this point in the conversation, the health metaphors had vanished. Artenol, it seemed, was both pill and projectile. “You aim high and see if the bullet hits the target or falls to the ground,” Mr. Krimershmoys said.

The image set Mr. Melamid to thinking. “You know, when you fire a gun, there is always the chance that someone will be killed,” he said.

“Not necessarily a bad thing,” Mr. Dann said.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Declaring Modern Art Dead, and Writing Its Epitaph . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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