Art-Rite Auction House communicates with its audience by sharing and narrating the history of art through the works of modern and contemporary Italian and international artists presented in the catalogues. In that moment, the idea of starting their own magazine took shape, and they pitched the concept of a newsprint supplement to be distributed within Art in America itself. To a rather shy and quiet Irish/English person (my main contribution to Artforum at the time, I’m quite sure, was a trivial willingness to work ninety-hour weeks), she was intimidatingly glamorous; but besides being sparkling in both her perceptions and her style, she was always warm and always utterly a pleasure. As a project, Art-Rite felt collectively summoned and populist, privileging the work and perspectives of artists themselves, and bringing an insider’s view to an emergent downtown arts culture of the mid-70s.

Through its auctions, Art-Rite Auction House hopes to offer a curated variety of works of art, able to add value to the most prestigious and historical collections. Perfectly positioned between the underground and the establishment, the magazine featured artists who became defining voices of the era, including Laurie Anderson, Chris Burden, Genesis P-Orridge, Patti Smith, and Gordon Matta-Clark. Over the past decade, digital has usurped print as the primary vehicle for the transmission of information and culture.Among them were Walter Robinson, his roommate Joshua Cohn, and Edit DeAk, a Hungarian immigrant living with her husband, artist Peter Grass, in a 3,500 square foot loft on the top floor of 149 Wooster Street in Soho. We were riding on the absurdity of the situation—that we were three nobodies, had no money, had no fame, and didn’t know anybody in the art world. Robinson meanwhile had gotten a job as a typesetter and designer for a Jewish weekly newspaper, and, he says, “We stole all the type from there until they caught me and I got fired.

The hand of the artist found its way into Art-Rite more often than not, even when the editors’ copy went unsigned. The fanzine image carries, since Art-Rite had a loving relationship with the art world and particularly with its own generation.

J. Liebling famously wrote in his 1960 essay titled “ The Wayward Press: Do You Belong in Journalism?

It made its presence known with simple, witty covers designed by established artists including Joseph Beuys, Ed Ruscha, Christo, Alan Suicide, William Wegman, Vito Acconci, Robert Ryman, and Carl Andre. Distributed free, it was “given away,” according to an undated grant application, “in recognition of the community which nurtures it. A good deal of thought went into images, so that the issue is virtually a compendium of decisions on how to represent a book visually—whether to show the cover, or individual pages, or individual images cropped from their pages, or perhaps the book as an object, held open by somebody’s hands, which in deAk’s case might also hold a cigarette.Organized as a series of theme issues, the magazine—produced at DeAk’s loft—was designed to be part of the Soho artist community it served. January 1977), mostly a group of found photographs invoking speed, violence, and rock ’n’ roll, and Kim MacConnel’s no. Art-Rite welcomed coverage of topics like fashion and music, presenting them as naturally in conversation with visual art.

Lesser known than contemporaries such as Aspen and Avalanche - magazines often evoked for their conceptualisation of the mechanics and materialities of publishing as a post-1960s object - Art-Rite in its original form instead utilised the disposable qualities of newsprint, an iconoclastic gesture against the canon of high production values that commented equally on the inherent disposability of arts journalism. These artists’ issues were surely one model for Artforum’s artist’s project series the following decade; in February 1980, in fact, MacConnel redid his Art-Rite project in two spreads of Artforum, using a few of the same drawings, this time partly in color. After graduation, Edit moved downtown with Peter Grass into an enormous loft space on the eighth floor of 149 Wooster Street, just south of Houston Street. Art-Rite maintains its unique position between the major and the underground, and has long been admired for its sharp, humorous street coverage and criticism of the art world. Primary Information brings back to life one more essential publication: this time, Art-Rite, the legendary New-York based magazine from the 1970s that made the connection between the gallery scene and the underground, punk and artists’ books, art criticism and jokes, “between craziness and clarity.Drawn from the archives of editor Edit DeAk, the show traces the early history of Art-Rite through an array of original production materials, much of which is on display for the first time. Regarding art advisory, the specialists of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art are available to assist institutional and private clients with any request related to their collections and the evaluation of individual or multiple works, also for insurance purposes. Although times have changed and New York is no longer a place where young artists can afford to live and make art with such abandon, the spirit of Art-Rite is alive and well at Printed Matter, Inc.