Regionalism evolves from the tribe that has not moved into, or has moved out of, the city. The innate human tendency to concentrate on the immediate surrounds to the expulsion or exclusion of all else. This becomes one’s safety net.
When it was founded in the Chicago of ’73 the New Art Examiner knew it could not be regional. When the standard front page header was changed in the 1990s to ‘The Voice of Mid West Art’ thousands stopped subscribing. It had to be both regional and international. Not just to be in some way balanced or fair, because this practice gives it authority and makes it more interesting.
One of the problems facing artists around the world is their inability to care or have interest in art production in the next town. To be enclosed in their own safety net, in love with their own sensibility, finessed to such a high degree that one can cease to care what is being created in the in the next town or next valley to the detriment of one’s own practice.
The international art market thrives on this narrowness because it long ceased to care about community and when community turns its back in the art structure, there is no measure left by which art world and/or the regional community can talk to each other. It is, in its own tribal way, a tribe now defined by the bank balance, looking for new work from art colleges and academia training not to be in the community.
So the community and the Art World have leaned to ignore each other and the avant-garde Art Market ignores the community. The NAE cannot and does not in theory wish to ignore the many forces in the Art World. We attempt To bridge both, we comment upon both we have writers from both broad tribes and little tribes who naturally share their own symbolic order.
This is why the NAE is mythic.
Daniel Nanavati, UK Editor
Volume 30 number 3 January / February 2016 p5