A friendly voice beckons you down a narrow gray hallway festooned with square advertisements for seemingly every exhibition opening in New York. The tiny corner office feels curiously expansive—chalk it up to the searing exposures on the twentieth floor, above the editorial offices. Confettied storms of white letterhead with whorls of red pen—a name, an exclamation point, the initial K, or just lists upon lists of proper nouns. It’s all too bright. A small man sits in the eye of this information tornado amid blond wood and glossy white drawers. He is dressed warmly. (Was the suit he was wearing canary or tangerine?) Framed artworks casually lean here and there; concern with damage, much less cost, is negligible. “You did well in the interview,” he says. “Perhaps too well.”
In May 2017, artist Juliana Halpert surreptitiously took eight photographs of former Artforum publisher Knight Landesman’s personal office. She had worked at Artforum for three and a half years and given her notice one month prior (as I would ten months later). It was five months before the old deb…