Every page-turn is a physical undertaking. The paper unfolds, resists, drapes across your lap. Large swathes of its insides fall out. Art of Conversation is a broadsheet newspaper — full broadsheet, not tabloid, not magazine — and the format is not incidental to the content. It is the content. The ideas inside require room to breathe, and the publication insists you give it to them, even if that means wrestling with the thing on a train or clearing an entire dining table to read it properly.
The editorial concept is austere and effective. Each issue consists entirely of conversations — not profiles, not reviews, not criticism, but uninterrupted exchanges between artists, gallerists, and creative minds who have known each other for years. The transcriptions are published verbatim: the umms and ahs, the self-contradictions, the digressions that a more polished publication would edit out. This is indulgent but charming, and it produces an unusual degree of honesty. One issue featured Peter Blake — the English pop artist who designed the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album — in conversation with his longtime friend and editions gallerist Paul Stolper, shot by Rankin in a deliberate recreation of David Bailey's famous portrait of Lennon and McCartney. They talked about the West Coast art scene of the 1960s, the celebrity artists of that era, the importance of clowns in art, and musical post boxes. It is that kind of magazine.
Published to coincide with the world's most important art fairs and distributed directly to some of the most significant collectors of contemporary art, Art of Conversation occupies a position that no other publication does: too substantial to be a catalogue, too immediate to be a journal, too beautifully designed to be thrown away. Serious quotes are pulled out in spiky speech bubbles. The photographs are large enough to be tactile — a man arranging oranges with his forehead, a giant smiley-face ball wedged between two buildings. It is as though, to compensate for trapping something as immediate as a conversation on the printed page, the reading experience has been made extravagantly physical.
In a world where art fairs can feel like shopping malls with better lighting, Art of Conversation insists that the most valuable thing at any fair is not what is hanging on the walls but what is being said in the corridors. The newspaper captures those conversations and gives them the only thing conversations normally lack: permanence.