Rosalind Krauss.

I read Amy Newman's oral history Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (Soho Press) with fascination, watching my own past parade by. Artforum's first decade is traced with great care. Charlie Cowles, one of the magazine's early publishers, provides a user's guide to the launching of an art publication, and Phil Leider, beloved editor during the first decade and the magazine's shift from California to New York, lays out his strategy. His emphasis on nurturing writers comes through clearly, as does the appreciation of the recipients of this care. John Coplans provides a more irascible voice, irritated by the relentlessness of the monthly grind and exasperated by the ideological tug-of-war within the editorial board, riven as it was by "formalists" Annette Michelson and myself and sociopolitical contextualists Lawrence Alloway and Max Kozloff. Challenging Art is a model of its kind and a much-needed historical document of one of the most important cultural journals of the '6os, a journal nearly driven to its deat h by Coplans.

Rosalind Krauss is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University. She is the author most recently of "A Voyage on the North Sea": Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (Thames & Hudson, 1999).