EXHIBITIONS / The state of the art mag: Tim Hilton takes issue with 'tate', a new magazine for . . . well, who, exactly?

TIM MARLOW is an intelligent young man with a great future in marketing - to judge by the first issue of tate, the new art magazine which he edits. It looks smart, retails at pounds 2.95 - cheap, for such a product - carries lots of advertising and has the same level of sophistication as an airline magazine. Many people will like tate. That's what it's for. The intention is that the journal's parent body, the Tate Gallery itself, will benefit.

Though it has more of a consumer look, tate is modelled on the RA Magazine, which promotes Royal Academy exhibitions and the activities of Academicians. This function it performs well, and furthermore the RA Magazine prints readable articles. Marlow and tate could do the same. All they need is some better contributors. The question of the magazine's function is more difficult. The RA Magazine is quite open about being a promotional and not a critical journal. tate was launched last week with the pretence of being independent. Not so. It is a new exercise in public relations, enslaved to the ethos of the Tate's director, Nicholas Serota, the Patrons of New Art and the Turner Prize.

Karen Knight, editor of the magazine Modern Painters, is furious. She asks why the Tate Gallery should use taxpayers' money to subsidise a 'vanity magazine', one that features 'culturally affluent lifestyles' when it ought to be angled towards education. She has a point; and perhaps she makes it with the more vehemence because tate, which costs pounds 1.50 less than Modern Painters, threatens its future existence.

Is the taxpayer being used to kill off a magazine that has been a consistent critic of the new Tate Gallery? This cannot have been the intention, but money always rules. tate has been phenomenally successful in attracting advertising. Its publishers, Wordsearch Ltd, know the field. They also issue Blueprint and Design Review. In April they launch the as-yet-unnamed magazine (charlie?) that will reflect the architectural views of the Prince of Wales and is funded by his Institute of Architecture.

I don't like Modern Painters, but at least it has a discernible standpoint and serves a definite and quite large constituency. Peter Fuller, its founder, saw that there was room for a politically right-wing and middlebrow magazine for people who distrusted the avant-garde and wished to be comforted in their instinctive preference for the softer forms of recent art. Hence its blethering about the countryside, the unjustifiable declarations of affiliation to Ruskin and its use of amateur art critics from the literary establishment. It's viable - I can't see tate putting it out of business - because it knows its audience.

Marlow doesn't know what his exact audience is, but he has dreams of the two million people who visit the Tate each year. And this is the clue to the new situation in art magazines. Culture means business. Vast numbers of people go to museums and exhibitions. Even more don't go but like to know about such things. Here is a seemingly limitless consumer group who may actually prefer to know about art at second hand, through a magazine. What more could an editor want?

I can think of some things. An editor might want to tell the truth about our art galleries and the way they are run. Or an editor might want to print genuinely new thinking and good writing. Or, fair enough, to stick up for one particular kind of art. Or to publish articles about culture that have no regard for consumerism. There is such a thing as the cause of art, and I wish I knew an art magazine that now supports that cause.

Idealistic art journals belonged to the classic age of the avant-garde. The first of them, in 1848, was the Pre-Raphaelites' The Germ. The last was Studio International, which petered out in the mid-Seventies. Artscribe, now dead, began as an artists' magazine and then perished at the hand of the commerce it became so eager to embrace. Now there are no specialist art magazines of any consequence. Yet the world shows an appetite for writing about art. That's why newspapers now take so much interest in exhibitions, and why genuine art criticism will in future be found in newspapers rather than anywhere else.-

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