Chief editor Jonas Ekeberg has given in his notice to Kunstkritikk with effect from 1 October. He has headed the periodical since 2009.
Under Ekeberg’s leadership Kunstkritikk has focused on the Nordic, and the budget of the enterprise has increased from less than NOK 700,000 to about NOK 3m a year. The readership has grown from 212,000 annual visits in 2009 to 336,000 in 2012. At the same time the staff has gone from one to five employees: an editorial staff of three in Oslo and editors in Copenhagen and Stockholm. The periodical now publishes daily from the offices in Kunstnernes Hus.
“I am of course sorry to be losing Jonas as managing director and chief editor. He has rare skills and has been instrumental in developing the institution into what it is today: a quite central player on the Norwegian and Nordic art scene,” says board chairman Petter Snare.
Snare adds that it is too early to think about when a new chief editor will be in place, but that the announcement will have to come early in the autumn.
Kunstkritikk’s Danish editor Pernille Albrethsen also regrets Ekeberg’s departure:
“It’s rare to meet people with an in-depth understanding of the editorial work related to art criticism as a genre, who at the same time have great insight into the institutions of the art world and a feeling for reading the art-policy game,” says Albrethsen.
Ekeberg is leaving his post to devote his energies to an ongoing research project on Nordic contemporary art with the emphasis on the nineties.
“These have been four fantastically interesting and developing years that I feel we have made much of, and I want to thank everyone who has contributed. It has been incredibly rewarding to experience the positive feedback we have had to our contribution to the revival of an art-critical sphere in the Nordic region. At the same time it has been challenging for me personally, because I have committed to running a research and book project in parallel with Kunstkritikk. It is this project that I now see a need to prioritize, and that is why I am now resigning from Kunstkritikk,” says Ekeberg.
The work with Kunstkritikk’s tenth anniversary this coming winter, which will begin with a series of thematic feature articles and a subsequent anthology, will be Ekeberg’s last project as chief editor.
