Mr. Finch wrote for Coagula for most of the 1990s, but by the end of the decade he had moved to Artnet. In a colorful remembrance posted on Coagula, Mr. Gleason wrote that the move was “like handing my high-maintenance pit bull over to someone who needed it more instead of sending it to the pound.”
Walter Robinson, Artnet’s founding editor, wrote a remembrance of his own on that site.
“He could be almost cruel with his judgments, and wrong, but he carried the core avant-garde demand for extreme freedom of opinion into everyday action, as if challenging the art world to live up to its haloed mythos,” Mr. Robinson wrote. “And of course he aimed most of his barbs at powerful successes — the best of them bearing Charlie’s insults as badges of pride — while succoring the out-of-fashion and beginners.”
In his post, Mr. Robinson recalled one of his favorite Finches, not necessarily for its conclusions but for its style. The article, from 1998, carried the headline “Who Is the Worst Artist?,” and in it Mr. Finch compared Joe Bradley, Dan Colen and Rob Pruitt, saying spectacularly unflattering things about each and declaring a three-way tie in need of this tiebreaker:
“Which of the B.C.P. bunch would you NOT wish to be shipwrecked with on a desert island? Well, Colen has a practical side that could produce the needed tent or coconut. Bradley could certainly trade quite well with any putative natives. Rob Pruitt would drive you crazy with his irrelevant showmanship and, after, you prepared him on the spit for dinner, would taste flabbily bland.”
For the record, Mr. Pruitt was the unlucky winner.
In a 2006 interview with The New York Observer, Mr. Finch defended his no-holds-barred approach and catty style.
“In any other field — politics, show business, whatever — a gossipy scandal sheet would be nothing out of the ordinary,” he said. “But since the art world is so secretive — it’s the last unregulated business out there — this kind of thing was explosive.”
