SPRINKLES PLEASE

Magazines are skinny lately.

Have you noticed?

I suppose online zines are shrinking the proverbial waist of the magazine industry just as online newspapers are making words on newsprint less and less common.

My advice?  Eat a doughnut.

Most folks want the instant gratification of Google that ends in a digital zine.  Information sought.  Information found.  But…

I still love the feel of paper, inky or slick, in my hands. I don’t own a digital reader because I still buy books. I subscribe to Conde’ Nast Traveler so I can fill my dreams with tours of gilded Russian palaces and sunny Italian beaches. I have recently re-subscribed to Rolling Stone after a hiatus of more than 10 years, and trust me, more than just Keith Richards needs some fattening up.

Eat a doughnut, folks.

So why am I babbling on about magazines? It is a question of legitimacy. I have had lots of conversations with lots of subscribers and friends about what constitutes artistic legitimacy or “making it,” aside from the ability to support oneself artistically.

Is it an academic pedigree or a resume of academic acceptance? Is it great reviews or stunning retail sales? Is it merely a well-hung cohesive show with “guts” and meaning?  I don’t know, sorry.  I can teach you how to get a show, but I can’t teach you how to be happy with it.

So, for all of you whose artistic dream is to be on the cover of the Rolling Stone, here’s a short menu of great art magazines…get to work.

1. The Artist’s Magazine. This is the first art mag I every owned. I was inspired by the work…wanted to be a painter…wanted my work to be featured among its pages.  That hasn’t worked out for me so far, but their Annual Art Competition has a looming deadline so don’t procrastinate.

2. Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine (pronounced Jucks-tah-pozz) is a magazine created in 1994 by a group of artists and collectors including Robert Williams Fausto Vitello, C.R. Stecyk III, and Greg Escalante, to both help define and celebrate urban alternative and underground contemporary art.  Anytime I have an art block, I find flipping through an issue of Juxtapoz inspires me.

Unique in the field of publishing, Juxtapoz emerged at a critical moment during the genesis of the late-20th Centuy underground art movement with the mission of connecting seminal modern genres like psychedelic and hot rod art, graffiti, street art, and illustration, to the context of broader more historically recognized genres of art like Pop, assemblage, old master painting, and conceptual art.

3.  ARTnews is the oldest and most widely circulated art magazine in the world. Its readership of 200,000 in 123 countries includes collectors, dealers, historians, artists, museum directors, curators, connoisseurs, and enthusiasts.

Published eleven times a year, ARTnews reports on the art, personalities, issues, trends and events shaping the international art world. In clear, well-crafted language that is as comprehensible to the novice as it is to the expert, the magazine offers a lively, provocative, and visually stimulating package that informs as well as entertains with news dispatches from a worldwide network of correspondents, hard-hitting investigative reports, criticism, and opinion.

I am still posting from the road, folks, but stay tuned… we will return to our regularly scheduled programming in just a few days!