, Natasha Lyonne plays a casino cocktail waitress with an innate ability to tell when people are lying. I have similar psychic insight, but restricted to a very narrow niche.

I have seen you with your phone pressed up against your nose, reading that juicy item about an artist couple’s divorce as your stack of 

 sits unread on the coffee table. Well, I wasn’t watching 

, exactly—I was watching Chartbeat, a website that gives publishers a snapshot of exactly how many people are reading each article on a platform at any given moment.

from 2017 to 2022, news editor of the now-defunct 

 from 2011 to 2013, and in other art media jobs, I looked to Chartbeat to observe the true reading habits of the growing audience for our work. Above a constantly shuffling list of top stories is something that looks like the dreaded 

 election needle, which tracks the site’s number of visitors in real time. When there’s a big hit, the needle goes all the way to the right and, sometimes, literally off the charts. The dopamine hit is undeniable.

Over the past decade, the public’s interest in art has bloomed as the subject increasingly intersected with pop culture, high finance, and tech. At the same time, avenues to publish journalism about art have dwindled. Major newspapers cut full-time art critic positions. Smaller outlets like 

 shuttered. The world’s longest-running English-language art magazine, 

, now publishes only one print issue per year, and 

 has reduced its run from eight issues to five.

This situation has left art coverage in a fairly unique spot within the journalistic landscape. More people want to read about art than ever—Chartbeat tells me that—but the moments when the niche and broad audiences intersect are rare and sometimes hard to predict. That’s why many of the trends that have shaped the broader journalism sector in recent years, like the ascent of single-voice Substacks and the broad adoption of paywalls, have failed to take hold in art journalism.

New readers come for a Maurizio Cattelan banana explainer, and maybe they return for the latest on climate activists throwing soup at a Van Gogh. But art remains niche enough that it’s hard to get a critical mass to commit to subscribe to a new outlet or newsletter. The stories you see in art media today often represent an attempt to retain the devoted niche while luring the masses.

Without consistent philanthropic support and with limited ad-supported revenue, new ventures have been supported by art businesses with a vested interest in fostering meaningful conversation. (Traditional art-media advertising is fueled not only by auction houses and galleries, but other businesses targeting wealthy people: private jets, premium liquor, luxury fashion.) Last fall, David Zwirner became the lead funder of the small downtown literary magazine 

. Art advisor Allan Schwartzman and journalist Charlotte Burns produce incisive podcasts about power in the art world. I was commissioned to write this very article for a journal funded by a communications firm.

To truly understand how we got here—and to offer you a decoder ring for art journalism—I compiled nine imaginary headlines you are likely to encounter in a range of publications, from a monthly art magazine to the 

. Here’s what they tell us about publications’ lofty goals, advertisers’ shifting demands—and, most enigmatically, what readers want.

Forty years ago—when critics had the power to make or break careers and write art history almost in real time—this kind of headline might have introduced a piece of writing that sent shockwaves through the art world. Fast forward a few decades, and the cerebral treatises of Arthur Danto or Clement Greenberg have all but vanished. Without any enticing keywords, or even a verb in the headline, this particular story would sink like a stone online. Unless it’s by someone Jerry Saltz-level famous or successfully coins a new term (Zombie Formalism, anyone?), the critical art essay is a hard sell with today’s larger, increasingly fragmented, international audience. If these sorts of stories are published now, it’s almost always for a publication with a dedicated subscriber base that doesn’t rely on pageviews. It’s vegan art journalism—it’s good for you, and you feel good after consuming it. But it’s never going to have broad appeal.

Christie’s Sells $80 Million Monet From Disgraced Countess’s Collection

As collectors around the world poured money into paintings in the 1990s, a new form of art journalism developed: market coverage. Staggering auction prices justified headlines like this one in weekly columns such as the 

’s “Inside Art” and monthly magazines like 

. In the olden days, a publicist would approach one of these outlets months in advance about doing an exclusive story on a big-ticket consignment. Then, the journalist would tap a few sources—art dealers, executives from competing auction houses—for the inside scoop. Who is the anonymous consignor? Why are they selling now? Is the work in worse condition than the auction house implied?

Today, auction-house announcements are less bespoke architecture and more prefab construction. The reason for this is threefold. First of all, many outlets that used to serve them up—including “Inside Art” and 

—are defunct. Second, the surviving publications operate at a pace that makes a deep dive untenable. Instead, it’s grist for a quick turnaround that can still generate a decent number of pageviews if there is a big dollar amount in the title. Finally, on the auction house side, press releases are increasingly used as sweeteners in the race to secure consignments (which now happen on a much tighter schedule), making their press departments far less discriminating and strategic about what they promote.

Kehinde Wiley’s New San Francisco Survey Shows an Artist on the Brink of a Breakthrough

Reviews are the genre that everyone says they want—but nobody actually reads. The outlets still committed to them are subscriber-funded print magazines like 

 and newspapers with a dedicated local audience, like the 

. There, they serve a similar purpose to a restaurant review: letting people know what is worth their time and money. But there simply isn’t a large enough audience to make most reviews worth the investment. When one is published, it’s because someone at the publication believed the artist or show justified the attention, even without a clear payoff.

Anish Kapoor’s New Bean Sculpture Looks Like a Giant Shiny Dog Turd


Here’s the other side of the review coin. While it’s true that few people actually read art criticism, there is one exception that proves the rule: the pan. But vanishing chutzpah among writers and cozy relationships between critic and subject aren’t the only factors marginalizing the negative review. Art criticism is now published so rarely, and in so few outlets, that editors and critics alike often want to seize the rare opportunity to celebrate something worthy rather than trash something disappointing. (I have definitely made that choice as an editor.) Compassion and enthusiasm are wonderful motivators, but alas, they don’t pay in clicks.


How an Antiquities Trafficking Case Rocked France

Investigations are expensive. Let me lay out what the above might cost in terms of both labor and money. Few arts publications have the resources to dedicate staff time to investigations. So these articles are often written by freelancers who do a significant amount of unpaid legwork—maybe three to five hour-long interviews—to get enough of a handle on the story to even craft a pitch. If the pitch is accepted, they might get $1,000 or so for the article, which then takes maybe eight to ten more hours of interviews and research, five hours of writing, and four hours of processing edits. (For those keeping track at home, that comes out to about $40/hour for the writer.) The publication will also likely spend an additional $1,000 on pre-publication legal review and dedicate five or more staff hours to editing and fact checking.

Sometimes, the effort pays off, and these stories draw considerable eyeballs—and, more importantly, put the publication at the center of the cultural conversation. But the sad truth is that a news item about 

 will almost always get more clicks than an in-depth investigation. If you’re wondering why you don’t see more of the latter, that’s why.

One slice of the art-media pie that has persisted against the odds is the nonprofit publication. These include 

, which chronicles the art of the American South. Many publish interviews like this one, which offer early, in-depth glimpses into the practices of artists who haven’t yet gotten major shows in New York or Los Angeles, or who don’t have the support of a large gallery. At least in the U.S., publications focused on a particular region are more likely to draw philanthropic dollars than other kinds of arts journalism outlets because they can align with a foundation’s mission to support a specific geographic area. (In other words, getting money to support writers and artists in the Pacific Northwest is a hard sell, but it’s even harder to get money to support, say, a journal of international performance art.)

A High School Student on a Field Trip Uncovers a Necklace That May Have Belonged to Catherine of Aragon

You might think, is this really an art story? And the answer is, not really. But archaeology has become the lifeblood of many art publications today because it’s quick to produce (real archaeologists have done all the work!) and extremely popular. One archaeology story, which might take two hours from assignment to publication, can deliver 10 times as much traffic as a nuanced review of a gallery show that takes shape over two weeks.

Inside Lucas Zwirner’s Scorched-Earth Breakup, Meet the Hottest New Downtown Art Star, and More in this Week’s Column

This particular header is clearly a riff on my alma mater 

’s wildly popular art-world gossip column 

. The series—first penned by gadfly Nate Freeman and now by the sharp and plucky Annie Armostrong—has an unlikely origin story. In the early stages of conceptualizing 

, several of our team members had “market research” calls with collectors, art advisors, and auction-house executives to find out what kind of art market content they’d actually be willing to pay for. We expected they’d want in-depth dossiers on blue-chip artists or deep dives into niche regional markets. No. By and large, they really just wanted gossip. In our social industry, that’s more valuable currency than a list of top galleries in Saint Moritz.


And quick tip: a story with a headline that starts with “Inside” will either be a rehash of everything that has been reported elsewhere (because any revelation worth its salt would be in the headline) or a detailed, engaging account bursting with new information (because there are so many goods, it is impossible to pick just one for the headline). It’s basically never anything in between.

Looking through these headlines and audiences’ typical responses to them, you might develop a somewhat dim view of the media landscape. But here’s a bright spot: people love reading about artists! Always have, probably always will. (And if there is a rags-to-riches narrative that involves a painter-waiter convincing one of his regulars to visit his studio, or a 19-year-old getting discovered on TikTok? Chef’s kiss.) Few things are more engaging to the general public and the industry alike than learning how an artist honed their style, emerged from obscurity, and lived a creative life.

Art is a prism through which to view so many forces that shape our world: money, power, political unrest, social change, creative expression. Art writing is important because it articulates those connections. But it won’t look the same in five years as it does today. The headlines above will evolve considerably.

What will the future of art journalism look like? I think we’ll see more gallery-produced glossy magazines. More corporate-sponsored art writing like 

, which recently launched a $10,000 fellowship for art writers. More hyperlocal, nonprofit art publications that cater to a defined, invested audience with the help of foundation support. In other words, more writing funded in ways that are distinct from the rest of the journalism sector. But perhaps this distinction has always been the case. The art world has always considered itself unique and exceptional. For better and for worse, so has art journalism.

Julia Halperin

A decoder ring for the desires of readers, the demands of advertisers, and the hopes of publications.

How Did Art Media Get Here? An Essay in Nine Headlines

I first understood the studio visit as the beating heart of an aesthetic education in Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Sculpture II class. This was 2005, Rirkrit was at the height of his fame, and it felt like Columbia’s entire studio art program was clamoring to see what lay behind the persona—whether there might be some keys to his success, his ideas, or even his person.

What followed felt almost like a series of deferrals. We’d most often just go to lunch where we’d all talk to one another, everyone quietly vying for seats closest to the teacher. Some days we’d cook, other days we’d just eat. Other days he’d show films. It was as if the class was just a way to pass the time. Often, midway through, I would request to go work in my studio. Others did the same. At the time I felt that the class wasn’t really a class at all, until one day I finally had a scheduled studio visit with Rirkrit.

I had no idea what to expect. Considering his class structure, or lack thereof, I assumed I’d encounter a similar laissez-faire attitude in a studio visit. I was wrong. For context, a studio visit is informally one of the sacred foundations of an arts education. It’s your chance to have a one-on-one meeting with your professor and receive feedback. Sometimes, these visits can be fortifying, other times they can be devastatingly crushing. The process of learning is more holistic, not based on obtaining facts or skills necessarily, but an overall know-how—ways of thinking through problems, and thinking with materials.

I had worked tirelessly to finish a piece to present for this visit in particular. It was a piece that I thought of as a phonebooth-meets-Medieval-reliquary, where the phone was replaced by three cast-plaster microphones. It was a bad sculpture. Nevertheless, I was invested and proud and waiting to hear Rirkrit’s take. He spent time closely observing the piece and soberly addressed what I would soon realize is one of the most important parts of sculpture: points of contact. How does the steel transition into wood? How do the cast plaster microphones connect to the “booth”? How do things literally connect?

It was at these points of contact that it became apparent that not only was my actual construction somewhat questionable, but underlying those badly shimmed foundations were ideas that had yet to fully form. The meeting points were rushed, not fully realized, and in noting this it was easier to discuss the range of ways in which I could bring more focus to the work and to my own ideas.

It was a profoundly illuminating moment, mainly because his approach didn’t begin and end in criticism, or with his ego. He looked and considered, and realized that while there were many valuable things going on in the piece, there were fundamental flaws that when addressed, might lead me to where I needed to go, without him having to explicitly suggest it. In order to help someone unlock what they’re capable of, you need to follow that maker’s logic, not your own. Rirkrit followed mine to the heart of the sculpture. He showed me what needed attention, and in doing so allowed me to find my own way. It was a master class in one kind of studio visit.

Eighteen years later, the pandemic pushed arts education toward another kind entirely. I was teaching at Columbia and Yale when both institutions were forced to shift their model towards virtual visits. As disoriented as we were, there wasn’t time to waste. My first few virtual visits were memorable largely because they felt like a deeply personal window into what people were feeling everywhere. The students were scared, shaken. They needed reassurance that things would be okay. Our visits were more therapeutic than critical and mostly not geared towards art at all, but those early visits oriented me toward how we might actually connect through technology. How do we communicate in ways that insist on sharing space?

Back in school, visits like Rirkrit’s showed me that a good crit is not about imposing absolute rules about what’s good and what’s bad, but instead about listening so closely that you begin to discern the internal rules of the maker and help them tease those rules out even further. In doing this, an educator has to use all their given faculties of intellect and intuition, connecting dots thoughtfully and empathetically. But these virtual visits also taught me something else: in the end, a great crit makes an artist or maker feel seen, understood, and cared for, which also means that you’ve earned their trust to helpfully critique, to suggest or speak to where their efforts may not have succeeded. It’s only from this place of trust that any kind of direction might be heard.

And as I found, this kind of crit could happen in person or virtually. In fact, as time went on, the initial challenges of a virtual visit became not only manageable, but I started to see the possible benefits of a virtual visit. On the one hand, I had to be skeptical of my own faculties because I wasn’t sure if things were being lost in translation. I had to ask new kinds of questions in order to bridge the virtual gap—questions to confirm our agreement on what it was I was seeing in front me. This looks almost like synthetic tree bark. Is that accurate? Does the piece have any kind of smell? It looks like it would smell wet.

On the other hand, there were no longer hang-ups about what a person’s studio looks like. There wasn’t a way to get distracted by random detritus in the studio that might draw your attention away from the conversation at hand. Students had less anxiety, because they felt like they had a bit more control.

When we got to this point, I realized that virtual studio visits weren’t going to go away after the pandemic was over. In all likelihood, it would become a way to exploit faculty labor even further. So I began to contemplate a new model for studio visits, one without the university’s bureaucracy or barriers to entry.


For many teaching artists, adjunct or otherwise, the pandemic and its attendant financial crisis brought a common assumption into focus: in the eyes of many educational institutions, we were dispensable. What would it look like to create a model where arts educators were empowered, where they were in charge of their hours and engagement? How would that empowerment transfer to an art student, or working artist, or any creative practitioner looking to connect more deeply with themselves and the surrounding world?

Last year, guided by these and many other questions, I created 

, a global platform for virtual studio visits run by artist-educators. NewCrits is a response to an arts education system too expensive for many students, and in which adjunct teachers are barely paid a living wage, with little to no job security. But more than that, NewCrits is an exercise in access. Using technologies and methods that came out of pandemic, we’re able to share the studio visit experience with a much larger audience. In a way, NewCrits has been developing since that first crit with Rirkrit Tiravanija. I wanted others to feel like I felt.

And so it became a quest to engage artist-educators who were not only exceptional working artists, but artists who understand the ethic of a great virtual studio visit. Artists like EJ Hill who had already been an educator for quite some time as well as having built a unique and important studio practice that incorporated endurance, performance, sculpture, and painting. Like me, EJ was tired of the multiple kinds of violence that institutions sometimes create or exist within. Why wasn’t there a way to do what we love without having to subject ourselves to the precarity of adjunct life? Additionally, how could we offer a service that felt worthwhile, flexible, and promises?

I decided to create a structure where students could sign up and identify what kind of visit they were looking for. They can select what they’re hoping to gain from the visit. Material histories? Conceptual histories? Focus on your blind spots? These questions help the artist-educators engage with the students in particular, helping them to further unlock their work. So many visits waste time and effort because people speak past one another. Our questions hope to eliminate a lot of this so you can get right to the more important, richer conversations. 

Studio visits helped me make sense of how I wanted to participate in art. In an industry where there is so much opacity and structural violence, a one-on-one meeting with someone invested in your creative practice is potentially life-changing. We have been taught that technology is only here to further alienate us, but this is too simple. Technology won’t solve our existential problems, but it can help us reach different communities, and further democratize a system of education that has only gotten more exclusive and expensive. NewCrits is our effort to create a new space for global art education.

Ajay Kurian

What would it look like to create a model in which arts educators and students are equally empowered?

Revisiting the Studio Visit

Few sectors in philanthropy are so rife with contradiction as the arts in general and the performing arts in particular. We venerate the performing arts as having a limitless social value and a substantial spectator value. The former is a staple of our discourse, and the latter shows up in eye-popping fundraising numbers for new performance venues—which are often misperceived as a reliable proxy for public support for artists themselves. Yet we are so accustomed to subjecting working performing artists to penury that we regard the leitmotif of “the starving artist” as a badge of honor rather than a stain on the contemporary artistic economy.

Instead, we should invest in performing artists at a level commensurate with the social value of the arts. It’s a simple idea, but it will require funders, patrons, and audiences to fundamentally rethink how we support performing artists.  Ten years ago, the Doris Duke Foundation (DDF) did just that. We took a new approach to our longstanding commitment to performing artists in contemporary dance, jazz and theater, prompted by a few key trends.

The plight of the working performing artist, while always grave, was worsening. Musicians, actors, dancers and choreographers were earning well below the median annual income. In fact, even more recently, the average dancer or choreographer was earning barely twice the poverty rate.

 Then, in the mid-90s, the National Endowment for the Arts abandoned funding to individual artists. This loss of support rippled through the system, fundamentally undermining an economic lifeline that had, for decades, kept many afloat.

The philanthropic sector had been principally funding performing artists through restrictive measures such as a grant to commission or perform a specific work. This was not intrinsically objectionable, but it had the unfortunate effect of paying artists only for a specific act of production and often failed to cover the entire costs of creating new work, leaving artists themselves holding the bag. It also didn’t account for whether anyone was paying artists for the parts of their lives that existed outside of the working day.

DDF tried a new approach: we’d focus expressly on supporting the artist as a whole human being rather than just a creative producer. This materialized as the Doris Duke Artist Awards, a $50 million commitment to funding individual performing artists. At the time, this was the single largest private commitment exclusively for performing artists.

The core of the program was an annual cohort of artists selected through a peer nomination and judging process. Each grantee received a $275,000 unrestricted cash award. In fact, artists were discouraged from using the funds to develop new work (although they were not barred from doing so). Instead, foundation staff encouraged artists to look after their life needs, including and especially those related to basic economic well-being. Since its inception, the program has made awards to 129 artists—not including our latest cohort.

Ten years later, here’s what we’ve learned: Supporting the artist as a whole person can unleash a qualitatively different level of aesthetic creativity and excellence.

Many awardees report taking risks and trying new ideas as a result of the time, space and flexibility the award’s financial largesse enables them. Dancemaker 

, who rose to prominence as part of the duo Eiko & Koma, was able to launch a celebrated and influential solo career. Choreographer Elizabeth Streb created a version of her uniquely physical and inventive show that could tour, exposing far more audiences to her work.

Recognizing great artists brings visibility and attention to great art. Doris Duke Artists have won or been nominated for dozens of major awards, including the MacArthur Prize, the Gish Prize and countless Tonys, Grammys and Emmys—awards that both affirm their artistic excellence and help to visibly celebrate their contributions to the sector.

And finally, creative approaches to funding can influence the structure of creative financing. Many grantmakers have come to us to learn how best to support artists. For example, the program includes a novel match incentive for retirement planning, which encourages artists to dedicate a portion of the income they receive while at their earnings peaks to prepare for later years when revenue might not be generated as abundantly. This is consistently one of the most asked-about features of the program.

What we hadn’t figured out in the first decade of the program was how to meaningfully arrest any of the aforementioned negative trends that essentially imperil the persistence and existence of performing artists in our society. Now, On the 10th anniversary of the program, we’re evolving again. We kept the basic elements of our selection process and a fundamental commitment to unrestricted support.

But we also made some adjustments. We doubled the size of the award to $550,000. We did this because greater financial flexibility would return exponentially in creativity, and we wanted to signal even more loudly and forcefully the indispensability of adequate support for performing artists. Beyond that, the Doris Duke Artist Award has evolved from a mere award to a platform. We will begin convening Doris Duke Artists for what they are—a dynamic community of the greatest living performers. We will invest in new programming to illuminate the true material conditions of creativity, and we will develop new research to help cultural leaders, policymakers, and others accurately assess how best to support performing artists and the benefits of doing so.  We underwrote all of this with a new $30 million commitment to the Doris Duke Artist Awards program.

Our goal is not just to strengthen great artists—although that will happen—but cajole our society into investing in performing artists at a level commensurate with the social value we derive from the arts.

We do this by supporting the artist not as a creative producer but as a whole human being. The rest will take care of itself.

The premise is simple—our society benefits from abundant performing arts. Great performing arts require great artists. Great artists are people, and they need the same support and material well-being as anyone else. Put otherwise, when artists thrive, we all thrive.

Sam Gill

"Starving artist" is not a badge of honor. It's a stain on the artistic economy. 

The Future of Arts Philanthropy is Supporting the Whole Artist

Executive Director, ADAA’s The Art Show

 In a world searching for balance between the efficiencies of virtual activity and the vitality of in-person experiences, art fairs are an irreplaceable environment to engage with art and the art community. 

 Art fairs are more than centers for commerce. They are a pilgrimage and, as such, I don’t see them going away. Humans are social creatures, and the art world is a network on steroids. Online sales aren’t going away, but neither are art fairs which are necessary to create and sustain the relationships that support online sales. 

 Fairs continue to represent an important opportunity for collectors and curators to see a wide breadth of work in one place and, at a fair like The Art Show, to be intimately scaled enough to encourage close looking and thoughtful engagement with the dealers about the work on view. 

 Art fairs invigorate a community for a week. It is the best week in Dallas, where everyone is so passionate and excited about the arts. And that excitement goes well beyond a week when you see its impact in museum programming, corporate collections and more.

 The conversations we have focus on solutions pertaining to quality, size, diversity of artwork shown, visitor experience, collector and institutional engagement, and sustainability. Our success is reliant on attention to these critical factors and on our ability to adapt to the needs of our clients and visitors. 

 Prince Albert, the driver behind London’s legendary Crystal Palace and what was arguably the first international art fair, would feel comfortable at a 21st-century art fair. Consider that the IFPDA Print Fair is held at New York’s Javits Center, which boasts its own 16-story Crystal Palace! Art changes, but art fairs are designed with humans in mind. We want to engage the senses of our visitors, yes, and we also need to offer them somewhere to sit and something to eat. The overall design and execution of the art fair have changed relatively little since the 1850s. 

 Particularly exciting is the potential there is for our region and how fairs can innovate — in most places, it’s essentially been the same model for forty or fifty years. We were one of the few events to take place during COVID; we launched a dedicated digital section of the fair last year that has expanded despite the economic uncertainty in that space. 

 Something novel is clearly happening now: new fairs in new places are succeeding while the largest hub fairs are consolidating their positions. As galleries have affirmed the essential role that fairs play in creating opportunities for discovery among their clientele, it also seems that we’re now reaching a peak in terms of global carrying capacity. No fair can expand indefinitely, and there will be a give-and-take as certain nodes come in and out of regional market systems. Now is a good time to celebrate the future of the regional fair with a defined audience operating at a scale that cultivates real intimacy between its community of galleries, collectors, and enthusiasts. It’s important to remember that we can’t be everything to everyone, and we need to make choices about what we can offer and what ethos of art and community we are putting out into the world. 

 We play a much bigger role in the cultural ecosystem here rather than just being a marketplace, as might be the case in other cities or markets — our role is fundamentally about convening people, collaborating with others to give a platform to our wider non-profit and commissioned programming, and introducing people to the best art and artists from the Global South.

 The cost of international shipping has become (and probably will and should remain) scary. It is hard to give voice to concerns about climate change while helming an event that is predicated upon moving thousands of people with thousands of pounds of cargo thousands of miles powered by the liquified fossils of prehistoric plants and animals. I dream of a transportation future like Kim Stanley’s Ministry for the Future, in which we’ll travel in high-speed clipper ships and move our freight with dirigibles. 

 One of the most important choices for the Art Show has been our sustainability initiative which we launched in 2022 when we commissioned the first-ever Sustainability Roadmap. The Roadmap assesses all production aspects of the fair that might impact climate or general wellness and sets short-, mid-, and long-term goals for us to address these issues in an efficient way. We will ultimately make the Roadmap available to other fairs in the near future to share the knowledge we’ve gained from this process.

Nicole Berry

Maureen Bray

Kelly Cornell

Benedetta Ghione

Jenny Gibbs

Robin Peckham

Art Fairs. More than centers of commerce?

Crystal Palaces

Issue 1

Any speculation of the future first requires a bit of retrospection. And so:

 on the first of November, 2016, at a party held on the set of 

, relocated to a cavernous Chelsea art space funded by the Austrian energy drink giant Red Bull. The election was a few days off. In many ways the thinking that went into the publication was encapsulated in that night. Conceived on the edge of the largest sociopolitical precipice in our lifetimes—though everyone was sure he would lose—we opted for irreverence. We reached out to writers, curators, and artists, and asked them to throw darts at whatever they wanted. It was a form of culture jamming, to borrow a phrase from an earlier moment, critique from within.

It was also slightly subversive, not only because of the writing we published, which was unbeholden to advertisers or news cycles, but simply because a PR company was behind it. And yet, it served a real purpose. Legacy publications were contracting, or folding entirely. As a one-time contributing editor of 

, we could give writers freedom, and a dollar a word. So we did.

Over the coming four years we published more than 100 medium to long-form essays from across culture. Sheila Heti, Gary Indiana, Chris Kraus. Andrea Long Chu, Bob Nickas, Brontez Purnell. To name a few. We published one essay at a time, every other week. No two were alike. No two were even similar. What emerged was an archive of the leading voices of our time, individualized, with cohesion only formed in the aggregate, in the aftermath.

It could be viewed as a collection, an idea explored in 

, written by Sophie Haigney and published in December 2020. By then we had slowed down commissioning new work: forced, by the pandemic, to put as much as possible on pause.

 brings together perspectives from different fields to further meaningful discussions relevant to culture in general. 

—championing individual points of view—by putting those voices in conversation. The voices you’ll find in these issues include those we at Cultural Counsel conspire with, and those we are inspired by. Whereas Affidavit had a strict church-and-state policy when it came to our clients, here we’re bringing everyone to the table. We offer this as a primer for the curious reader, and a resource for cultural professionals.

, is intentionally misleading. It plays on the techno-utopianism of future-focused thinking, the urge to move fast and break stuff in a culture that already moves too fast, and in which most things are already broken.

More than that, it emphasizes a temporal truth. The future demands both a past, and a present. Much as I used the first few paragraphs of this letter to explore what led us to this point, the contributors of this issue pivot on the vantage point of Spring 2023 to look back on the recent history of their respective fields, and envision a more just, equitable, and culturally advantageous path forward.

Reporting on the media, Julia Halperin of the 

, breaks down the current state of the art press through a series of fictitious headlines, and the editorial thinking behind them. If you’re wondering why you don’t see more exhibition reviews on a daily basis, you’ll find out why 

From the dual perspective of artist and educator, Ajay Kurian looks at how the conditions of artistic development have changed over the pandemic, and how new technologies have affected one of the core exchanges of an artist’s life: 

Sam Gill, President and CEO of the Doris Duke Foundation, lays out why philanthropies should support the entirety of an artist’s life, instead of just funding specific projects. 

Here’s the reasoning behind Doris Duke’s $80 million commitment to the performing arts.

Speaking of money, we round out this issue with a state of the union from one of the art world’s main economic drivers: the fair. We reached out to directors of fairs across the world to get 

their thoughts on the challenges and opportunities on the horizon.

Finally, we’re excited to premiere an artist commission program, done in collaboration with 

. On our homepage you’ll find a special work by Rachel Rossin. 

explores the Proteus Effect: a strange occurrence within virtual worlds, in which the chosen characteristics of an avatar begin to impact the behavior of the user. Obviously, something to be aware of as we continue to shift our lives toward online realities.

 on Tuesday, November 1, 2016, we had no idea what would happen seven days later. Let alone seven years. We hope that the writing in this first issue of 

 will help bring a little clarity, both to how we got here, and to where we’re headed together.

Discovery

by affidavit

Spring 2023

...of Tomorrow