Art publishing & art publics today (1989)
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Earlier I mentioned AND magazine. This journal has received some subsidies from the Arts Council. I have often written for AND without any payment because I support its aims. This small fact demonstrates that not all human actions are motivated by personal gain and private profit as some would have us believe. The editors of AND— Jenni Boswell-Jones and Ismail Saray— have avoided advertising in order to remain independent of the art gallery system and free from the need to review current exhibitions, and in order to devote all their pages to editorial content. They have deliberately kept their magazine at a low price so that even art students can afford it, they have encouraged the involvement of the contributors in the design and policy of the magazine thus breaking down the distinction between editors, artists and critics. They have published the magazine in conditions of personal poverty and have ploughed back any money received into computers so that they can take advantage of the new technology to improve the magazine still further. This example testifies to the fact that new forms of culture, new critical perspectives continue to survive in the margins of British society no matter how hostile the social and economic climate.
John A. Walker has written several books including Art in the age of mass media, Art & Celebrity, and Art & Artists on screen (1993/2010). He is also a co-author of Supercollector: A critique of Charles Saatchi (4th ed., 2010) with Rita Hatton. Most of his books were subsidised by research funding provided by Middlesex Polytechnic / University grants. His book on the history of Arts Television was partly funded by the Arts Council. Later volumes were funded by the writer himself because the illustration fees and cost of printing colour illustrations made the books uneconomic as far as most publishers were concerned. Small left-wing publishers are more receptive to critical books written by academics but they are often tardy about paying royalties and one editor of such a company once told Walker it was common practice not to pay their authors at all!
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