I love paper. And the experience of reading on paper. The tangibleness, the layout, the font choice, etc. that all get lost in the digital world. I own /a lot/ of paper. Bins of hardcovers, magazines and a storage locker full of comics. I wish I had started keeping my magazines after I read them sooner than I have and desperately regret getting rid of my Flaunt and Wallpaper* collection 20 years ago.

I’ve had Just Make Your Magazine on my desk for almost a year. It reminds me a lot of Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work!. It has been staring at (mocking/) me the whole time. I flip through it occasionally. But do I have a topic? Theme? Or even an idea? No.

Well, until this week at which point something bubbled to the surface. For context;

  • I’ve mentioned before that my final art portfolio theme in high school was ‘Things Adam Thinks Are Cool’. My teachers were not impressed. But it was accurate.
  • I am not a maximalist. Maybe a medium-ist. Certainly not a minimalist. I love my office and how I’m surrounded by things.
  • It isn’t clutter if your stuff is cool.
  • I love that there are books like Behind The Blue Door exist
  • There is a social media trick of talking to bartenders and asking what their favourite watering hole is and the drink they should get. And then repeat, drinking their way through the city. I’m pretty sure I read an article in a magazine or newspaper doing this as well. (For some reason it is always NYC.)

So my idea is to document people’s art collections. One collection per issue. Each issue would have three articles; one by me around why this issue’s collection was chosen, one by the owner of the collection about the overall collection, and one at the end for recommendations of other interesting collections. (More on that in a second.) Is this essentially ‘Art Thursday On Steroids’? Yes. Yes it is. But in physical form.

The layout would be a nice image of the piece on the left and a paragraph or two about it. Which means the size of each issue would vary. But I’d likely have to define what a ‘qualifying’ collection means. Is one piece a collection? Sure. To paraphrase Warhol, ‘a collection is anything you can get away with.’ And the pieces don’t even need to be on display. Part of my collection is in a bin in storage. (Now, those are pieces I’ve made and largely am proud enough of them to keep, but not proud enough to display. Oh, personal standards…)

‘Nice image’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I’d probably need to contract a professional photographer to take the images. ‘Nice’ also means the paper needs to be nice too. Would I trust they would do it properly or should I travel to the collection to art direct it. Should I ‘trust’ the collection owner to do all the blurbs about the pieces? Or should I interview them and transcribe / edit it? And should I give an honorarium for participating?

(Can you tell that I read In Real Life Media? ‘Know thine budget!’)

Back to the recommendation article. The underlying conceit of the whole thing is that subsequent collections would be based on the recommendations from the current issue. I’d ask them for 5 since not everyone would want to participate.

Disclaimer: do not expect this to arrive in shops any time soon. I have day-job, not-day-job, at least 1 other side projects I want to build, plus learn how to use my 3-d printer before I get around to this. But depending on how much it demands attention in my brain it might get escalated. Even if it is just one issue.

Normally one would end with a ‘Would you buy this magazine? leave a note in the Comments.’ – but I don’t have comments. But it is my hypothesis that the majority of people reading this know how to get in contact me.

East Wall