“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” A.J. Liebling famously wrote in his 1960 essay titled “The Wayward Press: Do You Belong in Journalism?” forThe New Yorker. We are given to mythologize the integrity of the Fourth Estate, mistaking the Bill of Rights for the Ten Commandments, often overlooking the basic fact that media is a business like any other. Only the rare, independent outlets escape the fetters of profit hungry power brokers by existing on a shoestring, their precarious state allowing them to stand beholden to none.
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Invariably, this doesn’t happen every day. Timing is everything—and so is location. For three young college students back in the 1970s, New York proved to be the ideal place to create an art magazine perfectly in step with a changing art world. The city had been gutted and left for dead. But New Yorkers, living by Plato’s dictum, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” created brand new forms of art and culture—and nobody could stop them.
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While the streets gave birth to graffiti, punk, and hip hop, the art world soon found itself in the throes of revolution. By the end of the 1960s, modern art had reached its apotheosis with the advent Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and Earthworks. After destroying the conventions of Western art, Modernism had nowhere to go, leaving the playing field wide open at the dawn of the 1970s.
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