the September-October issue of Artbyte in the mail and there is no longer any doubt about it: it’s the best magazine going on the subject of digital culture etc. It used to be too focused on art stuff before – not that arts coverage is a problem, obviously it’s the starting point for the mag. But now it does a better job of extending from the aesthetic to more general cultural, social, and political arenas. And in a way it lives up to McLuhan’s idea that artists are probes into the future, something I think is true.
Although I like mags like the Industry Standard (and some of the other net-biz-porn mags), they don’t tell me anything about what’s in the pipe – it’s all about what has happened. When they try and predict, they’re almost always wrong. After all it was one of those pubs that said – not two months ago – that “obviously” drkoop.com would be the great success story in the consumer internet space? Uh, not. Artbyte features great writers, great thinkers with a real provenance as commentators on these issues (like Geert Lovink, for example), and of course looks gorgeous.
