The magazine “Art” is successful, as the balance sheets show. That Bertelsmann is now selling it is bizarre. And possibly a chance.
From
Anna Ernst and Jörg Haentzschel
You meet them in Venice at the Art Biennale or at the Documenta in Kassel: the married couples of lawyers or teachers in their prime, who with the already worked through on the way there kind– Pull the special issue through the exhibitions in the shoulder bag. They belong to the core readership of this magazine: educated citizens with a wide range of interests, keen to spend and travel, who have enough ambition and passion to want to know what is happening in art and enough money not only to read about it. In short: an affluent audience that a publisher doesn’t actually let go voluntarily. And yet Gruner + Jahr wants to kind now, like many others, get rid of his magazines as if it were ballast.