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“Young kids think everything has to be free,” said curator and publisher Bice Curiger in a phone interview Friday, shortly after the announcement that Parkett, the hefty, finger-on-the-pulse German-English magazine she co-founded some 99 issues ago, would cease publication. “How can you survive?”

“Bookshops are dying. It’s a fact. We see that every day. Bookshops were very important for Parkett, because especially the early issues were more like books than periodicals. An old issue was not like an old newspaper. If you looked up books on [Gerhard] Richter, you would find the Parkett issue. But people have become used to reading much more online, and finding things there free of charge. Every newspaper has this problem.”

“We introduced the editions to be less dependent on subscriptions and advertisement. That was very exciting. It was not just to make money, it was also to explore very democratic means to offer artworks with a smaller price.”

“But it became increasingly difficult to survive because we no longer find it possible to have a good presence in art fairs. In the past, we would publish an advertisement for the fair and get a booth in return where we could show our editions. But now fairs have commercialized every inch.”

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