September 4, 2008
New Interview
When will the redesigned Interview arrive in the UK? Bored with waiting, I direct you to Andrew’s in-depth review, and here for a brief slideshow of images. More when I find a copy in London.
5 Comments
Comment on September 5, 2008 by Héctor Muñoz says:
I had never seen a real life copy of this magazine before until this number which strangely arrived Mexican magazine racks at a very affordable price.
I’m actually dissapointed, too much advertising and too little content.
The interviews are all cramped on the last pages. Is this a fashion magazine or what?
The photos and the design are elegant but all look alike and it would’nt kill them to use color and good paper.
The iterviews are good but nothing out of this world.
I really enjoy more flicking trough Antenna and reading the short unpretentious writing on it. Antenna is ugly but at least not boring.
Comment on September 5, 2008 by Woz says:
Antenna is basically a shopping catalogue with badly written shortform articles isn’t it?
Interview’s ’cause celebrity’ is about the ecstacy of communication. It is not a fashion mag. It started off as a newsletter from Studio 54 and is and was about PEOPLE who shape popular culture. It doesn’t need the best paper, best writing, best whatever – the world it presents is transient and all about surface. This is what most comments on this board simply don’t get. If Warhol were alive today, I suspect he would have ONLY ads inside the covers.
The editors’ (and Warhol’s) approaches over the years could be said to mirror this recent Lagerfeld quote: “I want to learn about everything. I want to know everything, but I’m not an intellectual, and I don’t like their company. I’m the most superficial man on Earth.”
Comment on September 5, 2008 by Andrew says:
I completely get what you’re saying, Woz – and agree with you about Warhol putting only ads if he could. And the observation about communication is a good one. Sadly, I don’t think the new Interview communicates as effectively or as joyously as it should, its cool style proving a barrier not an aid.
And of course it isn’t any more a newsletter from a group with a higher artistic ideal behind it – it’s a newsstand magazine, and must stand or fall by one criterion only: is it any good?
Comment on September 6, 2008 by Héctor Muñoz says:
Well, being Atenna what it is, I still enjoyed it more.
Comment on September 6, 2008 by Woz says:
Andrew – I think what you say is a major problem with very many magazines these days (and past few years) in “cool style proving a barrier not an aid.” Perhaps Baron is guilty of this with the current Interview, but he is a fabulous art director as past editorial design output demonstrates.
Its an age old conundrum – as an art director/designer, you may end up working with mediocre editors or below-par editorial content, so you tend to over compensate sometimes, and create sometimes over designed pages (or alternately, ‘less is more’ as a retort, but they end up showing in even harsher light the poor editorial words) – be that elegance or ‘cool’. Sure, lots of the content of Interview is repetitive (seen the people/subjects before) and must-try-harder (not great writing), But at the end of the day, I’m still loving it – it’s like an old friend with a new haircut – after being a ‘reader’ of it of 20 years.
