Circularity and Visibility in Italian Art Periodicals (1968-1978)

During the 1970s, at the apex of “dematerialized art”, the art magazines contributed a great deal to turn visibility (the photographic circulation of artworks, news on the artists, etc.) into an economic value. In a country like Italy, where museum validation was still lacking, neo-avantgarde periodicals such as Flash Art or Data introduced new communicative strategies (community building, indirect advertising, etc.) in order to provide a trans-national audience for Italian art. This study tries to enlighten the impact of advertising on art magazines’ preferences and their criteria of newsworthiness by analyzing some of their quantitative data.