After more than a quarter of a century, the magazine Ateliér has ended

Prague - After 28 years, the magazine for contemporary visual art Ateliér has ceased publication. In recent years, it had been in a difficult economic situation, as the Ministry of Culture allocated lower grants to this biweekly than in previous years. Editor-in-chief Blanka Jiráčková repeatedly protested publicly against this; however, she did not proceed to a less costly online version of the magazine, which continued to be published on high-quality, and therefore expensive, paper.

In mid-December, the last double issue was released. "I believe it is a mistake that the cultural policy of our state cannot financially support a visual art magazine designed this way with a strong readership base," writes Jiráčková in the obituary for Ateliér included in its final issue. "A printed periodical with quality reproductions cannot be replaced by today's preferred social networks, where despite all search engines, there is a lot of fragmented material, which is unfortunately often inaccurate and unverified, and each individual must laboriously search for it themselves and piece it together like stones in their own mosaic," the editor-in-chief believes.

The first issue of Ateliér was released on January 7, 1988, and its publisher was the Union of Czech Visual Artists. Jiráčková became its first and only post-November editor-in-chief in May 1990. According to her, the successor organization, the Union of Visual Artists, renounced publishing rights and a civic association was formed, which became the owner of Ateliér. After some time, the publication of similar magazines began to be partially financed by funds from the Ministry of Culture.

Ateliér reported on events in the domestic visual art scene as well as exhibitions in neighboring countries. However, the authors of the articles were sometimes the very authors and curators of the exhibitions that the texts informed about.

With the increase in VAT and the decrease in subsidies - in the case of Ateliér from an average of 32 percent down to this year's 11 percent of total costs - according to Jiráčková, publishing the magazine became increasingly difficult. The largest drop in subsidies occurred in 2012 when the ministry awarded a third lower subsidy than in the previous year; the magazine received only 560,000 crowns, the lowest amount since the early 1990s. Just in 2010 and 2011, the state subsidy was around two million crowns.

The ministry argues that one cannot automatically claim grants from funding schemes; the amount of the subsidy depends on the budget available to grant committees, which at that time were cutting budgets for all committees. These individual projects are scored, and Ateliér placed 12th out of 19 projects in the category of periodic publications in the mentioned year of 2012; 14 of them received a subsidy. Even in the following years, the subsidies for the magazine did not return to previous figures. Jiráčková tried to secure sponsors, organized fundraising events, and the magazine became more expensive. Nevertheless, as of December 31, 2015, the Ateliér magazine company is entering liquidation due to insufficient financial support.