by Jon Lackman | 17 November 2010 | Journals
The Fall-Winter 2009-2010 issue of Decorative Arts bears the heading “Final Issue,” with no further explanation as to why its publishers are discontinuing this sixteen-year-old journal that had earned numerous plaudits including the European Science Foundation’s highest rating. Poking around online, I discovered that the Bard Graduate Center plans to replace it with a new journal titled West 86th that will be published in print and online in cooperation with University of Chicago Press. West 86th founding editor Paul Stirton explains the change in a video:
Over the last two decades there has been a significant change in the scholarship. Related disciplines like sociology, anthropology and material culture studies are now central to design history … Subdisciplines like the history of fashion, film studies, and psychoanlaysis that had only a tangential relationship to our activities in the 1990s really now are central, and we would like West 86th to place these new disciplines right at the heart of our publication. The core of the journal will continue be scholarly articles, and I envisage carrying 3, 4, or 5 in every issue … Book reviews likewise … There will be several new features: Exhibition reviews … We’re also planning more polemical, perhaps longer reviews which will hold up a whole area of scholarship to examination … We’re planning a section called Translated Texts and Primary Sources … [There will be a] print version and an online version for subscribers … We also want to introduce a third platform, a complementary website in which a lot of new digital material will be made available … Open-access … it will carry exhibition reviews, digital projects and a range of other activity that can only be expressed or distributed properly in a digital form. West 86th will be published twice yearly, with the first issue slated to appear in the spring of 2011 … We would like to move up to quarterly.
