Best Art Magazines UK: The Independent and Contemporary Titles Worth Reading

The first issue of Frieze in 1991 carried a Damien Hirst butterfly painting, and that choice tells you most of what the magazine was for. The painting tied a new magazine to the Young British Artists before most readers had heard the phrase. Any list of the best art magazines UK readers can buy has to begin somewhere, and the useful way to begin is by separating the titles that report on art from those that argue about it, those that study it and those that sell it.

Best art magazines UK readers can buy, in outline

Eight titles come up again and again. Two are old and scholarly, two are sharp contemporary critics, one is a news paper in magazine clothing, and the rest sit in between.

Founding years and frequencies come from the publishers and from reference entries; where a figure could not be confirmed, the table says so instead of guessing.

The dates matter more than they look. The two oldest titles were founded before the First World War and before most of the artists now in museum collections had shown anywhere. ArtReview dates from the austerity of 1949, Art Monthly from the mid-seventies, and Frieze from 1991. Each grew up with the art it covers, and that shapes its tone: the old titles write about objects that have already survived a market test, the newer ones about work that has not.

Length of life is also a rough guide to survival. Of the eight, only Aesthetica and Juxtapoz lack a London base, and both have built something beyond the page: Aesthetica an art prize and festival, Juxtapoz a place in the lowbrow scene.

The old scholarly pair: Burlington and Apollo

The Burlington Magazine was founded in 1903 by a group that included the critic Roger Fry, the collector Herbert Horne, the connoisseur Bernard Berenson and the museum man Charles Holmes. It took its name from New Burlington Street, near Burlington House in London. It is published by a charity, and it calls itself the longest running art journal in English, a phrase worth keeping exactly as stated because nobody has agreed on what “oldest in the world” would even mean.

The Burlington joins archive-based research on objects with current news of exhibitions and sales, a combination it has kept for over a century. Reading it is different from reading a glossy. Articles are footnoted, attributions are argued, and the news pages report sales and acquisitions in a tone that assumes you care about the provenance of a drawing. For anyone who studies or collects older art, it remains the most rigorous of the best art magazines in Britain. For anyone who wants to know what to see this weekend, it is the wrong purchase.

Apollo started in 1925 and calls itself the international magazine for collectors. It covers antiquity to the present day, with a lively habit of following the fairs: TEFAF in Maastricht, Frieze in London. Edward Behrens has edited it since 2021, and the magazine changed hands in September 2024, when OQS Media bought it from Press Holdings. Apollo is the easier of the two old titles to live with.

Apollo also runs the annual Apollo Magazine Awards, which recognise museums, exhibitions and people in the arts sector, so its pages double as a record of what the profession considered a good year. Most of its articles are shorter and more readable than the Burlington’s, and its regular Art Diary works as an events guide.

Contemporary criticism: ArtReview, Art Monthly and Frieze

Three magazines cover the contemporary field, and they do not read alike.

ArtReview

ArtReview began in February 1949 as Arts News and Review, founded by Dr Richard Gainsborough, with the design by his wife, the artist Eileen Mayo. It became Arts Review in 1961 before taking its present name. Its 1954 editorial promised space for painters and writers that they “would never find elsewhere”, and the magazine has kept a reputation for letting critics be opinionated. It appears nine times a year, and ArtReview Asia followed in 2013. Over the decades its pages have carried David Sylvester, John Berger and Brian Sewell, three critics who agreed on almost nothing, and in its early years it printed Henri Matisse. Majority ownership passed to Modern Media Holdings in June 2019.

Its most visible product is the Power 100, an annual ranking of influential figures in contemporary art compiled since 2002 by an anonymous committee. There is a small side story here. When the artist Ai Weiwei was placed first in 2011, China’s Foreign Ministry criticised the choice, which tells you the list is read far beyond the art world. It also tells you how much weight to put on any ranking produced by an unnamed panel.

Art Monthly

Art Monthly was founded in 1976 by Jack Wendler and Peter Townsend and calls itself Britain’s longest-established contemporary art magazine. It has the plainest page design of the group and it became a registered charity in June 2017, which makes it one of the more independent voices among the best art magazines UK libraries stock. It publishes ten issues a year, with double issues in summer and winter, carries a regular art-law column and prints “Letter from” reports from other countries. Its Talking Art series has collected interviews with more than three hundred artists and critics, and a monthly radio programme on Resonance FM puts the same conversations on air.

Frieze

Frieze came out of London in 1991, founded by Amanda Sharp, Matthew Slotover and Tom Gidley. It is the youngest of the three and the most international, with eight issues a year and offices in New York and Berlin as well as London. The company launched the Frieze art fair in 2003, and that business has since grown larger than the magazine. Andrew Durbin has been editor-in-chief since 2019, and the brand keeps a permanent exhibition space at 9 Cork Street in Mayfair. The company is no longer owned by its founders: Endeavor bought a 70 per cent stake in 2016, and ownership has since moved to MARI. Readers who care about editorial independence should know that history before assuming Frieze is a one-room operation.

If you can afford only one subscription to a contemporary title, Frieze is the safer pick for international range, while Art Monthly is better if your interest is British artists and the politics of arts funding.

Independent and regional voices

Independent in this field means two things: ownership and distance from London. On ownership, Art Monthly and The Burlington Magazine both sit with charities, not with a publishing group. On distance, Aesthetica is produced in York and covers art, design, photography, architecture and film. It also runs an annual art prize, a film festival, a creative writing award and the Future Now Symposium, so its role is partly that of a platform for emerging artists. The mix suits readers who like art set beside photography and film. It suits less well a reader who wants three thousand words on one painter.

Smaller zines and artist-run publications are the real independent layer, and they are also the least reliable to recommend. They start with a grant or a burst of enthusiasm and stop when one editor moves on. Buy a single issue first.

News rather than criticism: The Art Newspaper

The Art Newspaper is not strictly a magazine, but it belongs in any honest list. It was founded in 1990 by the Italian publisher Umberto Allemandi and Anna Somers Cocks, and it grew out of Allemandi’s earlier Il Giornale dell’Arte, begun in 1983. It reports on the politics and economics of art: disputed antiquities, restitution claims, museum finances, tax rules. It won the National Art Collections Fund prize in 1992. About fifty correspondents in more than thirty countries feed it, and it produces daily editions during the big fairs such as Art Basel and Frieze. That daily paper, handed out in fair halls, is where many dealers and collectors first meet it. Where Frieze would review a show, this paper asks who paid for it and where the objects came from.

What the American titles add

British readers sometimes overlook the American magazines. Juxtapoz, founded in 1994 by Robert Williams, Greg Escalante and Eric Swenson, grew out of the Los Angeles lowbrow scene and is still publishing. Hi-Fructose is often named alongside it. Neither will tell you what is on at a regional gallery in Leeds, but both cover illustration, pop surrealism and street-influenced work that the British critical titles treat lightly.

Reading by use

The question to ask is what the magazine will be used for. Five uses come up most often, and each points to a different title.

• Planning a gallery weekend: Frieze, ArtReview or Aesthetica.
• Following British contemporary artists over years: Art Monthly.
• Understanding a museum acquisition or a sale: The Art Newspaper and Apollo.
• Reading about an old master with footnotes: The Burlington Magazine.
• Finding illustration and street-influenced work: Juxtapoz.

Prices change with each renewal, so none are quoted here. Check the publisher’s own page for a current rate and for whether a print copy includes digital access.

Choosing between them

A quick rule. Read Frieze or ArtReview for current exhibitions, Art Monthly for argument, Apollo for the market and museums, and The Burlington Magazine for scholarship. If a single choice has to be made, the best art magazine for most general readers is Frieze, unless the interest is older art, in which case Apollo is the better buy.

A magazine’s cover also says something about the editors’ priorities, and how a magazine cover is built is a useful lens when you pick one up in a shop. Contrast an art title’s restrained front with the loud cover lines of a fashion monthly such as Vogue, or compare the age of these titles with the very first periodicals on the oldest magazines timeline. Art and politics also overlap more than either set of editors admits, which is why the political magazines guide sometimes covers the same arts-funding rows from the other side.

The Burlington’s founders came from very different corners of the art world, a critic, a collector, a connoisseur and a museum man, and the magazine’s mix of footnoted research with sale-room news still carries that argument inside it: is it a journal or a trade paper? Its own pages never settle the matter, and that is probably the reason it has lasted.