Welcome Magazine Manifesto
An introduction
Welcome to Welcome Magazine. Here you’ll find editorial content published daily on weekdays, from bite-sized newsletters curating the latest cultural news, to analysis and op-ed, to interviews and guest essays. Paid subscribers will receive all of this. Free ones will receive some of it.
Welcome Magazine exists because we believe we’re experiencing a cultural crisis. The causes of this crisis are complicated. The way we experience it is very simple. Most of us, most of the time, do not think the cultural products we encounter are very good.
This is not because our age is creatively doomed, but because our dominant cultural curators are failing us. Limpness in art and homogeneity in culture are to be expected when art and culture are communicated by intermediaries who do not care about them. Whether it’s curated by the algorithm or the traditional cultural media, there are many reasons you might encounter a piece of art, music, film, fashion, photography, history, or news today. That reason is almost never because someone thought it was beautiful or meaningful.
Welcome.jpeg’s mission has always been to be a better curator. To us, this means a singular focus on two things: beauty, and meaning. We only show you things we like, or believe matter. Welcome.jpeg’s living archive admits any medium and any era so long as it is beautiful, and tells any story so long as it means something.
This is the style of curation that an information environment of infinite availability demands. Any sort of shared canon has broken down in the information deluge, and culture today is experienced as a piecemeal mosaic. The role of cultural mediators, therefore, is no longer to annotate an external culture (no stable external culture exists) but to curate a cultural mosaic that is beautiful and meaningful. Welcome.jpeg’s living archive is just such a mosaic.
Until recently, this mosaic has existed primarily on Instagram. This has meant being subject to algorithmic content practicalities. But we want to do more now. We want to platform more art and more artists. We want to feature more of the thought leaders making sense of culture today. We want more space to do so with adequate context and analysis. We want to have a closer relationship with you, the reader. We want to apply the mosaic model of cultural coverage to more traditional media formats.
We believe this is a necessary intervention. Conventional cultural media has largely failed to reckon with the mosaic shift in cultural consumption. They attempt to annotate a fragmented culture by confining themselves to specific coverage scopes, and hyperfocusing on the present. They also, of course, have been captured by commercial interests, meaning they fulfill their narrow focus with PR-approved content, to the ultimate end of selling a majority of their pages to the highest bidding advertiser.
On the other end of the cultural curator spectrum is the algorithm. The algorithm certainly understands culture as a mosaic, but the mosaic it pushes is one whose singular mandate is to addict its users with a downward spiral of attention-based curation. Many people have ‘good’ algorithms. We have the best. Algorithms won’t save art, and they won’t restore meaning to culture, because they do not care about either.
Getting out from under the algorithm is a primary motive for Welcome Magazine. We also believe that this new format will enhance our ability to deliver another kind of value to readers: taste-building. Through exposure to, information about, and analysis of quality material, Welcome.jpeg has always aimed to build taste. We view taste’s collective construction as the best way to plant the seeds of a better cultural future. Taste, after all, is a network asset; the more we all have, the better off we all are.
We are also introducing an array of subscriber benefits aimed at enhancing another network asset: community. From early access to drops and event RSVPs, to exclusive community spotlight opportunities, subscribing to Welcome Editorial is a way to ingrain yourself in the Welcome community in ways not previously possible. More of these features will roll out over time.
As we embark on this new chapter, we do so knowing that the ways we build our taste will need to continue to change as our information landscape does. What won’t change are the pillars Welcome.jpeg was founded on. They aren’t complicated. We want to engage with art that makes us feel something. We want a sense of meaning from the world. These are still our goals. Our promise is to achieve them, again and again. We do this not just for us, but for all of us. In return, we humbly request your attention.