4Columns

» see 4columns.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

4Columns published four reviews every Friday for nine years and nine months. Books and a gallery show one week, theater and a record the next: one piece each, around a thousand words, every one by a different critic with a declared point of view. The name was the format. Four columns on one page every week, with nothing else on the site competing for attention.

Margaret Sundell edited it from the first issue on 23 September 2016. The money came from a private foundation, and the terms of that money are the unusual part of this grave: the budget was written to cover ten years, and the project was conceived from the beginning as a finite thing. Most publications die when a spreadsheet turns against them. This one had its closing date written into the funding before the first issue went out.

The editorial line was borrowed from Baudelaire, who thought criticism should be "partial" and "written from an exclusive point of view that opens up the widest horizons". In practice that meant commissioning critics rather than filling slots, and paying them at rates that online criticism had mostly stopped offering by 2016. Greg Tate and Hilton Als both filed for it. The advisory board included Maggie Nelson and Okwui Enwezor.

~ the dossier ~

~ the model ~

A thousand words is a specific decision. It is long enough that the writer has to have an argument and short enough that they cannot pad it, and at four a week the magazine never had to publish anything it did not want. There were no listicles and no audience to grow into a business, because the business had been settled by the endowment before the first issue.

This is a corner of the internet i read about rather than from. New York gallery criticism in English was never going to reach a computer engineer in Ankara through anything but a link somebody else posted, and the years it ran, 2016 to 2026, are the years when the English-language web stopped being a place you wandered into by accident. What is worth noticing from the outside is the shape of the deal: ten years of commissioned criticism, paid for in advance, with the end date agreed at the start.

~ the funny part ~

The farewell went up on 3 July 2026, a week after the last issue, under the heading "From 2016 to 2026". Its URL runs the other way: "/to-2026-from-2016/4columns". The text calls the archive a time capsule of a shifting cultural landscape and notes that the magazine kept publishing through protests and a pandemic without ever missing its Friday.

~ what stays up ~

Every issue is still online, and the site now redirects its own front page to the goodbye note, so the first thing a visitor meets is the obituary rather than the work. That is unusual for a dead publication: the usual pattern is a frozen homepage from the last week of operation, with nothing on it to tell you the lights went out. 4Columns had a decade to plan its last page and used it.

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