feeling listless

Publishing Time was that a trip to WH Smith was like visiting an art gallery. Now magazines are falling back on agency photos of stars and models to publicise their contents (which this month saw J-Lo appearing on three magazines from the same company and some random model appearing on the cover of some periodical about family trees and some computer magazine). Pop Cult has noticed the trend themselves:

"Today, the art of the magazine cover has been vanquished by celebrity worship and bad taste. Designers are simply fulfilling the dictates of their industry, not unlike the paint person on an auto assembly line. Innovation, creative expression, or even cleverness has been mostly abandoned. Artistic considerations are limited to how much retouching the celebrity headshot requires in Photoshop and how many headlines can be crammed in before the cover looks too "busy." The result: A world in which it's difficult to tell the difference between Playboy and Harper's Bazaar without cracking them open.

There are some exceptions -- both Jack and The Idler still have painted covers. But it's entirely impossible to tell the other men's mags apart.