I founded publicsfear in 1992 with the art historian and writer Pamela A. Ivinski (1963–2018), my coeditor. Its three issues, published over the ensuing year and a half, featured artists’ projects, interviews with artists, writers, and filmmakers, and critical essays on topics ranging from Andy Warhol’s “society period” paintings to WFAN Sports Radio. Each issue closed with a themed invitational, for which a particular subject was addressed by a wide variety of respondents from the art, film, and literary worlds.

One of a group of small-press art and culture periodicals (such as Documents, ACME Journal, and Open City) launched in the early ’90s, publicsfear’s particular editorial focus was on anxiety-provoking issues of the period, including the (first) Iraq war, the AIDS epidemic, and growing economic disparities in the US. In the editors’ note in this first issue, Pamela and I wrote, “Self-consciousness is our greatest virtue, and our greatest vice.... Unsure how to proceed, yet unwilling to give in completely to cynicism, we parade our insecurities in front of anonymous audiences.”

Publicsfear received favorable coverage in The Village Voice (whose columnist, Robert Atkins, wrote: “an elegant and engrossing new art mag [sort of], Publicsfear is my idea of what Tina Brown's New Yorker should be”), The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Factsheet Five, and Parachute, among other press outlets.

This first issue included artist’s projects by Sean Landers, Jon Tower, and Daniel Clowes; and it also featured a terrific piece by Pamela, "FANfare: Talking Sex on Sports Radio,” that remains as incisive and timely today as it was then. Other contents include Gareth Jones’s long-form essay on Sandra Bernhard’s extended stay in London in the early ’90s; a piece by Julie Lasky about John Cheever’s recently-published journals, a deeply personal reflection on the work of Matthew Barney by Ed Gallagher; and an interview I conducted with the experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin. The issue concluded with our first invitational: “What Song Makes You Cry?" Respondents included Todd Haynes, Monie Love, Kathe Burkhardt, and Gretchen Bender. Its front and back covers featured photographs by Andrew Bush.