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What can an art magazine be? Today, as the publishing industry reassesses its role in the age of the internet, the pioneering art magazine Metronome provides an example of how a print publication can engage with a community of readers and contributors While online publishing allows for ambitious publications that cater to a small audience, the ability of the web to reach anyone, anywhere makes such small-scale operations seem futile or unambitious The internet has modified our understanding of what publics are and can be: when distribution brings with it larger discussions about discourse and its limitations not because of physical accessibility, but because of a lack of shared points of access, the real achievement – and legacy – of a small magazine is in its provision of a space for dialogue rather than its creation of a public This is a useful example – if not the ultimate one – for considering publishing as a curatorial practice And with that, to suggest that the production of art magazines, both in print and online, can be a more nuanced, more open practice than the role assigned to it in the incessant conversations about the current state of publishing   The director of one of the very few libraries in the United States to keep copies of Metronome emails me: ‘There are twelve issues total for Metronome,’ she writes ‘The first issue in 1996 begins with “0” rather than “1” – one of the eccentricities of the publication’ She attaches the library records, which include the following notes: ‘Edited Clémentine Deliss Publication inter-culturelle des arts plastiques = Intercultural publication of the visual arts Four no a year Later issues vary in size, format, and languages’   Issue 0 of Metronome was published in 2,000 copies in 1996, in Dakar Its first editorial read: ‘Metronome is the first edition of a new series of intercultural publications produced from Dakar and London It proposes a debate from within the visual arts, interpolating artists, critics, philosophers, historians, aestheticians, curators, patrons, and art enthusiasts’ At the time, Deliss, now director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, had just curated an exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery as part of Africa ’95, a season focused on contemporary art from Africa, of which she was the artistic