Radar isn’t the only independent magazine that didn’t make it to the New Year. Index, the Interview-ish downtown monthly founded by artist Peter Halley, folded just shy of its tenth birthday. But Index didn’t drown in red ink: Halley says it “did a little better than” breaking even. Index, with a staff of “four or five,” was small but influential: Halley listed contributors such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Juergen Teller, and Terry Richardson. “We had the first cover of Scarlett Johansson,” Halley says, and he claims he helped create Nolita by covering it in the late nineties. Problem was, Index had already become a bit of a side project for Halley. “Three years ago, I became the director of the painting program at Yale, and I just got overloaded,” he says. “We’re not really out of business—we’re going to do more with the Website, and we’ll work on a best-of-Index book. And if the right publisher came along, I’d be tempted to get back into publishing a paper magazine.”Next: Bloomberg’s New Eurostyle Kiss
Downtown Mag Shuts Down
