Publicsfear was founded in 1992 by Tod Lippy and art historian and writer Pamela A. Ivinski (1963–2018). 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 of the New York–based publication closed with a themed invitational, for which a particular subject (“Emergency Room Stories,” “What Song Makes You Cry?”) 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) from 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 for the first issue, Lippy and Ivinski 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.” Lippy has been quoted as saying that the zine was a nascent (or in his words, “angry adolescent”) version of his later nonprofit publication Esopus.

Publicsfear featured early contributions from a number of emerging figures who went on to prominent careers. Contributors included Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose “Eating with Publicsfear” project in Publicsfear 2 (1993) was one of the earliest iterations of Tiravanija’s meal-cooking performances/installations; Elizabeth Peyton, Richard Phillips, Meg Cranston, and Todd Haynes. Regular contributors to the journal included artist, curator, and critic Gareth Jones and Ivinski, whose long-form essay on Madonna’s book Sex in Publicsfear 2 was called “an academic-minded deconstruction of Madonna that tweaks academic deconstructions of Madonna” by Eric Messinger in The New York Times.

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.

In 1993, the Publicsfear Press Ltd. published the limited-edition book [Sic] by artist Sean Landers, which was later reissued as a trade paperback by Riverhead Books.

Due to a lack of funding, Publicsfear ceased publication in 1994. A fourth issue, featuring contributions from Doug Aitken, Sophie Calle, Mark Leyner, Lypsinka, Adrian Piper, David Sedaris, Nan Goldin, Gregory Crewdson, David Sedaris, Faith Soloway, and Joey Soloway, was never published. -Publisher