Opening and closing newspapers or magazines is a little bit different than opening and closing doors. A good day we decided to start what has been and will be forever ArtDaily, The First Art Newspaper on the Net.
We have received lots of compliments for this work, many awards, and we reached an average of five thousand daily visits but after eight years of its birth, our economical resources are gone and we are forced to make this difficult decision.
The inevitable became a reality: that beautiful dream became a nightmare. The agony of not being able to pay the minimum costs of this project: the paychecks for three collaborators, servers and a few other things. Because we were four people that worked most of the time in ArtDaily!
We are four cats, I repeated and four cats at some times (cuatro gatos a ratos). And all of us had other jobs.
ArtDaily was done with love and for the love of art, and although this is a phrase repeated so much, here it applies perfectly. Or as Spaniards would say, Never best said.
We put ArtDaily in a privileged and respected place that we always cared for. It was never used to insult anybody or to take revenge on someone or used for something that was not to strictly inform what was happening in the world of art.
Neither did we dedicate to promote painters that take their portfolio of scams, surprising young collectors in a game well known among art dealers, museums and auction houses.
We would like to inform that we will write a brief history of what ArtDaily has been and hope to publish this in our front page very soon. It will be a kind of last report of what happened here, in ArtDaily, since we began with this great dream that ends here.
With great respect we would like to leave this photograph, the last in the life of our newspaper and that was published to announce the exhibition that today, June 11, 2004, opened in New York at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
This sculpture by Constantin Brancusi and his splendid work "Sleeping Muse I, 190910" was the last photograph in the history of ArtDaily and we believe that it symbolizes, as no other work does, what those who make this newspaper feel and the moment we are living.
We would also like to thank the patrons, directors and executives at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, from the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., to which Joseph H. Hirshhorn donated this Brancusi work in 1966.
Today we wish to thank all those who visited us, all those who collaborated with us and those that hindered us; they made us improve and conquer new unthinkable goals.
It is impossible to forget those great contacts that from their posts at the most prestigious museums all over the world sent us invaluable material, trusting we would make good use of it.
To all, many thanks.
Ignacio Villarreal
Editor & Publisher
June 11, 2004
