What Is Cabinet?
Founded in 2000 as the publishing arm of the non-profit organization Immaterial Incorporated, Cabinet is an award-winning magazine of art and culture based in New York that throughout its more than twenty-five-year history has consistently confounded expectations of what is typically meant by the words “art,” “culture,” and sometimes even “magazine.” Originally created as a quarterly print publication, Cabinet’s hybrid sensibility was intended from the first to merge the popular appeal of an arts periodical, the visually engaging style of a design magazine, and the in-depth exploration of a scholarly journal to create a sourcebook of ideas for an eclectic international audience of readers, from artists and designers to scientists, philosophers, and historians. Using essays, interviews, and artist projects to present a wide range of topics in language accessible to the non-specialist, Cabinet—which in 2026 went fully online—has been and remains designed to encourage a new culture of curiosity, one that forms the basis both for an ethical engagement with the world as it is and for imagining how it might be otherwise. In an age of increasing specialization, Cabinet looks to previous traditions of the well-rounded thinker to forge a new type of magazine designed for the intellectually curious reader of the future.

As originally conceived, each print issue of Cabinet contained three elements: “Columns,” “Main,” and a themed section, the latter ranging from august subjects such as “Evil” and “Love” to less eminent, yet no less revelatory, topics such as “Hair” and “Bubbles.” Each edition also came with an issue-specific bookmark and postcard, and there were occasional posters and audio CDs as well. The online magazine keeps the tripartite structure, but disaggregates it so that any one issue consists either of only “Columns” and “Main” or is wholly dedicated to a single theme. Given the continiuity between the print and digital versions of Cabinet, the descriptions offered below outline both the historical and the future shape of the magazine.

How Was Cabinet Structured, 2000–2026?

Columns
Across its sixty-eight print issues, Cabinet’s continuity largely resided in its columns. In its first fifteen years, for example, every issue featured a column titled “Colors,” in which we asked a wide variety of writers (ranging from scientists to poets and many others in between) to consider a specific color we assigned them. Contributors to the “Colors” column over its sixty-plus issue run included Erica Baum, Corina Copp, Spencer Finch, Daniel Handler, Matthea Harvey, Lyn Hejinian, Shelley Jackson, Aaron Kunin, Paul La Farge, Jonathan Lethem, Ben Marcus, Carol Mavor, Tom McCarthy, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Lisa Robertson, Lucy Sante, Lytle Shaw, Namwali Serpell, Frances Stark, and Lynne Tillman.

The “Colors” column has been retired, but many of the other regular columns from the print issues have continued in the online publication. One such column, “Inventory,” provides an occasion to make creative reassessments of various types of catalogues, lists, and taxonomies; two recent installments have included a selection of images from NASA’s photographic archive of “flameholders,” the strangely beautiful components of jet engines that allow safe combustion, and a register of all the known sections of the Berlin Wall on display in the United States. “Leftovers,” which investigates the cultural significance of detritus, has provided the occasion for a consideration of the strange fate of the enormous clock that presided over London’s St. Pancras railway station for more than a century, and an examination of how rescued greyhounds no longer needed for racing are used as living blood banks for other canines. Our “Ingestion” column, which examines the intersections between eating, aesthetics, and philosophy, recently showcased Owen Simmons’s Book of Bread, an obssesively detailed and lavisly illustrated paean to British loaves, and related how legendary IBM information scientist Hans Peter Luhn brought all his expertise to bear on his ”Cocktail Oracle,” an interactive pocket guide for determining what drinks can be made from what one has on hand.

Cabinet has also published a number of now-retired single-author columns—Brian Dillon’s “Sentences,” Joshua Foer’s “A Minor History of … ,” Wayne Koestenbaum’s “Legend,” Celeste Olalquiaga’s “Object Lesson,” David Serlin’s “The Clean Room,” and Peter Lamborn Wilson’s “Black Pyramid”—as well as the ongoing but irregular “Thing,” in which three authors are asked to explain the nature and function of a highly enigmatic object whose purpose and provenance is unknown even to the magazine’s editors.

Main
This unthemed section contained essays, interviews, and artist projects about a vast range of topics, and has not changed after our transition to a solely online format. Recent essays have included Shahram Khosravi on what it means for the defeated of the world to harbor hope from within the ruins; Reed McConnell on the historical relationship between privilege and prisons at German universities; Dan Handel on the psychology of carpet design in hotels and casinos; and Sasha Archibald on Technicolor and the invention of the Hollywood palette.

Interview subjects have included Michael Sfard on his landmark legal claim against Israel’s Channel 14 for incitement to genocide; Gerhard Wolf on the techniques, practices, and aesthetics of containment, ranging from ceremonial teacups to septic tanks; Deanna Day on patient labor, scientific motherhood, and the development of the medicine cabinet; Giorgio Agamben on friendship and philosophy; Sianne Ngai on minor aesthetic categories; Cătălin Avramescu on the intellectual history of cannibalism; and Alain Badiou on the political uses of the rhetoric of evil.

Theme
In the themed section of each issue, Cabinet looks at a specific subject from a broad range of perspectives via a mix of essays, interviews, and special artist projects. Past themes have included “Gray Literature,” “The End,” “Dreams,” “Knowledge,” “Milk,” “Calendars,” “The North,” and “Catastrophe.” The “Desert” issue, for example, included Michael Marder on the desert as an invention that purports emptiness amid the plentitude of existence; Emilio Distretti on the continuities between the remnants of World War II combat in the Libyan Sahara and the Zionist colonization of the Naqab; Maria Golia on tomb theft in ancient Egypt; Elizabeth Knafo’s artist project on the extraction of rare earth elements in the Mojave; and more.

Artist Projects
Artist projects have appeared in each of the magazine’s three sections. Some of these projects have taken the form of postcards, posters, postage stamps, DIY paper sculptures, and audio projects. Artists featured in past issues include Janine Antoni, Francis Alÿs, Yto Barrada, Walead Beshty, David Birkin, Adam Broomberg, Matthew Buckingham, Heman Chong, Tim Davis, Yevgeniy Fiks, Joseph Grigely, Rachel Harrison, Justine Kurland, An-My Lê, Mark Lombardi, S. Billie Mandle, Josiah McElheny, Helen Mirra, Vik Muniz, Paul Noble, Trevor Paglen, Dan Perjovschi, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Jude Tallichet, and Tassos Vrettos.

To see a sample issue of the magazine, go here.

And for the ridiculously nosy/curious, a little look at the inner workings of Cabinet.

What Readers Say
Cabinet is my kind of magazine; ferociously intelligent, ridiculously funny, absurdly innovative, rapaciously curious. Cabinet’s mission is to breathe life back into non-academic intellectual life. Compared to it, every other magazine is a walking zombie.
—Slavoj Žižek, philosopher

Memorably quirky in its conceptual range, diversity and inventiveness, Cabinet is an ideal magazine for our times. Typically, the arcane and the quixotic orbit around a dense visual force-field whose nexus becomes the principal topic of that particular issue. At once enthralling and beguiling, its contents segue adroitly from subject to subject, the whole packaged into an unusually elegant design.
—Lynne Cooke, curator, Dia Art Foundation

Cabinet is absolutely unrelenting, issue after issue, in its madcap curiosity and creativity. There’s a cerebral joy to the whole enterprise—a firm and happy belief that there is still much to be discovered and said about our world, our culture. Opening an issue of Cabinet is like finding out that Karl Marx is related to the Marx Brothers.
—Jonathan Ames, novelist

The editors of Cabinet are collecting some of the weirdest and brightest minds out there from different disciplines and assembling them together in a way that doesn’t always make sense. This magazine is for me.
—Rachel Harrison, artist

Publication or project? Cabinet magazine, the antidote for the suffocated intellectual, continually moves across and beyond all the categories, offering some of the best writing and thinking about culture to be found the world over. Few journals can truly be described as new: Cabinet, while offering rich perspectives both historical and contemporary, is one of them.
—Tim Griffin, former editor-in-chief, Artforum

Voracious, omnivorous, and playful.
—The New York Times, 10 February 2005

Curios and curiouser. The finest thing to come out of Brooklyn since our grandmother, every issue of Cabinet is a deft collection of ephemera and anecdote, a Mütter Museum of themes. Every time, we’re left in the dust, wondering where they find their peculiar contributors. Cabinet functions as any good quarterly. It presents you with a sizeable wealth of information and lets you take a couple months to absorb it. Their spring issue addressed the historical and societal significance of beheading, provided a history of amputee cricket games and a history of the pigment ultramarine. The writing is densely informative (footnoted, even) while still cheerfully meandering; creative writing without the sophomoric, self-centered writing-workshop sloppiness. Like the best of artists, it’s not wrapped up in gallery gossip nor weighed down by Fluxus antics. Rather than making a big deal of how creative it is, Cabinet functions creatively.
—“Best Art Magazine 2003,” New York Press, October 2003

Cabinet fits an enormous amount into its finely designed, small-format pages. There are other treats in store too, such as tipped-in artwork, the occasional CD and an extraordinarily broad range of articles on everything from random radio stations to weather quotes to art vandalism. Your coffee table never need lack intellectual rigour again.
—Jonathan Bell, Wallpaper, October 2001

The journal’s name alludes to the phone booth used by Dr. Who. From the exterior, it looks normal but inside is an entire alternative universe. Cabinet likewise brings the reader to other ways of thinking, successfully blending accessibility in its writing and diversity and originality in its content. Cabinet is lively, humorous, and fascinating and will be perused over and over again.
—Michael Colford, “Best Magazines of 2000,” Library Journal, 2001