Submissions Policy
We receive a large number of submissions, both for issues of Cabinet magazine and for the Kiosk section of our website. In order to be able to look at everything we get and not keep you hanging for months, our submission policy is (unfortunately) as follows:
1) We will only contact you if we can use your submission. Sorry not to be able to do otherwise.
2) We will contact you within 6 weeks of submission. If you have not heard from us within 6 weeks, assume that we were not able to use your submission. We do not mind it at all if you submit the piece to other publications at the same time.
3) We can only look at finished works and projects; no proposals, please.
We wish we could have a more generous policy that showed our appreciation for your keeping us in mind but we are a tiny non-profit organization run largely on a volunteer basis and we really can’t do anything else. Thanks for your understanding.
General Guidelines (see below for additional guidelines for writers and artists)
We only accept electronic submissions sent to the address given at the very end of this page (this pertains to both texts and artist projects). Emails sent to other Cabinet addresses will not be processed. You must include the word “submission” in the subject line of your email so that it does not get eaten up by our spam filters.
Please put your name(s), email address, phone number, as well as a very short biography on the first page of the text.
Authors should feel free to include relevant images in tiff, gif, jpeg, or pdf format. Please do not send enormous pictures with your submission and limit the size of the submission to a maximum of 15 MB.
Texts should be submitted as an attachment in Microsoft Word or a file format we can open with Microsoft Word. Please note that if your piece is accepted, all editorial work needs to be done in Microsoft Word and its Track Changes function.
We do not publish poetry or fiction. Please see below for more guidelines for what is not a good fit for our pages.
We do not accept texts previously published (in print or online) in English. We are, however, open to translations of texts that have never been published in English. We do not accept artist projects previously published in another magazine.
Our essays can run anywhere between 1,500 words and 4,500 words. Please hand in submissions that are roughly within these limits.
Our fees for contributions to Cabinet and to Kiosk are based on length. We are a non-profit and our fees reflect our idealistic, noble mission (i.e; they are low).
Deadlines
We publish contributions to Kiosk on an ongoing basis. Issue 68—the last print issue of Cabinet—is closed to submissions. From issue 69, we will become a monthly online magazine, with every third issue dedicated entirely to one theme. As such, there are no deadlines for unthemed submissions; please send them in and we will consider them for the earliest slot possible. We are currently not accepting submissions for the themed issues of Cabinet.
Additional Guidelines for Artists
Cabinet publishes artist projects that treat the magazine itself as an exhibition venue. Unlike most contemporary art magazines, we would like our reader to actually encounter the artwork rather than simply learn of its existence. We do not publish documentation of sculptural works, performances, or installations. Video stills and architecture proposals are also highly unusual for us to print. A brief statement about the work can be included if you think it useful. Please note that we do not publish artist projects in Kiosk.
Additional Guidelines for Writers
Cabinet is an art and culture magazine that approaches the world with an expansive definition of both these terms. We are interested in almost any subject matter, as long as your take on it is original and demonstrates how the apparently familiar world around us is in fact artificial, fascinating, and strange. Cabinet appreciates the unorthodox—daring theses, unfashionable stances, minute observations, forgotten cultural practices, and found documents.
We welcome historical material that sheds light on current cultural issues and are also interested in non-artistic practices that carry an aesthetic surplus. We publish a wide range of voices, ranging from the academic to the surreal. Our approach is to juxtapose high seriousness with the playful (“joco-serioso,” as it were). We encourage you to see what kind of material we are interested in by looking at our past issues; the vast majority of articles from our sold-out issues are online for free. Click on any issue cover on this page.
Articles about contemporary art should be idea- rather than person-driven. We avoid articles that are about a single artist’s work, including interviews; nor do we run reviews or news items about forthcoming art world events. There are excellent venues that do so.
Congratulations! If you are still here, we look forward to receiving your submission at this email address.