You can read this as just a local earthquake caused by the larger tectonic shifts of the publishing industry. But art publishing has its own peculiar dynamics. One of these is that a great, great many art titles are vanity projects, backed by a rich person for the same kinds of reasons that rich people like to buy art in the first place.
So what happens in the art mag world doesn’t just tell you about the ill health of print, but also about the changing values of particularly wealthy people. Both Art in America and ARTnews represent their own permutation of this pattern.
From the Art in America side, the detail of the story that sticks out to me is this: While Peter Brant is selling off his art magazines, including not just AiA but also the Magazine Antiques and Modern, he is specifically not selling off Interview, which remains under his private control, despite the fact that it is a money sink just like the rest.
Andy Warhol founded Interview and Brant is a famous Warhol fanboy. So it is hard not to read this decision as a statement of the Warholian priority of values: the connection to celebrity and fashion is what is to be prized and shielded; the doughty old project of producing ideas about fine art needs to be rationalized.