You might be well aware of fanzines as a form of analogue self-publishing in and around your own arts community. Or they might be somewhat peripheral to the particularity of your engagement with the arts.

For the uninitiated, the word fanzine is often shortened to zine, and is pronounced 'zeen', as in 'magazine'. This abbreviation doesn't merely signal a growing ubiquity, or an economy of syllables for those (like myself) who say or write the word a lot, it also speaks to the shift away from fandom to a growing eclecticism – bringing the lie to anyone attempting to describe zines as a genre.

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In Printed Matter's 1981 mail-order catalogue, artist Edit deAk enthusiastically described the 'many hands at work in the process of making and marketing the book'. Turning the spotlight on individuals and groups involved in the production, distribution and sale of books by artists, deAk likened independent art publishing to activities 'like filmmaking or rock 'n' roll music.' While such comparisons with filmmaking have been relatively scarce over the past few decades, artists, publishers, designers and critics have continued to draw parallels between art publishing and independent music.

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I’ve never actually seen the Mona Lisa, and it’s a fair bet that most people reading this article haven’t either. Yet, according to Wikipedia, the painting is ‘the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world’. So how to account for the fame of an artwork we haven’t seen? And what have reproductions of Da Vinci’s sixteenth-century portrait got to teach us about time-based art and the online environment in 2015?

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