Weekly gossip magazines based their business model on alternative facts decades before the term was coined. Trafficking in fabricated stories and semitruths about royals, celebrities, and sometimes even the family next door, these publications phrase their speculative tales in the conditional and tread the fine line between boosting sales and avoiding lawsuits.

Freizeit (Leisure; all works 2022), one of the works in Milena Büsch’s exhibition “Auto Freizeit Motor Sport,” is a painted appropriation of an array of popular German gossip mags. Twenty-five covers organized in a grid present an aggressive