Art blog, existentialist style

Today’s travels have taken me over to Steve Durbin’s post over at Art & Perception taking up the call for a survey on art blogging set out by Kriston Capps and Edward Winkleman. That seems a crucial question for an established blogger, and perhaps even more so for a small fish beginner-blogger such as myself with scarcely a month’s track record to her name. So on behalf of the emergent camp, here’s my take on those questions, as published in Art in America.

1. What’s the purpose of your blog?
I started this blog for fairly utilitarian reasons - after four years of professional practice in the UK, I found myself back in Canada, essentially cut off from many of the usual forums I had available for critically knowing my art and that of others. We’re basically talking about a use-it-or-lose-it survival instinct here.

2. What are the boundaries of your blog?
I’ve set up this blog in direct relation to my professional life as an artist and critical writer, and therefore choose to limit my posts to that content - hopefully I’ll never find myself ranting about my love life or lack thereof at any point in this blog. That being said, my practice is by its very nature very open-ended and interdisciplinary, so if a discussion of last weekend’s openings goes on a seemingly wild and unrelated tangent, that’s more than alright.

3. Tyler has cited Joy Garnett’s NewsGrist blog as doing a great job of “placing art within a sociocultural and political context.” What I see on NewsGrist is a magazinelike interspersing of short profiles, exhibition reviews, op-ed pieces on how other people are covering things, and Village Voice–like political takes. But what does Tyler’s comment mean to you, and why are blogs in general better positioned than print to do what he describes?
Tyler’s quite right - NewsGrist does do its job very, very well for a blog that in many respects adheres to a format quite similar to a print-based art monthly. I doubt it really needs saying that its real advantage lies in its real-time existence alongside the context it conveys. Its real sociocultural immediacy comes from the simple fact that its audience is directly engaged at a point when their response is going to actually mean something, before the event goes archival.

4. Why can’t blogs go further, to the point where there’s hardly any discernible difference between artist and critic/commentator, blog and work of art?
I see the relationship largely as one of mutual reinforcement, but not so far that I’d personally like to see them become a singular practice. The blog-as-art is fraught with the same risks that comes of making art that is heavily illustrative of an artist’s research and theories - it just ceases to be that transformative something-else that marks authentic artistic creation. I can foresee a time when someone might grasp onto the blog format as a mutable medium and turn it to the purposes of art, but by that point I would hope that the result would be something viewed as art related the materiality of the blog, the way that an oil painting is related to a tube of Old Holland.

5. What scope and degree of editorial control do you exercise over your blog?
As the sole writer of my own blog, that’d be complete control. It’s all good.

6. What about posting comments from readers, and what about anonymity?
Comments are all to the good, anonymous or otherwise. Thus far I’ve found my feedback coming in the form of emails rather than comments in the blog itself, and that’s a reader choice I respect as well.

7. What’s “trolling,” and why don’t some of you allow it?
Has yet to come up here, so let’s not fuss about it for now.

8. Is trolling really so easily identified and universally bad? Is having posters register a solution?
Identifying trolls is such a subjective thing that I would never declare the practice as ‘universally bad’ and for a similar reason I don’t think registration will prevent one idiosyncratic someone from getting up someone else’s nose.

9. What about liability coverage?
Um, no.

10. What’s the economic model of your blog?
I’m afraid in this respect I hit the artist stereotype pretty hard - my grasp of economics sucks. If my writing here ever yielded enough attention to increase my freelance payload, that’s golden, but it would never be owed to any great economic planning.

11. How do you see your blog’s relation to the established print art media?
My blog writes into an informal gap that I don’t usually see covered in print art media, and I reckon that’s rather the point. I may choose to write in response to something in print in future, but I suspect it would lack a certain immediacy.

12. Tyler and Regina, what’s the relationship between your blogging and your work in the print media?
I’m finding so far that content I’ve got in the works for print media gets a sort of warm-up jaunt in the blog, in the same way that any material uppermost in my head at a given time will find its way here. However, the two operations are really quite distinct.

13. How do you attract readers/posters other than by word of mouth?
I’m quite fortunate to have a technocratic genius of a brother who was responsible for embedding this blog within my website and adding some SEO package that I don’t pretend to fully understand but which has thus far generated more traffic than a fledgling steeltown art writer should ever expect. Otherwise, it’s just an ongoing effort of engaging with relevant content, casting a wider net among other art bloggers, and hoping that the quality of writing stays up to par.

14. In general, is blog art criticism more open and liberal, and print criticism more closed and conservative?
Ugh. Generally, sure, it’s tempting to say so. But that does a discredit to a good number of perfectly open and liberal print criticism, and ignores a great deal of conservatism happening in blogs. It’s just a silly question, really.

15. Some people say that there’s a dearth of art criticism at length on blogs. Is this true? If so, does it have more to do with reading on a computer in general, or with art criticism in particular?
That’s likely a fair assessment, given that the majority of art blogs I’ve encountered tend to announce exhibitions rather than discuss them at length. Like the previous question, it’s tempting to take the simple route and generalize about the digital media itself; on the other hand, a repeating theme at the talks I attended at TIAF was the lack of critical writers in North America generally and Canada in particular, and all from participants in print media. I suspect the ‘dearth of art criticism at length’ is fairly widespread, really.

16. Art magazines come out once a month. Newspaper art reviews usually appear once a week. Blogs appear more or less daily, and sometimes have updates by the hour. Do you think that the faster pace of blogs will start to affect the pace of art-making?
For the sake of my own practice, I certainly hope not.

17. Tyler just said that there’s more good art being made by more artists in more places than at any time in history. Is this true? And if so, what’s the reason?
It’s quite possible, and can likely be attributed to greater access to educational resources among other things. It’s also quite possible that this is the time in history in which we’re able to be more aware of good art being made by more artists. The past is just so hard to judge.

18. Do blogs help correct the geographical bias in print art criticism, i.e., the tendency to think that most of the important stuff happens in New York or Los Angeles, and the difficulty of art outside those places to get national attention?
I certainly hope so, and it’s a good part of the reason for my own blog, given my stubborn refusal to move to New York or any other hardcore art capital.

19. One index of a city’s gravity as an art center is young artists—perhaps recent MFAs—from elsewhere coming to set up shop. Is that happening in Philadelphia and Portland?
I like to think that one day the ‘art center’ thing will be made less relevant altogether, if only because so many artists will choose so many middle-sized cities that they will all be equally relevant. A girl’s gotta be optimistic about something, I guess.

20. Is there any constructively negative edge to your blogging and, if so, what is it?
I think art criticism as a whole has been shy of negativity, and it’s a habit I try to avoid in my own blog; I think the people who invest themselves in this public fray of art are all entitled to the honest criticism that I myself value. Negative criticism is still an expression of interest, and doesn’t devalue the work - if I found a work of art completely irredeemable, I would just choose to ignore its existence completely.

21. Let’s throw something back into the mix: naked human ambition. Unknown bloggers want to be little bloggers; little bloggers want to be bigger bloggers; and bigger bloggers want to be called, as is Tyler’s Modern Art Notes, “the most influential of all the visual-arts blogs” by the Wall Street Journal.
That wasn’t actually a question.

22. Where will your blog be in three to five years?
One month into the game, it’s an ambitious question. But honestly, just still running.

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