Art Blogs: Part Two of Two

by Art Fag City on November 2, 2007 · 8 comments From the Desk of AFC

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Image AFC 

Yesterday, Kriston Capps started a meme about art blogging prompted by a recent interview of bloggers in Art in America by Peter Plagens.  For those who are just tuning in, part one of this series can be read here.  I’ve conducted the second half of this “interview” below, and asked the following bloggers to answer the questions laid out in part one and two of the questionaire on their own sites: Artist Martin Bromirski of Anaba, editor of ArtCal Zine and conceptual artist Bosko Blagojevic, Caitlin Jones, scholar, and blogger for Rhizome.org, MTAA, and James Wagner and Barry Hoggard of long time bloggy fame.

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.

I don’t see why the operation of one medium should effect another.

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?

Well, there’s more art being made in the West than any other time in history, but whether it’s of any value remains to be seen. I know this is stating the obvious, but the way we attach value to art changes with time so there’s no guarantee that what’s important to us now will have any significance to those in the future.  Because of this, we never know what history will remember.

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?

Not my blog.

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?

According to the New York Times Magazine it is, but my knowledge of the Philadelphia and Portland art scene past what I read on artblog and port is scant to say the least.

Is there any constructively negative edge to your blogging and, if so, what is it?

I think this answers might vary quite a bit amongst the artists, institutions and media outlets I’ve reviewed negatively, but I do try to throw in something good about the work, even when I hate it.    Sometimes I have solutions I propose as well, but this can be dicey because you never want to appear as though you are telling an artist/institution what to do.

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.

Sure most visible bloggers are ambitious, myself included, but since some weeks I barely have time to write a post a day, I have to recognize the limitations of growth within that blogging model.  Secretly of course, I’m waiting for a blog patron to pay for everything so all I have to do is read and write all day.

Where will your blog be in three to five years?

Hopefully not buried under endless Google results of the arts coverage provided by larger media. I predict preexisting print media will have a much larger presence on the web in three years than they do now.

{ 8 comments }

t.whid November 2, 2007 at 1:29 pm

Hey Paddy,

Thx for the shout-out but I have to admit that I’m not really interested in answering these questions (generally, I don’t find them interesting and they don’t seem to apply much to the artist/blogger but more to the critic/blogger).

Perhaps M.River will take a crack at it 🙂

t.whid November 2, 2007 at 9:29 am

Hey Paddy,

Thx for the shout-out but I have to admit that I’m not really interested in answering these questions (generally, I don’t find them interesting and they don’t seem to apply much to the artist/blogger but more to the critic/blogger).

Perhaps M.River will take a crack at it 🙂

Art Fag City November 2, 2007 at 9:06 pm

Oh I know – they aren’t very interesting at all. In the spirit of the meme however, I thought if you did do it, you would manipulate the questions so they might be more meaningful to you.

Art Fag City November 2, 2007 at 5:06 pm

Oh I know – they aren’t very interesting at all. In the spirit of the meme however, I thought if you did do it, you would manipulate the questions so they might be more meaningful to you.

martin November 2, 2007 at 11:31 pm

hi paddy, thanks. i’m gonna do it…

martin November 2, 2007 at 7:31 pm

hi paddy, thanks. i’m gonna do it…

m.river November 3, 2007 at 4:06 pm

http://www.mtaa.net/mtaaRR/news/twhid/art_blog_questionaire.html

Yes, Thanks PJ but I’ll pass as well. What I do at MTAA_RR and on Tinjail makes little sense with this type of questions. The one thing I would say is that art/ review / crit blogs might want to avoid setting up standards and norms. Art needs a wide array of voices and styles. VVORKs, AFGs, MANs, ARTCALs, Reblogs, NNs, Rhizome Raws, Artnets and even Art Forum Diaries all have a role to play.

m.river November 3, 2007 at 12:06 pm

http://www.mtaa.net/mtaaRR/news/twhid/art_blog_questionaire.html

Yes, Thanks PJ but I’ll pass as well. What I do at MTAA_RR and on Tinjail makes little sense with this type of questions. The one thing I would say is that art/ review / crit blogs might want to avoid setting up standards and norms. Art needs a wide array of voices and styles. VVORKs, AFGs, MANs, ARTCALs, Reblogs, NNs, Rhizome Raws, Artnets and even Art Forum Diaries all have a role to play.

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