Art blog

An art blog is a common type of blog that comments on art. More recently, as with other types of blogs, some art blogs have taken on 'web 2.0' social networking features. Art blogs that adopt this sort of change can develop to become a source of information on art events (listings and maps), a way to share information and images, or virtual meeting ground.

Contents

• Mainstream media
• Academia
• Other coverage
• List of notable art blogs
• References

Art blog entries cover different topics, from art critiques and commentary to insider art world gossip, auction results, art news, personal essays, portfolios, interviews, artists' journals, art marketing advice, and artist biographies. Some artists use art blogs as a form of new media art project.

Art blogs may also serve as a forum to reach out to anybody interested in art – be it painting, sculpture, print making, creative photography, video art, conceptual art, or new media. In this way, they may be visited not only for the practitioners of different forms of art, but also collectors, connoisseurs, and critics.

Mainstream media

In 2011, art critic Brian Sherwin interviewed art critic Mat Gleason of Coagula Art Journal for Faso.com's FineArtViews blog. The interview between Sherwin and Gleason focused on contemporary art criticism and the role of art blogs in present-day art criticism among other issues. Gleason suggested to Sherwin that art blogs and the development of new media have become a "blow" to traditional print art magazines. Gleason and Sherwin also discussed how bloggers form a "pack mentality" based on region and perceived significance. ^{[1] [2]}

On 28 April 2009, Art Connect produced an in-depth interview by Peter Cowling for Art Connect and Jessica Palmer of Bioephemera. The interview, titled "It is not Really Bloggers vs. Journalists, You Know," ^[3] pointed to five trends that were shaping the communication and discussion of art on the internet and that the real picture was much bigger than just the bloggers vs. journalists that had been discussed to date. These five points were:

• Media convergence will continue to improve consumer choice, providing a better match between desire and availability.
• Content producers are just that. Consumers care less about how and where they can get the content they want. What they do consistently care about is the quality of the content and whether the content is produced to their timescales.
• The content producer-to-content consumer relationship is changing. Requests for feedback and further debate have been partially overtaken by things like conversations, and further fragmentation will certainly occur.
• Information technology and systems, provided as commodity (pay-as-you-go) services. Such services range from processing and storage, through to credit card processing and super-fast content delivery.
• The economic downrun.

On 8 January 2009, Regina Hackett, art critic of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, noted in her article "Art blogs hit Wikipedia" ^[4] that commercially run, mainstream media-supported art blogs face issues of acceptance among the independent art blogging community.

On 7 January 2009, The Village Voice art critic Martha Schwendener suggests that art blogs have helped shape a more laissez-faire climate for art writing. "Art blogs have created a new, largely unedited, admirably 'unprofessional'—hence, democratic—venue for people to speak their minds, gossip, or theorize about art." ^[5]

In September 2008, the Brooklyn Rail contributor James Kalm produced an article titled "Virtually Overwhelmed.". ^[6] A practicing artist and video blogger himself, Kalm says about art blogs, "The art blogosphere is a work in progress, and you’ve got to be vigilant of hidden agendas. As with anything online, take it with a grain of salt. Have fun, speak out, but don’t let it cut too much into your studio time; you might end up in a twelve step-program."

In the November 2007 issue of Art in America , Peter Plagens contributed "Report from the Blogosphere: The New Grass Roots." ^[7] Plagens convened a round table of veteran art bloggers, who conversed via email on a range of questions, aimed at getting a better understanding of what art blogs were, how they were run, and their relationship with the mainstream media.

In an October 2007 article for Artnet Magazine, critic Charlie Finch suggested that art critiques and reviews by art bloggers are overrated and lengthy, and implied that the art blogging community was overly insular. ^[8] The article includes several ad hominen arguments against specific art bloggers, and ventures the opinion that art blogs "have no readers".

In the January 2005 issue of Art in America , ^[9] Raphael Rubinstein mentioned several blogs in the magazine's "Front Page" section, where he penned a brief, annotated survey of 12 art blogs that he found "to be worth regular visits.". Rubinstein opined that "art-related blogs" had not, at the time, become as consequential as blogs in other fields such as poetry or politics.

Academia

In December 2008, the art blog The Dump, ^[10] where the new-media artist Maurice Benayoun dumped hundreds of undone art projects, was the first to become a doctorate thesis in art and art science in and of itself: Artistic Intentions at Work, Hypothesis for Committing Art Université Pantheon Sorbonne (6 December 2008). This PhD was directed by Prof. Anne-Marie Duguet. Jury: Prof. Hubertus von Amelunxen, Louis Bec, artist, Prof. Derrick de Kerckhove, and Prof. Jean da Silva.

In May 2010, The Dump – Recycling of Thoughts, a contemporary art exhibition curated by Agnieszka Kulazińska at Laznia Art Center (Gdańsk, Poland) presented 9 artists whose works were derived from The Dump blog project list. ^[11]

Other coverage

Other coverage of art blogs includes interviews of art bloggers, reviews of art blog sites, and recommendations of favorite sites. Art Connect has produced around 90 reviews of art blogs and undertakes interviews with art bloggers. ^[12] The Courtauld Institute of Art, in London, maintains a list of recommended art blogs. ^[13] Directories such as Yahoo! Directory and BlogCatalog maintain a list of user-submitted art blogs.

List of notable art blogs

• A Year of Positive Thinking ^[14] is published by artist and activist Mira Schor, "a cheerful postscript" to her book of essays on art, culture and politics called A Decade of Negative Thinking.
• Art F City, founded by Paddy Johnson, is an officially non-profit art blog that covers new art in New York. At The New York Times, Holland Cotter named AFC as a blog that "combines criticism, reporting, political activism and gossip on an almost-24-hour news cycle." ^[15]
• The Dump by French new media artist Maurice Benayoun delivers hundreds of undone art projects ^[16]
• Hyperallergic , founded by the art critic Hrag Vartanian and his husband Veken Gueyikian in October 2009. The site describes itself as a "forum for serious, playful and radical thinking." ^[17]
• NEWSgrist, ^[18] maintained by artist Joy Garnett, began in March 2000 as an e-zine devoted to the politics of art and culture in the digital age. For four years, it was distributed entirely by email subscription.
• PORT, co-founded in 2005 by Jennifer Armbrust and Jeff Jahn (who still maintains the site), PORT ^[19] focuses on critical content related to the Portland art scene. PORT describes itself as "dedicated to catalyzing critical discussion and disseminating information about art as lensed through Portland, Oregon." In the November 2007 Art in America roundtable Plagens described PORT as, "the closest thing to the virtues (paid critics, office help, etc.) of a print art magazine on the Internet....". In 2007, Tyler Green described PORT as, "The undisputed champ of the regional art blogs" on Off Center, the Walker Art Center's blog.
• Two Coats of Paint, ^[20] founded by Sharon Butler in 2007, is dedicated to contemporary painting and related subjects and received a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writing Grant in 2013–14.
• Wooster Collective ^[21] was founded in 2001. This site focuses on ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world. Updated by Marc and Sara Schiller, the site also offers podcasting with music and interviews featuring street artists.

Related Research Articles

A blog is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. In the 2000s, blogs were often the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community or as a social networking service in which everyday authors can publish their opinions and views.

Boing Boing is a website, first established as a zine in 1988, later becoming a group blog. Common topics and themes include technology, futurism, science fiction, gadgets, intellectual property, Disney, and left-wing politics. It twice won the Bloggies for Weblog of the Year, in 2004 and 2005. The editors are Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, Carla Sinclair, and Rob Beschizza, and the publisher is Jason Weisberger.

The Mormon blogosphere is a segment of the blogosphere focused on issues related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Netroots is a term coined in 2002 by Jerome Armstrong to describe political activism organized through blogs and other online media, including wikis and social network services. The word is a portmanteau of Internet and grassroots, reflecting the technological innovations that set netroots techniques apart from other forms of political participation. In the United States, the term is used mainly in left-leaning circles.

Jeff Jahn is a curator, art critic, artist, historian, blogger and composer based in Portland, Oregon, United States. He coined the phrase declaring Portland "the capital of conscience for the United States," in a Portland Tribune op-ed piece, which was then reiterated in The Wall Street Journal.

This is a list of blogging terms. Blogging, like any hobby, has developed something of a specialized vocabulary. The following is an attempt to explain a few of the more common phrases and words, including etymologies when not obvious.

Fashion blogs are blogs that cover the fashion industry, clothing, and lifestyle related topics.

Laura Fritz, is a Portland, Oregon based installation artist who incorporates sculpture, light and video.

Brian Sherwin is an American art critic, writer, and blogger with a degree from Illinois College in 2003. Sherwin is a founding Management Team member of the artist social networking site myartspace, where he also served as Senior Editor for six years. As Senior Editor for myartspace.com Sherwin established an extensive interview series with emerging and established visual artists. Sherwin currently writes for FineArtViews and is the editor of The Art Edge. Sherwin is also an advocate for youth art education.

Coagula Art Journal was founded in 1992 by Mat Gleason as a freely distributed contemporary art magazine. Since its inception, the publication remains free as a PDF download, however readers may still obtain a hard copy via "print on demand".

Digby is the short name of American political blogger Heather Digby Parton from Santa Monica, California who founded the blog Hullabaloo. She has been called one of the "leading and most admired commentators" of the liberal/progressive blogosphere.

Katherine Bradford, née Houston, is an American artist based in New York City, known for figurative paintings, particularly of swimmers, that critics describe as simultaneously representational, abstract and metaphorical. She began her art career relatively late and has received her widest recognition in her seventies. Critic John Yau characterizes her work as independent of canon or genre dictates, open-ended in terms of process, and quirky in its humor and interior logic.

Peter Plagens is an American artist, art critic, and novelist based in New York City. He is most widely known for his longstanding contributions to Artforum and Newsweek, and for what critics have called a remarkably consistent, five-decade-long body of abstract formalist painting. Plagens has written three books on art, Bruce Nauman: The True Artist (2014), Moonlight Blues: An Artist's Art Criticism (1986) and Sunshine Muse: Modern Art on the West Coast, 1945-70 (1974), and two novels, The Art Critic (2008) and Time for Robo (1999). He has been awarded major fellowships for both his painting and his writing. Plagens's work has been featured in surveys at the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Whitney Museum, and PS1, and in solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Las Vegas Art Museum. In 2004, the USC Fisher Gallery organized and held a 30-year traveling retrospective of his work. Critics have contrasted the purely visual dialogue his art creates—often generating more questions than answers—with the directness of his writing; they also contend that the visibility of his bylines as a critic has sometimes overshadowed his artmaking—unduly. Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel described Plagens's painting as a "fusion of high-flying refinement and everyday awkwardness" with an intellectual savvy, disdain for snobbery and ungainliness he likened to Willem de Kooning's work. Reviewing Plagens's 2018 exhibition, New York Times critic Roberta Smith called the show an "eye-teasing sandwich of contrasting formalist strategies," the hard-won result of a decade of focused experimentation.

Blogging is increasingly used in many countries around the globe, including those with oppressive and authoritarian regimes. In many Arab countries with oppressive and authoritarian regimes, where the government conventionally has controlled print and broadcast media, blogs and other forms of new media provide a new public sphere where citizens can obtain information they are interested in and exchange their personal opinion concerning several topics, including politics, economics, culture, love, life and religion.

The "Łaźnia" Centre for Contemporary Art is a municipal cultural institution and art gallery in the Dolne Miasto district of Gdańsk, Poland, located in the abandoned municipal bathhouse. The word "łaźnia" means "bathhouse" in Polish.

Coagula Curatorial is a contemporary art gallery founded in April 2012 by Mat Gleason, Los Angeles art critic & curator. From 1992-2011, Gleason published Coagula Art Journal, a free zine-style publication on contemporary art, which gained notoriety for its "no holds barred" critique of the contemporary art world.

Laurie Fendrich is an American artist, writer and educator based in New York City, best known for geometric abstract paintings that balance playfulness and sophistication. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, a retrospective at the Williamson Gallery at Scripps College (2010), and group shows at MoMA PS1, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Academy of Design, among many venues. She has received reviews in publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Arts Magazine, ARTnewsPartisan Review, and New York Magazine. Fendrich has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2016), Brown Foundation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and National Endowment for the Arts (1983–4). She has been an educator for more than four decades, notably at Hofstra University (1989–2014), and a regular essayist for The Chronicle Review at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Sharon Butler is an American artist and arts writer. She is known for teasing out ideas about contemporary abstraction in her art and writing, particularly a style she called "new casualism" in a 2011 essay. Butler uses process as metaphor and has said in artist's talks that she is keenly interested in creating paintings as documentation of her life. In a 2014 review in the Washington Post, art critic Michael Sullivan wrote that Butler "creates sketchy, thinly painted washes that hover between representation and abstraction.Though boasting such mechanistic titles as 'Tower Vents' and 'Turbine Study,' Butler’s dreamlike renderings, which use tape to only suggest the roughest outlines of architectural forms, feel like bittersweet homages to urban decay." Critic Thomas Micchelli proposed that Butler's work shares "Rauschenberg’s dissolution of the barriers between painting and sculpture," particularly where the canvases are "stapled almost willy-nilly to the front of the stretcher bars, which are visible along the edges of some of the works."

Mat Gleason is an American-born author and curator.

References