Looking into 2009

Click here for FAIR WEATHER, my report from the Miami art fairs

We can see the new year from here, so this post is not about looking into the future so much as it is simply looking at what's planned for the next few months. Here are a few events and upcoming posts:

Blogger Events
. Sunday, January 18 Sharon Butler, artist and blogger (Two Coats of Paint), and Austin Thomas, artist and director of Pocket Utopia, are planning what Sharon calls a "Blogger Conference/Think Tank/Pre-Inauguration Party" at Pocket Utopia in Brooklyn at 4:00 pm. (Sharon is my Art Bloggers @ partner, and while I have nothing to do with the planning of this particular event, I'll be attending with enthusiam, support and opinions.)
. Saturday, March 7, I'll be participating on a blogger panel at Platform Project Space in New York City with Hrag Vartanian and the Fallon and Rosof Artblog duo, Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof. The panel is scheduled for late afternoon, around 5:00. Stay tuned for more, including info on a Twitter connection that Olympia's planning.
. . . . .The panel will follow the Thursday, March 5th, opening of Blogpix, a show at Platform curated by the four of us. Olympia Lambert, the gallery administrator at Platform and its support venue, Denise Bibro Fine Art, is directing the whole thing. I'll have a whole Blogpix post on the curators and artists as we get closer to the date, but here's the 411: Hrag has selected Ben La Rocco; Roberta and Libby have selected Christopher Davison; and I have gotten gluttinous in selecting four of my favorite painters: Steven Alexander, Sharon Butler, Reese Inman and Julie Karbenick.

Upcoming Features Here at JMAB
. Remembering Morandi An interview with New York gallerist Stephen Haller recalling his long-ago friendship with Giorgio Morandi
. 50 Over 50 A curated show of the work of 50 artists over 50, celebrating experience, perseverance and damn fine work. (Update 1.11.09: This is a change from the original premise, which was to have been from submissions; I got overwhelmed when my post went out to the list serve of several large arts organizations.)

ART BLOGGERS @ RED DOT

I'm late with this post. What can I tell you? Life, of the non-blogging variety, intervened. But I do want to put my two cents in about Art Bloggers @ Red Dot.

We were here:

The Red Dot Fair at the Park South Hotel, 128 E. 28th Street

And this was us:

That's you all in the audience. Panelists from left: Ed, Paddy, Carolina, Sharon, Carol and moi. Photo courtesy of Hrag Vartanian, whose blog post contains a link to a few Flickr images

Sharon Butler (in the blue shirt) and I (at far right) came up with the idea of bringing bloggers together in real time and space, typically at an art fair or event. Art Bloggers @ thus came into the world during the Miami art fairs, where a small group convened in the lobby of Flow Fair on Collins Avenue.

We had a bigger group in New York. Last Sunday, March 30, we met at the Red Dot Fair at the Park South Hotel. Some 40 or so bloggers showed up--some bleary-eyed, let it be said--as we started gathering in the lobby at 10:00 am. After an informal round table in one of the small conference rooms, we adjourned to the restaurant, which had been set up for a series of panels. Ours, "The Impact of Bloggers on the Art World," ran from 11:15 to 12:30 and could easily have gone on another hour.

I moderated a panel that consisted of Carol Diehl, painter, critic (Art in America), Artvent blog; C-Monster, aka Carolina Miranda, freelance writer; Edward Winkleman, gallerist, Edward Winkleman Blog; Paddy Johnson, freelance writer and blogger, Art Fag City; Sharon Butler, painter, writer (The Brooklyn Rail) and professor, Two Coats of Paint. I was the moderator. Sharon has posted some of the panel questions on our blog so that we might all continue the discussion online.

I started by offering some blog statistics, which I've updated for this post. According to Blogpulse, the total number of identified blogs is 77,104,143. In the last 24 hours alone, there were 95,529 new blogs. That's 3980 an hour, 66 a minute, and just over one new blog a second. Even if one half of one percent of those blogs is related to art, that's several hundred thousand blogs--offering potentially or actually far more commentary about art than conventional print media could ever produce.

So my first questions to the panel was:
What is our responsibility personally to good writing and journalistic integrity in our own blogs and within the blogosphere in general?

Ed got to answer first, as he would leave early to go to his gallery's booth at Pulse. I don't have notes, since I was focused on moderating, but I do recall this part of his response: "My readers are my editors." If there's one difference between print media and the blogosphere (aside from the lack of salary in the latter) it's the instantaneousness of the medium. You can't pull one over or get away with shoddy reporting when your readers can call you on it. And they do.

The conversation drifted to ethics. Since the panel was composed of ethical people, no one seemed overly concerned about what they were or weren't doing. Carolina, the most journalistically bona fide of the group (she used to work at Newsweek and was part of the team that helped expose inconsistencies in the resume of FEMA's Michael Brown) noted the importance of disclaimers when writing about a potential conflict of interest. (Disclaimer: I often disregard copyright to pull images from the Internet--but they're always in service to the related topic. )

We talked about stats--yes, we're all obsessed with them--and some technical stuff. There was some nice give and take with the audience, many of whom returned home almost immediately to blog about it. Art Bloggers @ has links. The thing that struck me was how nice everyone was. As you know, the blogosphere is often marked by contentiousness (and more). Here, everyone was very friendly.

James Kalm recorded it all. We'll let you know if he posts a video. (This just in, 4.8.08: he did. Click here for Part 1, and here for Part 2. Thanks, James. You distilled a lot of information in two 10-minute segments.)

We didn't get to the big questions-- Are we mainstream yet? Do we want to be? What is the future of art blogging?--but Sharon and I are planning something in New York in the fall, and of course in Miami in December, so the conversation will continue. We'll have the info on our respective blogs and on Art Bloggers @ in September.

Big props to George Billis, gallerist and founder of Red Dot Fair, for generously letting us convene. A partial list of attendees (thanks to Franklin for taking names) includes:

Chris Albert
Steven Alexander
Brent Burket
Franklin Einspruch
KosukeFujikata
Aneta Glinkowska

Stephanie Lee Jackson (aka Pretty Lady)

Chris Jagers
James Kalm
Olympia Lambert
Megan and Murray
Andrew Robinson
Harry and Jennifer Swartz-Turfle
Hrag Vartanian

Next post: A report on the ADAA panel at MoMA, "Is the Killer Art Market Killing Art." Then on to some fair reportage and pics.