Read Hrag on Jerry

On the NYFA site, Hrag Vartanian reports on Jerry Saltz's talk at the New York Studio School on April 22.
One problem with art in the past 15 year is that over-academicized critics and curators have taken the joy out of art. Another was the overheated art market.
Quoting Vartanian quoting Saltz: “The problem with the art market,” Saltz said . . . “was that we were all in the same boat. We can only hope that this future art world would probably look like a massive fleet of modest-sized ships, rather than one ill-fated luxury ocean liner." Read the whole thing.
Picture from the NYFA website

Blogpix, The Panel

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Click here for Blogpix at Platform Project Space

Click here for Blogpix, The Show
Click here for first Armory post, Show Me the Money

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The Blogpix panel, which took place on Saturday, March 7, followed the Thursday opening of the Blogpix show at Denise Bibro's Platform Project Space in New York.

This is not a report. I was moderating, and totally focused on making sure the right questions got asked, that panelists got to respond, and that the audience got its pennies in, too. But Olympia Lambert, the organizer of both events, Twittered the event so you can access a running stream of comments.

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Here, let me show you some pictures of folks involved. Then I'll post some of what I remember (aided by the Twitter feed).

Denise Bibro, far left, welcomes bloggers to her gallery. Standing next to her is Blogpix organizer Olympia Lambert. The panel is identified in the picture below. In the audience Sharon Butler, Blogpix exhibiting artist and author of Two Coats of Paint , turns to face the camera.

The event took place not at Platform Project Space but at Denise Bibro Fine Art, the larger gallery next door. The work here is by Lisa Dinhofer

Our distinguished panel: Hrag Vartanian (www.hragvartanian.com); Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof (www.fallonandrosof.blogspot.com); Bill Gusky (www.artblogcomments.blogspot.com); and Brent Burket (www.heartasarena.blogspot.com)

Hrag, Roberta and Libby are curators, along with myself, of the Blogpix show; Bill and Brent were invited to round out the panel. If you're wondering about Brent's blog title, "Heart as Arena," we learned that he'd originally named it "I Love Mary Boone" but changed it to a phrase taken from a Basquiat painting

Martin Bromirski (www.anaba.blogspot.com) took all the pics except for the top one, which I snapped just before my moderating duties began. And if you're wondering what "Anaba" (accent on the first syllable) means, it's a Japanese term for "special place." See what you learn at a blogger panel?

That's me moderating

Here's the audience. Well, part of it; the chairs spread out in a wider arc and in deeper rows. I'd say we had about 40 attendees. I recognized a few folks: Sharon Butler at far left; Steven Alexander, exhibiting in Blogpix and author of www.stevenalexanderstudio.blogspot.com ; Alyce Nicole Dunn, an artist new to New York, welcome!; Loren Munk, aka James Kalm, author of The Kalm Report, whose video coverage of the New York art scene is rich and in depth; and Ben La Rocco, one of the Blogpix artists

Veken Gueyikian (www.veken.org) is seated behind James Kalm. And Olympia Lambert, our intrepid Twitterer, is at the laptop behind Veken

Here's Olympia, below. Did I mention she posted so many comments that she exceeded her Twitter allotment and got shut down?

Here's a snippet of the conversation:

Given the decline of print media, are we bloggers getting more power than we asked for, expected, or even want?

Roberta Fallon had the funniest and probably most honest answer: "We love pontificating." But Sharon Butler offers a good example of how that power can be used in a good--no, a great, way. After writing about how she got her portrait painted by Matt Held, who is working his way through a portrait project, all kinds of great things started happening for Matt (see Sharon's update at the bottom of her original post).

Brent sees blogs as "a supplement" to print media. But given that print publications are on the decline--here, several people rattled off a list of newspapers that are in trouble--we noted that only so much of their editorial space and budger can go to arts coverage. That's where we come in. And we can do it immediately.

"Is there a sense of ethics and protocol among you?"

The question came from Denise, and was primarily with regard to advertising, which some bloggers have, and some don't. We all said, essentially, "Ads or no ads, our voice and vision are our own." I must add that all of us have journalism in our backgrounds, and we take our mission seriously--even if we have fun while doing so. "When we started, we came out of a writing and journalism background," said Roberta of herself and Libby; both write for print in addition to blogging. Olympia, also, come out of J-school. Hrag writes for PBS's Art 21; Brent for the non-profit Creative Time; I spent 20 years as an editor

How do you know if the blog is worth reading?

This is not the exact question, but it captures the gist. I responded that readers make the evaluation. If you feel you're getting propaganda, relentless self promotion (beyond the normal stuff we all do; hey, we don't get paid for blogging!) back-scratching coverage because of advertising, or plain bad writing, you won't return. The blogosphere has much to offer, and you can access (or delete it) with a click. So trust your instinct and go with your taste.

Why are we blogging anyway?

Hrag: "I find I get more satisfaction from my blog than the other venues."

Fallon and Rosof: "We love that you can go to a blog in Philly and read about a show in London."

Panelist (sorry, I can't identify from the Twitter feed): "The direct response-- having people comment means something."

Bill: "I like to be the Rush Limbaugh of this stuff--but in a good way.

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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.