View current page
...more recent posts
Thanks to bloggy for linking to my site. The posts on his page are much more wide-ranging and culturally evolved than the ones here. He (Barry) is a flaneur in the inquisitive, Baudelairean sense, soaking in what New York and the larger Web world have to offer in terms of art, music, books, you name it. He's also politically astute, and especially good at close reading of the media for its quirky little habits, such as reportorial bias and blind subservience to the power structure.
He's also one of the few people in cyberspace tracking the art world. A few posts back, he lamented the shortage of New York art blogs, and it's true. There are websites galore but not much journal-cum-critical writing that I'm aware of. Artnet.com has had "artist's diary" columns come and go, but they're often larded with malicious gossip or trivialized by constantly quoting prices of art objects. (Sorry, Walter, but the mercantilism is really annoying!)
I started this weblog two years ago next month, and have watched in amazement as blogging has transformed the political world (e.g., the demise of Trent Lott), while at the same time having nil effect on the art world. Artists and dealers are still obsessed with print magazines as the ultimate validation for their efforts. But then even with print media, if I can generalize horribly, art worlders are less interested in batting ideas back and forth than having a piece of stamped parchment that says This Is Important Work. Dealers will put a 100-word semi-diss by NY Times writer Grace Glueck in an artist's book over a thoughtful 500 word review from an obscure magazine (as you may have guessed, my writing's hit the cutting room floor this way). As an artist, of course, I would include both articles!