Art Blog - Mainstream Media

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 blog’s 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 art bloggers form a “pack mentality” based on region and perceived significance.

On April 28, 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, 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 January 8, 2009, Regina Hackett, art critic of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, noted in her article Art Blogs Hit Wikipedia that commercially run, mainstream media supported, art blogs face issues of acceptance among the independent art blogging community.

On January 7, 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."

In September 2008, the Brooklyn Rail contributor James Kalm produced an article titled "Virtually Overwhelmed.". A practicing artist and video blogger himself, Kalm has this to say 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." 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 the 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. 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, 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.