still big in Bentonville

Culturegrrl, trying to buck herself up after not getting the call for Art in America's blogger interview feature, notes that "I'm willing to bet that none of those other bloggers has ever been the subject of an Arkansas newspaper editorial."  Perhaps not, but sorry, Lee: when it comes to stirring up defensive Razorback writers, you weren't the first.

My gripe with AiA is the usual one: as Lee politely puts it, its website never links to its articles.  Which is another way of saying that their internet presence, like so many other art magazines, stinks, even when (as in this case) the most interested audience for a particular article will be found online.  It's especially incomprehensible when all of their articles eventually wind up on FindArticles, if without images or original formatting.  You'd think they might want to put a little more into their own website and reap some of the benefit, but apparently not.  While I'm interested in seeing the piece, I think I'll make a point of not paying for a copy of the magazine to do so.

Comments

[Paddy Johnson]

Yeah, their website -- if a splash page alone merits the name -- is horrible. My sense with the last blogger profile they conducted was that blogs were followed for a short period of time in order to write the piece -- but that no one there really followed any of the writers.

[JL]

I'm not sure I saw the last blogger profile they did. I hope this one is better, from the sound of what you write. At least they're letting the various people speak for themselves, even if edited. It's my recollection, perhaps mistaken, that Plagens is something of a blog skeptic; don't know if that had any impact on the piece. I'm still waiting for the library to get the issue, probably won't see it until next week.

Sadly Art in America's craptastic website isn't all that unusual for an art magazine, especially one of the old, mainstream ones. I suppose their attention to the web comes at least in part from a perceived power imbalance: they're AiA, they matter in ways that dirty hippies on the internet don't, and they can keep doing what they do secure in the knowledge that the audience will keep buying. I don't know; except for older/specialized stuff (regarding which AiA is a decent, but hardly exhaustive or authoritative, source), I hardly bother with any art reading that isn't online anymore. Between online magazines and papers (whether exclusively so or an internet edition), blogs, artist/gallery websites, etc., I can get pretty much all that I want. To be sure, there are particular writers or occasional articles only in hard copy that I'll go for, not to mention exhibition catalogs and the like. But a lot of general art magazine writing isn't so great that I feel the need to seek it out as opposed to what's available online. That said, while I'm happy to see art blogs continue to grow and improve, I tend to find them as only one part of the online mix, with some limitations that, if they aren't inherent, are at least widespread.