a little self-indulgence

Because otherwise, what's a blog for?  Kriston Capps decided to answer Peter Plagens' questions himself, to add to the conversation, and kicked it out to others to do the same.  The idea to do so had already occurred to me, and I had chosen not to; but Kriston not only included two links here in his post as well as a flattering comment, so what the hell, I'm easily bought.  I'm putting the rest under the fold to not bother those who'd rather not be bothered.  And while I won't kick it out to specific others as Kriston does, I do join him in encouraging anyone else who'd like to take part.  Anyway, moving on,

What's the purpose of your blog?

To amuse me and, I hope, some others as well.  That's the bottom line.  Along the way it became a means to have some enjoyable conversations with people, most of whom I've never met and never will.  At various times its purpose has been to post material I thought Bunny Smedley might find interesting.  It's also the case that while I don't especially like writing, I value it as a way to make me think a little more, and perhaps a little more clearly, about the things I'm reading, listening to, and looking at.  While I work in the arts, and was rather expensively groomed to do interpretive work of various kinds, I found that I lacked the drive, ambition, or desire (I'll leave it to others to judge the ability) to pursue a significant career doing so; writing here provides me with a way to do that kind of work just as much as I want, and no more.

What are the boundaries of your blog?

What are you offering?  Just kidding.  Mostly, that which interests me and I can bother to write about.  Early on I wrote some political stuff, as while I had been moved to start this site by reading stuff like MAN and ABL, political blogs had been my introduction to the medium and I've always been a politics junkie (I very nearly, in fact, went to McGill to study political theory in grad school, but chose to pursue a different path that eventually led to me to art history.)  I swiftly found it didn't suit me.  While I have my opinions, I don't have the mindset of an activist ready to fire off denunciations, and I'm too slow a writer and unoriginal a mind to have anything to add to the vast amount of material already out there.  Anything I'd put together no doubt had already been written by someone else, and far better, so why bother?  But even if my take on a particular book or exhibition or painting is worthless, I'm the only one who can give it, and it may be of interest to someone (if only me) to see it elucidated.  Anyway, in practical terms, this means mostly art, music, food, football, philosophy, random bits of pop culture, and the occasional tidbit of what might be called Rhode Island anthropology.  While personal disclosure is inevitable to some degree in this sort of medium, it's not a place where I look to expose my private life, work experiences (other than in the most general, "best practices" kind of way), relationships, or anything of that nature.  On a final note, I'm pretty dead-set against having advertising, except if the unimaginable happened and the site started to receive so much traffic I needed to get money to defray costs.

Tyler has cited Joy Garnett's NewsGrist blog [hyperlink added —ed.] as doing a great job of "placing art within a sociocultural and political context." What I see on NewsGrist is a magazinelike interspersing of short profiles, exhibition reviews, op-ed pieces on how other people are covering things, and Village Voice–like political takes. But what does Tyler's comment mean to you, and why are blogs in general better positioned than print to do what he describes?

Tyler's answer sounds to me like a description of some of the things Joy (who I think does great stuff) presents but not something that I aspire to, or at least not in the same way.  I see no reason why blogs would be better than print at this if the terms are left so broadly defined.  Perhaps mass print media stands at a disadvantage on these grounds due to commitments, economic realities, etc., but individual writers have their own built-in biases as well.  Art blogs are often closer to what used to happen (and of course still happens to some extent) in little magazines, artists' publications,  shop talk of all kinds, the underground press, etc., along with a growing group (as Kriston notes) of mainstream publications that have adopted the platform to either farm out or augment some of what they were already doing.

Why can't blogs go further, to the point where there's hardly any discernible difference between artist and critic/commentator, blog and work of art?

I agree with both the answers given in the article, generally, and Kriston's--people are already doing this sort of thing, if they want to.  It's just a publishing platform; while it has its limits, you can pretty much do what you want with it.

What scope and degree of editorial control do you exercise over your blog?

I am the Supreme Leader.  I'd consider having co-bloggers only for the thrill of conducting purges.

What about posting comments from readers, and what about anonymity?

All posts are open for comments for at least a couple of months, then they get closed to avoid any spam build-up.  I have and will delete comments I deem inappropriate, the definition of which goes something like 'I know it when I see it.'  Anonymity is fine with me, most of the time.  If someone's offering a particularly loaded comment anonymously, I may not delete it, but I'll probably try to undercut it, to the extent it deals with information not confirmed.  While I'm not exactly anonymous at this point, I don't publicize my identity, as this is just a bit of fun, and I don't want prospective employers finding it on a Google search on my name.  I'm sympathetic to anyone who wants to comment on blogs and feels the same way.  Tyler has inveighed against anonymous blogs; I don't agree, especially when one is talking about someone who maintains a stable, consistent identity online and isn't engaging in any kind of antics.  Credibility still needs to be earned, of course, but anonymity online allows people who might otherwise be forced into silence to have a voice in the conversation.

What's "trolling," and why don't some of you allow it?

Kriston probably has the definitive answer, but I'd just say that I'd prefer people not be assholes and try to regulate things accordingly.

Is trolling really so easily identified and universally bad? Is having posters register a solution?

Again, I don't focus on trolling per se, just how I perceive people behaving.  Given the level of comments here, of course, it's generally not much of a problem.  I hate registration policies.

What about liability coverage?

None, of course.  I'd like to think I hedge enough to ever need to worry about this problem, but my basic plan has always been to grovel and retract in case it was actually necessary.

What's the economic model of your blog?

Um, maybe the same as the economic model I used when I went fishing?  It cost a little money, but I enjoyed the pastime.  If I did well, I sometimes earned praise, and I'd have fish to eat.  So: it's rewarding!  But not in a way you'd want to depend on, though some people do fish for a living.

I remember a few years back having a conversation with a (much-missed) blogger of the time whose work involved creating models to judge the cost/benefits of various practices for organizations to help them decide what to do.  He said he had run his blog through his standard analysis and it told him he should drop it right away.  Fortunately for us all, he keep going for a while longer.  Bottom line, this question is kind of funny.

How do you see your blog's relation to the established print art media?

"Parasitic" is the usual word for this relationship, and it applies fairly well here.  I'm not a reporter.  I don't provide material for the print media to work on, it goes the other way round.  I like the fact that some members of the media read this site, and have enjoying having contact with them, but that's about it.  To the extent that I've done any work in the print media myself (and that's a very small extent), those opportunities came about at least in part because of this site, but I keep them somewhat separate from anything I do here.

How do you attract readers/posters other than by word of mouth?

I don't.  When I started in 2004, I did email a few people whose sites I respected to alert them to the blog's existence in hopes that they might check it out and link to it.  Some did, some didn't.  Those links led to some other people seeing it, and sometimes linking back; and my own links to other sites or comments elsewhere also sometimes brought more traffic.  Since at this point I'm not really adding to the circle of sites I read or link to, those paths for increasing readership have largely been played out.  But I think it was in 2006 that I stopped caring very much if the readership got any larger--it has, in fact, declined from its 2005 peak.  I wouldn't mind getting back to that level, but I'm not really obsessed with doing anything to get there.

In general, is blog art criticism more open and liberal, and print criticism more closed and conservative?

As everyone else has pointed out, no.  It seems silly to even think so.  It's just a medium, anyone of any particular mindset can use it.

Some people say that there's a dearth of art criticism at length on blogs. Is this true? If so, does it have more to do with reading on a computer in general, or with art criticism in particular?

I personally have no problem reading long form writing on a computer--I can't imagine bothering to print something out and then read it, as some of those in the AiA article described doing.  Who wants all that paper?  Kriston kindly remarked positively on the longer items I've posted here (though not so much recently); it's funny, because I've always thought I do better writing short pieces, but short for print may sometimes be long for a blog.  I'll also note that I just recently had the experience of writing a middling length review for a magazine that had to be cut down by 25-30% or so.  No doubt there were some losses to be regretted--it wasn't all useless verbiage that went, the piece ultimately said less--but it was undoubtedly a tighter, more focused piece of writing in the end.  Anyway, I'm not sure there's a dearth of criticism on blogs, but it's not the sole focus--blogs do a lot of other things beyond criticism.

Art magazines come out once a month. Newspaper art reviews usually appear once a week. Blogs appear more or less daily, and sometimes have updates by the hour. Do you think that the faster pace of blogs will start to affect the pace of art-making.

Not in any important way.  I suppose they could increase the distribution of art world gossip or stunts and the like, especially if more established players start to use the medium.  That's already happening, really.  But actually art-making?  God forbid.

Tyler just said that there's more good art being made by more artists in more places than at any time in history. Is this true? And if so, what's the reason?

Sure, if only because there's a lot more people around to make it.  I often think many people, always looking for great art, the best art, devalue the wide amount of good art there is--art that may not be the most original or the most powerful but still remains something of value, something that offers enjoyment.  It's the "not so good as Turgenev" problem.  One of the things I like about a number of sites out there is that they draw my eye to a lot of good art, even if not all of it is great (though some of it's that, too.)

Do blogs help correct the geographical bias in print art criticism, i.e., the tendency to think that most of the important stuff happens in New York or Los Angeles, and the difficulty of art outside those places to get national attention?

Yes, but as Kriston points out, mostly for those outside NY and LA, or to put it differently, those who care.

One index of a city's gravity as an art center is young artists—perhaps recent MFAs—from elsewhere coming to set up shop. Is that happening in Philadelphia and Portland?

I can't speak to those places, but on a smaller scale, that's been true of Providence for quite some time.  It is so small scale that it doesn't have the same impact, but RISD kids (and others) who come, get their education, and then don't leave town, or don't for some time, have been mixing in with the homegrown scene for decades.  It's gotten bigger since the late 1980s/early 1990s.

Is there any constructively negative edge to your blogging and, if so, what is it?

I don't know.  I doubt if there were that anyone would care, and why should they?  Mostly I'm just working out my own reactions.

Let's throw something back into the mix: naked human ambition. Unknown bloggers want to be little bloggers; little bloggers want to be bigger bloggers; and bigger bloggers want to be called, as is Tyler's Modern Art Notes, "the most influential of all the visual-arts blogs" by the Wall Street Journal.

But there are different kinds of ambitions and different ways to wield influence.  To be sure, it may be taken for granted that anyone bothering to write and publish wants to be read.  But by who and how many?  As I said above, I wouldn't mind if my traffic went back up to the 8,000 or so/month it had at its peak, though my preference isn't so strong as to get me to do anything about it.  I doubt I would want it to get very much higher than that, and I certainly can't imagine wanting to be "the most influential of all the visual-arts blogs."  That sounds very tiring.  I'm lazy.  I certainly don't want to be a professional writer of any kind--the thought of needing to write for a living horrifies me, I don't like to do it that much.  It's fun to work things out here, and occasionally have something run elsewhere as a lark.  Rather than have the ambition to be a big shot, I'd like to have my site read (and linked to) by a select audience--online writers I respect, arts professionals, certain journalists, especially those plugged in to blogs, etc.  A good small audience, one interested in discussion, would mean a lot more to me than driving lots of traffic.

Where will your blog be in three to five years?

God knows.  Probably still here, but I wouldn't take it for granted.  Especially given that we all may have moved on to the next big internet/communications trend by then.  There are some changes I'd like to make to the site to improve it, and I do think that I'll continue to want a forum to work out what I think about various experiences, so that suggests to me that I'm not yet done.  But as I said to someone once when discussing what the future might hold, can you really imagine doing this in fifteen years?  It's going to end some time, if not now or in the near term.