Artists who blog

A lot of artists write blogs. I even found a blog about artist’s blogs with interviews of artists about their blogging by an artist, Stephanie Levy. Artists Who Blog. Most of the artists are just photographing of their current art and posting that in a blog. I wish that more artist bloggers, especially the painters, would show something of their process and inspiration rather than simply spruiking their completed paintings for sale or advertising their next exhibition.

The Internet has exposed many crypto-artists, the secret artists, the part-time artists, and the artists who are outside of the art world circle. There are many blogs about the arts and crafts (see my entry on Contemporary Craft Politics & Blogs) and many more blogs about Melbourne’s street art (maybe I should write another blog entry about them).

I’m surprised that zines have survived given the number of artists who are turning to blogs as their preferred media of publication but there will always be an appeal for the hand-made. Sticky Projects, in the Degreaves St. underpass at Flinders St. Station, is full of zines. I’m surprised at any print media surviving economically; the age of art magazines, like Art + Text, as a significant force in art is over.

Well this is a slack blog entry – I could be writing about who would win a death match cage fight (Jeff Koons vs Jackson Pollock) but instead I’m going to present a list of artist’s blogs. A decade ago I used to do these lists of websites for LookSmart, an international internet directory that no longer exists; so writing this entry feels a bit like my old job. I’m going to have a sandwich.

Blogos/HA HA by artist Peter Tyndall part of his meta-art work “A person Looks At A Work Of Art/ someone looks at something. Articles about recent issues and events in the arts along with notes and observations.

Self vs Selfby Sydney artist Hazel Dooney. Hazel writes regularly about her art, the process of making her art and her life.

Psalm, by the veteren Melbourne street artist of the same name. Psalm writes about street art and urban exploration and his blog features lots of photographs of derelict buildings.

Paul J. Kalemba describes himself as “an urban edible®evolutionary” and has regularly exhibited in Platform’s “Underground Garden”.

Hidden Archive by Melbourne artist Dylan Martorell, documentes his exhibitions and sound/music performances.

Earth Died Screaming by Ryan an illustrator living in Collingwood. Ryan writes about his art (showing working in progress), his inspiration and other things happening in Melbourne’s illustration scene.

Supermarketmonkey by a part-time street artist and illustrator. He has mentioned me several times in his blog and consistently sends me traffic, so I should return the favour. Supermarketmonkey writes about life and other art and the process of making art.

This Painting Life by South Australian artist Dianne Gall, writes about her art, thoughts and inspirations.

Six Hundred Degrees – Sophie Milne, ceramic artist who writes about her art practice and other ceramic and art related events. Sophie Milne used to run Pan Gallery in Brunswick.

Erin Crouch, a young Melbourne artist showing her video work and paintings on her blog.

One for the records

Camera strapped to my waist, like a gun in holster, ready to shoot and record what I encounter. A blogger has to be a photojournalist, as well as, copy-editor, researcher, editor and publicist – so I have to blow my own trumpet.

This week this blog has received some outside recognition. I don’t know if a link to my post 3 Portraits of Julian Assange from the Huffington Post is that significant as it has only lead to 3 views. What is more significant is that State Library of Victoria (in partnership with the National Library of Australia) is going to archive Black Mark – Melbourne Art & Culture Critic on PANDORA, Australia’s Web Archive. PANDORA’s index of Australian websites provides a link to the published site and an annual archive of the site. The library will keep the contents accessible as hardware and software changes over time; long after my energies for it have been exhausted or if WordPress folds. It will also be in the library catalogue and in the National Bibliographic Database (a database of catalogue records shared by over 1,100 Australian libraries).

Looking at the Pandora index in the ‘Fine Arts’ section along with many gallery webpages, like Westspace, 69 Smith and Platform Artist Group, I’m pleased to see Peter Tyndall’s Blogos/Ha Ha included in the archive.  Blogos/HA HA is part of Tyndall’s meta-art work “A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/ someone looks at something…”, the title of all his art. His blog has articles about recent issues and events along with a great selection of images that all build on his meta-thesis about the act of looking. Peter Tyndall’s art made a great impression when I was an undergraduate student at Monash Uni in the early 80s and spurred my interest in looking beyond the image and the frame.

Now this is recognition that I am making a significant contribution to recording Melbourne’s fine arts. It feels like a vindication for all the work that I have put into this blog. And all of this gives me more motivation to write, to research and to explore Melbourne’s visual arts.

And while I have your attention: “Like” my Facebook page for Black Mark – Melbourne Art & Culture Critic; it is a lite version of the blog with more photographs, links to stories and chat about what I’m doing as an art critic.

self-portrait in a tram mirror

Gushing

There is an ugly glut of gushing praise in the art world. Wonderful, amazing, fabulous, great, fantastic, must see … gushing praise is just so much balderdash, soap bubbles of words that don’t tell you anything. Turn the flow of praise down and find something else to say about art.

In the past the partisan politics of the modern art world attracted many defenders convinced that appreciate progressive art was the same as supporting progressive politics. A small, marginal cultural practice might need a gushing review from an insider to promote it but Melbourne’s contemporary visual arts scene is neither small nor marginal. It can stand on its own merits and doesn’t need a constant flow of gushing praise to sustain it.

The arts media is seen as a free promotional forum whose role is to attract a larger audience for an event. These gushing comments are poncy (“poncy” as in pandering, procurering and pimping) praising all the artists and every exhibition or event. There is even a Melbourne blog called Art Pimp by Din Heagney, artistic director of Platform Artists Group (2006-2010). But all this pimping isn’t going to improve the quality of the art.

There is a lot of gushing in the Australian art media because too many the writers and presenters can’t say anything else due to massive conflicts of interests. Andy Dinan who presents “Gallery Girl” on Channel 31 is the director of Mars Gallery. This conflict of interest that is left unmentioned on the show, even when Andy Dinan reports on her own gallery. “Gallery Girl” is not community television but a half hour advertisement for some of Melbourne’s commercial galleries. There are so few independent critics who can comment without conflicts of interests that it goes unmentioned in the arts media. Even the ABC’s “Art Nation”, the national broadcaster’s visual arts show is full of gushing; one of their commentators, Reko Rennie’s artistic career influences what he has to say about art.

When was the last time that you read a negative review of a contemporary art exhibition? When was the last time that you read that a notable artist was under performing or that an exhibition wasn’t worth a look? These kinds of comments are common in film and book reviews, even from sports commentators but they are rare in the visual arts. One of the reasons for this blog is to improve the quality of critical discussion in Melbourne’s visual arts not to gush.

Art Bloggers

Who are the other bloggers writing about the visual arts in Australia? What motivates them to do all this work creating original content for their blogs?

Ace Wagstaff – Dead Hare Melbourne Art Review (started May 2008). The title, Dead Hare is a reference to the Joseph Beuys work “Explaining art to a dead hare” (and also one work by his BFA teacher, Geoff Lowe as part ‘A Constructed World’ entitled ‘Explaining Art to Live Eels’). Ace Wagstaff wants “to document and share events and exhibitions that were and are almost invisible comparatively to the larger commercial and government galleries.” He focuses on Melbourne’s smaller gallery spaces, student spaces and ARI’s.

Steve Gray – Art Re-Sources (started Sept 2008) grew from an idea of a resource for Yr 11+ Visual Art Students. Art Re-Sources features many interviews with artists, as Steve Gray explained: “I wanted to offer students and artists a bit more than the usual fix of art magazine heroes and maybe/wannabees who were the flavour of the month. I had a few contacts and a bunch of questions to pose them in a question and answer format.”

Marcus Bunyan – Art Blart (started Nov 2008) reviews exhibitions in Melbourne and around the world. As a photographer Marcus Bunyan has a particular focus on photography exhibitions, he is often the official photographer for exhibitions and consequently his blog has some great photography along with exhibition reviews.

Karen Thompson – Melbourne Jeweller (started March 2009) has a special focus on jewellery exhibitions in Melbourne. Karen Thomspon started the blog with advice and encouragement from Brian Ward who writes Fitzroyalty. Thompson wanted to write her blog: “to document exhibitions (for future interest, and for others outside of Melbourne to read), explore my own reactions, to expand my language and visual ‘well / bank’, and to open up discussion to invite others to give their opinions (not just on exhibitions but also on topical issues).”

Stephanie Pohlman and Ashleigh Clarke – Brisbane Art Collective (started Aug 2010) write their blog because they “felt in Brisbane especially, a city that supposedly is a ‘cultural wasteland’ in comparison to Melbourne and Sydney there was a lack of critical feedback in regards to the art scene. I guess, fundamentally what we wanted to do was to show people that there is an amazing art scene in Brisbane and offer people a forum in which they could read about it.” The Brisbane Art Collective writes about more than just exhibitions, their posts range across a variety of topics including: street art, silence in the gallery and art history.

All of these people write because they are interested in the subject and the by writing a blog they can connect with the subject and other people with that interest. Writing is an outlet for their curiosity. For Ace Wagstaff and Karen Thompson it is a return to the kind of thinking that they missed after graduating. Karen Thompson notes: “the public readership gave me a framework and a kind of discipline I may have not developed without that framework.”

Karen Thompson, Ace Wagstaff and Marcus Bunyan all balance their own art practices with blog writing. Marcus Bunyan commented about this balance:

“… one practice informs the other, they are not mutually exclusive. I usually make 2-3 bodies of works each year, so that when I am not working on my artwork I am studying for Uni (I am studying a Master of Art Curatorship part-time), reading, working on reviews for the blog. All of these things interweave, are intertextual, one informing the other.”

So why write about art exhibitions? Many of these bloggers want to supplement the meagre coverage of the many art exhibitions. The Brisbane Art Collective put it this way: “basically we write art criticism because we want to give people an objective outlook to the art industry, we aren’t publicists and we aren’t interested in just talking about pretty pictures.” Steve Gray is motivated by his own experience: “I have looked at hundreds of shows over a 30 year period, some years more than others. I would see reviews, see the show and agree or disagree. I would also see shows which had not had an ounce of media attention. There was a chance to chat about some of these things and explore it further.”

When I asked the bloggers “who inspires you?” I was surprised to find how many other bloggers are an inspiration to them.

One point that I was relief for me to know – it might also be a relief for artists too – most of bloggers selection of exhibitions to be reviewed is largely random and personal. Only Melbourne Jeweller is so focused that finding out about exhibitions require searching via reader suggestions, gallery websites and internet searches.

It does take encouragement to start a blog and to keep it going. I wish that more people would write blogs about the visual arts in Australia and that more readers would comment on the posts. When Ace Wagstaff considered his doubts and insecurities about writing a blog he then noted:

“I’m reminded of how few people do write about the work that I’m writing about, and how good it is to start dialogues and how affirming it is as an artist to receive feedback, so I swallow my ego and try not to think about whether I am going to embarrass myself with my writing or whether or not I am going to finally expose myself as an art-scene poser, and channel one portion of punk cajones and one part Nike slogan and just do it.”

(Thanks to all the bloggers mentioned for their help in writing this post. There are more bloggers writing about the visual arts in Australia – see my blogroll at the bottom of this page.)

Refreshing & Rebranding

“Change your ideas regularly like your underwear, lest they become dirty.”

- Tristan Tzara

Black Mark – a new name and a new image for the blog. “Black Mark” was what my biker neighbours called me because I was then, and I am now, dressed in black. I thought that it would be a good name for the Melbourne Art & Culture Critic, the critical assessment.

I also now have a Facebook page for this blog – Melbourne Art & Culture Critic (that I unfortunately created before I thought of the name change).

Along with a new name I have a new “Elegant Grunge” theme for this blog. “My Art” has been banished to my RedBubble page; I’m not trying to make a career as an artist but an art critic and my painting has been consigned to a hobby activity. (It is important to have several hobbies in having a balanced life – shopping, reading or being an audience are not hobbies, although they are also important for a balanced life. I have other hobbies but I won’t be writing about them.)

All of these changes have been prompted by a review of my blog by writer and editor, Peter Symons, a former colleague of mine at LookSmart.com. – thanks Pete. (I also must thank Evangeline Cachinero for the new Black Mark header along with her advice and encouragement in updating the blog’s image.) Peter Symons’s review was more substantial than just a question of style or theme and I thank him for that. I have been thinking about his comments for the last four days. So hopefully regular readers will notice other changes in this blog’s content. Even a critic needs a critical eye cast on them.

What do you think of the new image? Leave a comment (it is just below the Share This at the bottom of the post.)

Reader’s Poll

It is easy to become addicted to the daily stats of readers displayed on WordPress and like me many bloggers are checking their stats daily. Even with this constant attention and information about referrals, links, search terms and shares it is still very hard to predict what blog entries will attract the most readers. A big influence on the daily views is if it gets shared by a lot of people on Facebook. I can make broad generalizations that certain galleries, like the NGV, and certain celebrity artists, do attract more readers. But I would like more feedback.

I have been trying out features on WordPress. This time I am trying out a poll to find out what type of stories my readers are most interested. I know that polls like these are rather crude instruments for gauging opinions but if you want to leave more detailed feedback please comment. I am particularly interested in the opinions of subscribers and other regular readers. (WordPress has recently changed the way that they record subscribers so I have a lot more than I thought I did last year.)

Thank you for your participation.

Donate

There is now a donate button on my sidebar. I am asking for donations to my Paypal account. Your donation will help pay the ongoing expense of running this blog. Looking at the costs of transportation, broadband, books and magazines the expense of writing this blog is beginning to add up. If you have enjoyed reading this blog, especially those people who have subscribed, consider donating.

I have decided to try the donate approach to funding the production of original online content. I have tried finding sponsorship for this blog however it would be inappropriate for an art critic to be sponsored by a gallery. What would be appropriate is sponsorship from a business that makes money from art galleries and artists.

Mark Holsworth @ Sweet Streets festival

There are few benefits for being an art critic unlike movie and theatre critics who get free tickets. Sure there have been a few free drinks at openings but the gallery would give them to anyone and I am not a big drinker so all these free drinks aren’t doing that much for me. One of the very few freebees that I have received in writing this blog was a copy of Illegal Fame Winter 08 because I wrote a short review of an old issue of their magazine in this blog. (Big shout out to the guys at Illegal Fame.) This year I have been treated me like the rest of the media, so I have been to a few media previews and received media packs (along with tea and nibbles).

Another option for bloggers to make money is side projects; spin offs from the expertise that has been acquired from writing the blog. Maybe I still want that 2005 blogger’s dream – a book deal. Instead I have been doing a bit of work for people making documentaries about street art.

To subscribe to this blog click the “sign me up!” button near the top of the right hand column on the home page. Subscribers receive notifications of posts by email. I would never sell or pass on my subscriber email lists to anyone else but I am examining what I can do with it. Would subscribers tolerate a monthly email from me with targeted advertising, e.g. for an arts festival or exhibition? I have been considering other offers for subscribers e.g. talks, gallery and street art tours. What do you want as a subscriber? Please leave a comment.