Last Friday, I went to BLOG THIS! Blogging the contemporary arts, a panel discussion at x-initiative. I went with moderately high hopes, as the panelists were all artists and writers with whom I am familiar, and whose work I follow. I was interested to hear what they had to say about the particular platform of blogging and how it works within the context of the contemporary art world. While I didn’t have any particular questions or issues in mind, I was hoping for and expecting at least a few pithy remarks.
I was disappointed. I will actually admit to walking out before it was over. The panel began with an introduction to and history of blogging. “Blogging has been around since 2002.” “Anyone can blog!” Halt the presses! This is breaking news! These sorts of stiff introductions to such a technological medium with such immediacy feel a little irrelevant, as we seem to have absorbed this history first-hand, and more than that, they just sound helplessly dated.
The panel moved on, and the discussion leader asked each writer/artist to explain when they started, why they started, what their editorial focus is, and so on. And so they do. I was aware of most of this already, but: Winkleman uses his as a marketing tool for his gallery; Powhida writes fairly personally and had no traffic until his (completely awesome) Brooklyn Rail cover, which now gets him hundreds of hits a day; Barry Hoggard (of ArtCat and others) doesn’t really write anymore, but supports blogging through Culture Pundits (actually really interesting and awesome); Paddy Johnson started after studying art; Art21 had to develop a particular voice consistent with the organization’s mission and dedication to education.
Following the introductions, the panelists were asked a few specific questions. Questions like: “How do you combat the idea that blogs aren’t credible sources for news or information?” “How do blogs compete with the mainstream media?” “A lot of people don’t trust blogs… what do you have to say about that?”
Finally, a woman sitting in the front row said what I’d been thinking all night. What’s the point in asking all of these questions when they aren’t relevant to the audience? The audience was (largely) artworld cognoscenti. To all of us, blogs are a credible source of information with interesting and varied critiques on art and the world at large. This cacophony of voices serves to keep the art world in check. Nearly everyone these days is held accountable for what they do, say, and make.
For one of the first times in my life, I felt a serious generation gap between myself and those only ten or fifteen years my senior. I grew up and was art-school educated in a world where bloggers are an accepted, respected, and important part of the cultural and critical landscape.
The most interesting thing to come out of the evening was actually a point made by Winkleman. In response to the constant reiteration of the term mainsteam media and its relationship to blogging, Winkleman pointed out that what blogging has really managed to do in the past ten years is demolish the brick walls of the mainstream media. Now, more than ever before, people realize that all journalistic content is generated by an individual. We, as media consumers, are much more savvy, much more willing to question the information that we’re presented with by all news sources. No source is swallowed whole as a non-partisan, utterly neutral voice. And now, thanks to twitter, facebook, and sites like blogspot, we’re given the tools to not only consume, but to process, regurgitate and rebut that information... and sometimes, as we’ve seen with figures like Jerry Saltz, we can actually engage in a critical back-and-forth. This, I will argue, is one of the most significant developments related to blogging and social-networking to emerge in the past five years.
