A heads up for anyone interested in getting an overview of the state of arts journalism: Regina Hackett has put together a good list on her blog, Another Bouncing Ball, In the fast-morphing world of art criticism, I found this posting helpful.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Brookyn Rail does not pay its contributors. Living on air gets thin. Other favorites from the visual art category include:
Art Fag City, Triple Canopy, Departures, Big, RED & Shiny, Bad At Sports, Dinosaurs & Robots, Idaho Arts Quarterly, Glasstire, Of Note, Kung Fu Art Critic and a site under construction, East of Borneo, which will be edited by Thomas Lawson.
There are flashier sites on the list, most prominently, FLYP Media, which is gorgeous and technically inventive. Good luck to FLYP, which seems to be aiming for an undifferentiated audience, one that will be impressed by the site’s click power and not put off by soft, feature-style arts writing.
People already in the game, on the other hand, aren’t likely to want to read what they already know, even though production values are stellar. As a bridge builder between the art audience and everybody else, FLYP serves the purpose. Its texts are elementary, but its mainstream taste is reliable. If you’ve never heard of John Baldessari, this site’s for you.