Why We Love Art Blogs

The art world is a complex and often contradictory place.

The people who take part in the art world can be passionate and experimental, or parochial and secretive. They can be friendly, or (let us be honest here!) terrible snobs. Sure, that is the case for lots of other cultural grouping, but the art world is simply the most diverse.

The reason why such diversity exists is a reflection on the ways in which it is possible to participate in the art world. The people whose interests lie at the intersection of art and fashion, tend to live for the moment, and are interested in art as an experience.

Contrast that to the outlook an art scholar might have: they are interested in contextualising the things they study, to discern how substantial they are, and go about their business as a physicist or any other serious academic would do. Add-in the various ways people produce, sell, buy, and view art, and it is hardly surprising that a wide range of very different personalities are involved.

The need for a steady stream of accessible information about these different aspects is therefore particularly important.

Before the internet took off, the main source of free news information that covered the arts were local newspapers. However, local newspapers were not, with a few notable exceptions, providing compelling and insightful coverage. The root of that problem was that most newspapers did not have access to someone with the required knowledge to cover art in any sort of depth.

To try to paper over the cracks, newspapers covered events like gallery openings by taking a by-the-numbers approach. The result would read like a school sports day - with things like total turnout and notable attendees being added to a quote from, say, the Mayor (which would typically boil-down to 'I enjoyed it very much').

Once the internet did start to become popular, local papers came under significant threat of closure, and had to react by cutting-out anything that was not core to their readership. Art was a soft target, and soon began to dip further under the radar.

By the end of the 90s not only was there a lack of free or marginally costed quality information about art, but that which was available was being produced by a relatively small number of people - people who had developed pretty clear ideas about how the art world should be presented to their readers.

It was not that people could not go to libraries, nor that there was no information available at all about art. The issue was that art had become a far less prominent, and for those looking for a way to join in, less accessible, leisure time activity than things like watching TV, sport, and playing computer games.

Art blogging has been a breath of fresh air. The coverage is fantastic, with (almost!) every aspect of the art world being extremely well covered.

As you might expect, the big art scenes are well catered for, and some of the art museums also do a great job.

The addition of a whole host of quality artist-run blogs, locally/regionally focused art blogs, and blogs on subjects like how to buy art by collectors like Lisa Hunter have really opened things up.

With this increase in choice, and accessibility, the art world has become a less imposing place to join. It has facilitates dialogue: the art world today has become less pushed along by the few, and more pulled along by the many.

In the beginning of December 2008, we decided it would be useful to take a look into the art blog environment. We are doing so in two ways.

We started out by compiling a list of all the art blogs we knew about. Once we did that we started searching for more. We wanted to know how many art blogs there are, and to provide some insight into the coverage they provide. We are in the process of finalising an initial report, which we will release on the Art Connect website.

We also decided that it would be useful to showcase the best art blogs. To this end, we are steadily working or way through the many, many good blogs that exist.

For each blog we cover, we summarize the coverage, provide some background about the author(s), and pick one article that we have particularly enjoyed. To make things easy for our readers, we make use of things like RSS feeds and an email delivery service.

The idea is that together these two services will help people engage with the art world for the first time more easily. We also want to expose people already involved to art blogs they may not have previously discovered.

Checkout Art Connect for more information.