Last month Artdish received a grant from 4Culture for the expressed purpose of covering art in Seattle. Hopefully this will be the first step towards a future that will include regular, comprehensive arts coverage with respectable writers’ fees.
There has been a conversation taking place about the changing nature of our city’s arts scene and the manner and degree to which it is now being reviewed electronically and in print. Since I began writing about visual art for Reflex in 1995, Seattle’s art scene has become both larger and more relevant while the writing has struggled to keep up.
Earlier this year the Seattle P-I shut down its presses after 148 years and let go of Regina Hackett, its brilliant and unflinching art critic and blogger. Across Denny Avenue, rival daily Seattle Times bought out its own art critic, Sheila Farr – choosing to replace her with freelancers. The alternative weekly the Stranger and its prolific, uncompromising critic Jen Graves have been preparing for this occasion over the last few years, offering more thorough and incisive coverage online and in print with each successive season.
But while the print medium wanes, free-range electronic critics have multiplied. First and foremost is Hackett herself. Emboldened by her liberation from Hearst, she now posts blogs several times a day on ArtsJournal. A group of younger artists - Emily Pothast, Joey Veltkamp, and Sharon Arnold – blog regularly on their respective sites and each offer a fresh, intelligent perspective that would have never quite fit into the rigid conventions of print. We at Artdish will continue to be surrounded with great writing talent in Seattle.
But the web itself is getting faster and shorter. Blogs are giving way to tweets and web dialogue has increasingly moved to social networking sites. Could these new permutations of this still-new medium, with their immediacy and brevity, ever hope to do justice to visual art or dance? I doubt it. Artdish, ever-sporadic but approaching its tenth birthday, will counter these larger trends by going long and slow. We hope to continue and expand our role as practitioners of the traditional art review with all of its context and exposition of ideas. We will offer the description, analysis, and judgment that Seattle’s art so rightfully deserves.
In the end, the crucial matter for arts coverage is not whether the medium is electronic or print, but whether there is adequate compensation for those who write and publish. The death of the P-I and the elimination of full time art critic jobs at the Seattle Times means that the small handful of people who were paid to cover their respective art beats for these dailies will no longer exist. Seattle’s art bloggers may have livened things up like never before, but even the most gifted can only persist on goodwill for so long.
Artdish is grateful to 4Culture and the people of King County for these funds and for the chance to make another serious go of this project.
