Still chilly around these parts, but spring has definitely sprung. Thanks to that and new wheels, I’m getting out more, shaking off my cabin fever. Looks to be a busy season.
Nowadays I start my mornings at my desk with coffee and updates on the fights for democracy in eastern Europe and the U.S. How about you?
A. D. Coleman/ATOA Zoom Session April 17
A week from now, on the evening of April 17, Douglas I. Sheer, president of the critically acclaimed series Artists Talk On Art, will conduct a virtual interview with me, hosted via Zoom.
I invite all readers of this blog to join me for this event, which is free and open to the public. There’s no registration required; just log in via the link below, shortly before 7 p.m. EST:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86314194491
The host will grant you access to the Zoom Room promptly at 7:00 p.m.
Artists Talk on Art was founded in 1974 and is the art world’s longest running, most prolific forum. January marked its 49th year. I serve on ATOA’s advisory board, and have collaborated with the organization on numerous occasions over the years, appearing on and moderating panels and also offering solo presentations of various curatorial projects of my own. This is the first ATOA panel devoted to an overview of my professional activities.
A short q&a period will follow the interview, which will be recorded. Subsequently the video will get posted at the ATOA channel on YouTube, and eventually it will become part of the ATOA archive, which resides in the prestigious Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC.
A. D. Coleman, ATOA interview, 4-17-23
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No Future For You
I read with dismay but no surprise “Art Critics: Next Endangered Species?” by Zachary Small, which appeared in the New York Times on February 4, 2023. (The NYT has since retitled it “Dispute Within Art Critics Group Over Diversity Reveals a Widening Rift.” It appears elsewhere online under its original headline.)
A dispute over diversity issues within AICA-USA, an organization of art critics, does indeed serve as the occasion for Small’s report. AICA-USA is the U.S. branch of the International Association of Art Critics, which Small describes accurately as “a nonprofit organization based in Paris that represents more than 6,000 art writers worldwide including some 500 critics, art historians and scholars in the United States.” (Full disclosure: I was a long-time member of AICA-USA, serving on its board in the 1980s, helping to organize some of its events and chairing its membership committee.)
But Small’s article goes further, to address a deeper issue. As Small puts it,
… the matter of diversity in criticism is compounded by the fact that opportunities for all critics have been diminished. While most editors recognize the importance of criticism in helping readers decipher contemporary art, and the multibillion-dollar industry it has created, venues for such writing are shrinking.
I found the following passages particularly disturbing:
… In December, the Penske Media Corporation announced that it had acquired Artforum, a contemporary art journal, and was bringing the title under the same ownership as its two competitors, ARTnews and Art in America. …
David Velasco, editor in chief of Artforum, said in an interview that he hoped the magazine’s acquisition would improve the publication’s financial picture. The magazine runs nearly 700 reviews a year, Velasco said; about half of those run online and pay $50 for roughly 250 words. “Nobody I know who [writes] about art does it for the money,” Velasco said, “but I would love to arrive at a point where people could.” …
Large galleries — including Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, and Pace Gallery — now produce their own publications with interviews and articles sometimes written by the same freelance critics who simultaneously moonlight as curators and marketers. Within its membership, AICA-USA has a number of writers who belong to all three categories. …
Let me add two quick elaborations: First, Velasco’s $50 for 250 words — which today includes online rights, and contractually may require transfer of copyright and subsidiary rights — is not much more than what I got paid as a freelance columnist for the Village Voice and the New York Times. Half a century ago. With no adjustment for inflation.
Second, Small neglects to add that “the same freelance critics who simultaneously moonlight as curators and marketers” are also, not infrequently, young and aspiring artists themselves, with a vested interest in currying favor with the artists and galleries and museums they review, in hope of obtaining more lucrative catalog-essay assignments and find platforms for their own artwork. I couldn’t design a more corruption-prone environment for serious critical writing if I tried.
I meditated on aspects of this situation in my controversial lecture “Dinosaur Bones: The End (and Ends) of Photo Criticism,” delivered at Hotshoe Gallery, London, in November 2011. You’ll find Part 1 here, and Part 2 here. According to Small’s account, things have only gotten worse over the intervening decade.
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The Hunter Arrow, Then and Now
Back in 2010 I published a post titled “Starting Point: Hunter Arrow, Fall 1960,” in which I reminisced about working on the Hunter College newspaper during my undergraduate years, and the effect of that experience on my subsequent writing.
The internet operating as it does, a dozen years later that post led David Alm, a professor of journalism at Hunter, to contact me. The college’s Dept. of Film & Media Studies department had developed a website to serve as a platform for its journalism students, set to launch imminently. They’d named it The Arrow, unaware of its predecessor with the same name until, searching online, Prof. Alm happened upon my post. He invited me to contribute to the new site, as a way of connecting the present to the past.
Of course I agreed, providing an essay I titled “From the Old Arrow to the New,” in which I expand on some of the issues I raised in my original post. You’ll find it here.
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Neocon Groomers Wanted in the Olive Grove
“Liberal Professors Can Rescue the G.O.P.,” reads the headline of this March 23, 2023 New York Times op-ed by Jon A. Shields. Shields is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, a small private liberal arts institution in California whose business-friendly motto forthrightly proclaims that “Civilization prospers with commerce.”
This is a new one: A neocon academic groomer pleads with liberal-left academics to join neocon academic groomers like himself in grooming impressionable college students for the waning neocon movement that’s increasingly unpopular among their cohort, on the grounds that they owe such grooming to their liberal-left belief in bothsidesism and preservation of the endangered species known as the adult neocon.
Why on earth should liberals, whether college professors or otherwise, have any desire to “rescue the G.O.P.?” The Republicans have for years now boldly shown their true faces and said the quiet part out out loud. Their leaders are Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Keri Lake, Jim Jordan, Lauren Boebert, Ron Johnson, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Elaine Stefanik, Rand Paul, Sarah Sanders, Greg Abbott, Rick Scott, et al. Their media mouthpieces include Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro, and Bret Baier. They have all made their anti-democratic commitment to fascism and theocracy abundantly clear. They have all, at every turn, supported and defended racism, homophobia, misogyny, antisemitism, insurrection, and treason. No liberal has any motive to interfere with these demented lemmings as they plunge themselves into the dustbin of history.
To the contrary: Today’s GOP represents the logical, inexorable evolution of this party from the Nixon administration on down. Now it’s sharks in the dark with blood in the water. Far from intervening, we should celebrate. As Napoleon advised, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Imagine writing this embarrassing, pathetic drivel. Now imagine deciding to endorse it by publishing it on the most influential op-ed page in the country.
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NU23
As noted previously, for the past several years I have provided commentary on a shifting set of collaborations between a photography program at Yrkesinstitutet Prakticum in Helsinki, Finland, which sponsors and organizes the project, and other programs for vocational education students in the Nordic countries. The contributing students range in age from the late teens to the early forties.
These cross-sections take the form of physical exhibitions while also going online, in both forms under the rubric “Nu” plus the year. So they titled this one “NU23.” Its theme was “Uncertainty.” And it will be accompanied also by a printed catalog. (The link below will take you to a website that also includes the 2020, 2021, and 2022 editions.)
You’ll find my response to NU23 here, titled “Uncertainty Principle.” From the introduction:
SPJ Research Award 2014
Cabin Fever: Bits & Pieces 2023
Nowadays I start my mornings at my desk with coffee and updates on the fights for democracy in eastern Europe and the U.S. How about you?
A. D. Coleman/ATOA Zoom Session April 17
A week from now, on the evening of April 17, Douglas I. Sheer, president of the critically acclaimed series Artists Talk On Art, will conduct a virtual interview with me, hosted via Zoom.
I invite all readers of this blog to join me for this event, which is free and open to the public. There’s no registration required; just log in via the link below, shortly before 7 p.m. EST:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86314194491
The host will grant you access to the Zoom Room promptly at 7:00 p.m.
Artists Talk on Art was founded in 1974 and is the art world’s longest running, most prolific forum. January marked its 49th year. I serve on ATOA’s advisory board, and have collaborated with the organization on numerous occasions over the years, appearing on and moderating panels and also offering solo presentations of various curatorial projects of my own. This is the first ATOA panel devoted to an overview of my professional activities.
A short q&a period will follow the interview, which will be recorded. Subsequently the video will get posted at the ATOA channel on YouTube, and eventually it will become part of the ATOA archive, which resides in the prestigious Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC.
A. D. Coleman, ATOA interview, 4-17-23
•
No Future For You
I read with dismay but no surprise “Art Critics: Next Endangered Species?” by Zachary Small, which appeared in the New York Times on February 4, 2023. (The NYT has since retitled it “Dispute Within Art Critics Group Over Diversity Reveals a Widening Rift.” It appears elsewhere online under its original headline.)
A dispute over diversity issues within AICA-USA, an organization of art critics, does indeed serve as the occasion for Small’s report. AICA-USA is the U.S. branch of the International Association of Art Critics, which Small describes accurately as “a nonprofit organization based in Paris that represents more than 6,000 art writers worldwide including some 500 critics, art historians and scholars in the United States.” (Full disclosure: I was a long-time member of AICA-USA, serving on its board in the 1980s, helping to organize some of its events and chairing its membership committee.)
But Small’s article goes further, to address a deeper issue. As Small puts it,
… the matter of diversity in criticism is compounded by the fact that opportunities for all critics have been diminished. While most editors recognize the importance of criticism in helping readers decipher contemporary art, and the multibillion-dollar industry it has created, venues for such writing are shrinking.
I found the following passages particularly disturbing:
… In December, the Penske Media Corporation announced that it had acquired Artforum, a contemporary art journal, and was bringing the title under the same ownership as its two competitors, ARTnews and Art in America. …
David Velasco, editor in chief of Artforum, said in an interview that he hoped the magazine’s acquisition would improve the publication’s financial picture. The magazine runs nearly 700 reviews a year, Velasco said; about half of those run online and pay $50 for roughly 250 words. “Nobody I know who [writes] about art does it for the money,” Velasco said, “but I would love to arrive at a point where people could.” …
Large galleries — including Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, and Pace Gallery — now produce their own publications with interviews and articles sometimes written by the same freelance critics who simultaneously moonlight as curators and marketers. Within its membership, AICA-USA has a number of writers who belong to all three categories. …
Let me add two quick elaborations: First, Velasco’s $50 for 250 words — which today includes online rights, and contractually may require transfer of copyright and subsidiary rights — is not much more than what I got paid as a freelance columnist for the Village Voice and the New York Times. Half a century ago. With no adjustment for inflation.
Second, Small neglects to add that “the same freelance critics who simultaneously moonlight as curators and marketers” are also, not infrequently, young and aspiring artists themselves, with a vested interest in currying favor with the artists and galleries and museums they review, in hope of obtaining more lucrative catalog-essay assignments and find platforms for their own artwork. I couldn’t design a more corruption-prone environment for serious critical writing if I tried.
I meditated on aspects of this situation in my controversial lecture “Dinosaur Bones: The End (and Ends) of Photo Criticism,” delivered at Hotshoe Gallery, London, in November 2011. You’ll find Part 1 here, and Part 2 here. According to Small’s account, things have only gotten worse over the intervening decade.
•
The Hunter Arrow, Then and Now
Back in 2010 I published a post titled “Starting Point: Hunter Arrow, Fall 1960,” in which I reminisced about working on the Hunter College newspaper during my undergraduate years, and the effect of that experience on my subsequent writing.
Of course I agreed, providing an essay I titled “From the Old Arrow to the New,” in which I expand on some of the issues I raised in my original post. You’ll find it here.
•
Neocon Groomers Wanted in the Olive Grove
“Liberal Professors Can Rescue the G.O.P.,” reads the headline of this March 23, 2023 New York Times op-ed by Jon A. Shields. Shields is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, a small private liberal arts institution in California whose business-friendly motto forthrightly proclaims that “Civilization prospers with commerce.”
This is a new one: A neocon academic groomer pleads with liberal-left academics to join neocon academic groomers like himself in grooming impressionable college students for the waning neocon movement that’s increasingly unpopular among their cohort, on the grounds that they owe such grooming to their liberal-left belief in bothsidesism and preservation of the endangered species known as the adult neocon.
To the contrary: Today’s GOP represents the logical, inexorable evolution of this party from the Nixon administration on down. Now it’s sharks in the dark with blood in the water. Far from intervening, we should celebrate. As Napoleon advised, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Imagine writing this embarrassing, pathetic drivel. Now imagine deciding to endorse it by publishing it on the most influential op-ed page in the country.
•
NU23
As noted previously, for the past several years I have provided commentary on a shifting set of collaborations between a photography program at Yrkesinstitutet Prakticum in Helsinki, Finland, which sponsors and organizes the project, and other programs for vocational education students in the Nordic countries. The contributing students range in age from the late teens to the early forties.
You’ll find my response to NU23 here, titled “Uncertainty Principle.” From the introduction:
In February 2022 Russian dictator Vladimir Putin launched the most ferocious ground war since World War II: the illegal invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation. The images gathered here were made by beginning photographers during the months since.
While the conflict has not raged in these students’ own countries, it has taken place in what we might call their regional neighborhood. Ongoing even as I write this at the beginning of the new year, that so-called “special military operation” serves as the geopolitical and cultural background for these images. So we might think of them all, cumulatively, as “war-adjacent.”
Understandably, then, “uncertainty” serves as the theme for this 2023 edition of an established, annual, collaborative exhibition of work by a cross-section of young Nordic photographers. And it manifests itself in a number of different ways. …
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This post supported in part by a donation from David Wunsch.
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And, as a bonus, I’ll send you a signed copy of my new book, poetic license / poetic justice — published under my full name, Allan Douglass Coleman, which I use for my creative writing.