The Art Life are a group of artists and writers who got together in 2004 to start a blog. A blog is like an online diary but with higher production values. We publish once or twice a week and we do reviews of exhibitions, news, art world politics, galleries and publications. Since we began, the number of hits has grown steadily from a couple of hundred a week to close to 3000. We have visitors from all over Australia – which is kind of odd, as the blog is about the Sydney art scene – and we have readers overseas and even get hits from computers registered to the US army.
The question we will discuss today is “why write about art?”
Certainly there are the philosophical implications of proposing such a question of ‘why’. Why prooses that one thing might make or cause another thing to happen – the concept of causality, why one thing, in this case art, causes another thing, writing, to happen. For example, the cue ball causes the eight ball to roll into a pocket, or heat causes water to boil or the Moon’s gravity causes the Earth’s tides. But can we therefore say with any certainty that it’s the art that causes the writing to happen, or is it the writing that conjures the art into existence?
Then there is the vexing notion of what constitutes “about” – as a measure the word ‘about’ is imprecise, an approximation of the thing, and denotes a notional condition of subjectivity, that is when we say “we write about art” it is neither the thing nor a particularly faithful rendition of the thing. These are complicated ontological questions.
Yes, you’re thinking, that’s all very well and good, but will writing about art make me rich? Yes, yes, it will. How rich you ask? Well, let’s put it this way. When we first started to benefit financially from our art writing we were, in comparison to most people, very well off. We went out and bought new cars and clothes and pretty things to decorate our architect designed cliff top mansions. But then we entered an altogether new realm of wealth where money began to lose its meaning and although we could buy anything our hearts desired, we began to lose our zest for life. The fine wines we sipped and the exquisite foods we ate tasted like bitter ashes from the bonfire of our talent. Life in the art world is there for the taking, but once its glistening fruits have been plucked they begin to sour. The bounty of our imaginations was a desolate wasteland of neglected promise and compromised values.
Hey, you’re no doubt saying, I can handle the money – but will writing about art make me famous? Arts writers can expect to be vaulted to the very top of the social ladder, their influence and glamour outstripping the very artists they write about, the clamouring callow gallerists who vie for your attention and favour, the social butterflies that come to rest upon your bejewelled fingers and who flatter with their silken wings. Everyone wants to know what you think. They ask for your opinion. They love to see you at parties.
But it’s a shallow kind of fame, a Paris Hilton sort notoriety instead of a Bertrand Russell type of seriousness. When the artists’ start grabbing at you coat tails asking for an article in a learned journal, and you are forced look into the hungry eyes of their children, it takes a very hard heart not to realise that, as Cicero said, glory follows virtue as if it were its shadow.
Midway on our life’s journey, we found ourselves in dark woods, the right road lost.
We decided that we must act to save our souls. We launched into the Australian art world our twice-weekly blog called The Art Life and we have been feeling better. Still richer than Croesus, yes, but our consciousnesses are assuaged like an oil tycoon who has decided to drive an electric car – it’s the same kind of sin, only a lesser one.
The art world and its magazines and books and essays and room notes and catalogues have become very similar. Even different is similar, so similar that difference is now only measured in relation to something not very different to itself, just slightly, imperceptibly different to the thing measured. It is niche marketing in the art world – voices are catered for, and can even prosper on the notion that difference does in fact equal difference.
Let us put that another way. Every time you hear the words “expect the unexpected” or “anything can happen” you know that whatever is to be expected, or what will happen, will fall within a very restricted measure of possibility. In the art world the same expectation and outcome applies – the available means and methods of expression and discussion have meant that we are a people who live on an island so culturally small that homogeneity rules at every level.
We have come to expect less to avoid disappointment. It may be that like Prospero, we know of another world other than this, but we are happy in our exile, or, like rats, once we have the cheese, we sit back to admire the maze mistaking it for our homes.
To create something viable in a world of homogeneity is look to the self for the texture and weft of subjectivity, the thing that drives emotional and psychological reactions to the external world. It’s something of a paradox but it’s that individuality that creates both an admission of similarity and recognition of real difference. Radical subjectivity can be entertaining for a while but something between the specific and the general is the place where real change is made.
You look out at the world and the things that interest you – art and birds, boxing and astronomy, music and movies – and reflect on the experience. It can sound kind of corny or solipsistic, but writing is a form of thinking about yourself. It’s for that reason that writing about art seems like a natural meeting of two related disciplines. Art is a way of thinking about the world, remodelled and presented in a different form, and so is writing.
It is often the case in arts writing that it is seen as subservient to the art, that it’s role can only be one of an obvious and didactic explicator of hidden meanings or that it should act as an interpreter of the artist’s intentions. Writing has to be liberated from the rule of subject – we have often wondered why writing about art is defined by the subject, when the real meeting of disciplines is in a treatment of theme.
The blog, is in our view, the first truly democratic means of communication. It can be free or as expensive as you want, its content and style is not restricted by anything except your imagination and if you have the ability to create within the confines of a generic package, its possibilities are huge. That may seem like a contradiction – how can you be original within something that’s generic? But it’s just packaging and a handy means of delivery, just like a book, like a magazine, a TV show, a 90-minute movie.
It has been pointed out to us many times that if you’re poor and you don’t have a computer, blogs aren’t the revolution we think they are. And that’s true. We all have to live in the shadow of someone else’s misfortune.
There are tens of thousands of blogs on the web at the moment. We cannot tell you how many times we have clicked through the blogs hosted by Blogger and read the mundane details of people’s lives. There is a lot of online writing, most of it untutored and not very interesting, but the ones that stand out are those that assume that there is another reader, or at least a potential reader, aside from the person who wrote it. Being aware that there is an audience for what you are doing and speaking to them lifts a blog to somewhere near the top 5 per cent of the hundreds of thousands of pages of writing. There are a number of celebrated examples of blogs that have attracted a lot of interest such as the Dear Raed blog by a gay man living in Baghdad before and after the wars, Reverse Cowgirl a New York woman’s sex diary (which no longer exists, but read about it here ) and various right wing political blogs. We recently discovered a blog called The Last Nail by a guy who is documenting his efforts in building his own home between jobs as a construction site worker. As unlikely as it sounds, it is one of the funniest and most well written things on the web.
The thing that these blogs have in common, and what we try to achieve with The Art Life, is to take the job of writing and the subject we choose to cover with a degree of seriousness. That’s not say of course that you shouldn’t attempt humour or irony but a knowledge of the subject, or at least an account of how you are discovering your subject, also serves to distinguish between a good blog and a million others. The result of taking it seriously also means that your readers take you seriously, so although there is an incredible number of blogs and web sites, there is the ability to cut through the noise and find an audience. In essence, a blog is a serious as you make it and people will respond.
There is a school of thought that says the rules of print journalism should apply to blogs. Certainly accuracy of information and fairness of comment should apply, but on the other hand, blogs are still developing and growing. It’s too soon to start fencing off the prairie lands, we just got here. But in terms of accountability, to have a credible voice you have to be in possession of the facts, at least make an attempt to find the facts and be ready to make an admission of guilt if mistaken. And we should add, if you’re going to use irony and satire and crack a few jokes, be ready to apologise.
Blogs are a hybrid form, somewhere between a magazine and a book, but perhaps more like a magazine or a book in the future where you can listen to music in an article about the music, see a clip from a movie, hear the voice of the person who wrote the article or spin off to entirely different sites from a link. We know the theories of hypertextuality and what’s possible on the web but to be frank, as practitioners, the theory doesn’t excite us that much because the reality has already outstripped it.
One question that we are often asked is why the ‘we’ – why the plural pronoun? We’ve been accused of being cowards and backstabbers and that we fail to step up to our opinions. The reason we are a ‘we’ is for a number of reasons. We’re speaking for a collective view, both for us and people like us. ‘We’ is literally inclusive, it welcomes the reader into the thoughts, is much easier than the shotgun blast of ‘I’ and isn’t as scary as the freaky ‘you’. Speaking as we, ‘we’ underlines the level of uncertainty inherent as to who ‘we’ is, the voice speaking and thinking about art. Art is a series of postulations and conjectures. Not only is the experiment an ongoing unanswered theory or question, the methodology is constantly changing. ‘We’ encapsulates this uncertainty but also underlines the collective nature of the project.
Why write about art? It’s a difficult question to answer. It’s not as though there aren’t already enough Australian art magazines or enough imported magazines or newspaper critics. Somehow all these magazines get bought and right wing conservative critics get jobs, so someone out there must value all those words and all those opinions, someone must agree with the you-beaut-ridgy-didge safety net of consensus opinion. But unaccountably is seems we’re not happy, something is wrong and we still don’t know what it is. The answer to the question is that writing about art is about act of empowerment, about creating rather than simply consuming other people’s opinions, ideas and thoughts.
The thing that surprised us most when we started the blog was not just how seriously people took it, but how passionate readers were in voicing their own ideas and opinions. Along with that came something else that blew us away. It was the generosity of artists towards whatever comment we made. The overwhelming response has been positive and we have received e-mails and letters of thanks, gifts and some very flattering mentions and reviews in other media. Our quest to salvage whatever was left of our souls seemed to be working and although we never set out asking to be thanked, we acknowledge the amazing support we’ve received from people we’ve never even met. Cicero’s words are true.
Well that’s just great, you’re thinking, but what of the future for The Art Life? We’re looking around for people to perhaps contribute from other states from time to time and have considered expanding to add a bulletin board and other similar and obvious ways to expand our empire and grind in The Art Life as the brand du jour .
A top secret development is the new Art Life TV show. We had been thinking of a new magazine style arts show on the ABC that could run during a slot programmed into TV’s dead zone, say on a Sunday morning before 10am. But in this age of baroque marketing we realised we need some sort of lifestyle hook and so we’re currently making a pilot for a TV show that will go out live on Friday nights on Channel Ten and feature a panel of art world experts such as an art market analyst, a gallery owner, an arts writer and each week subject the work of known and emerging artist to the scrutiny of the final judge – a blue cattle dog who will decide if the artist’s work is up to scratch. A Tim Maguire flower painting? Grrrr.Grrrr. A Susan Norrie video – woooooooo! A John Olsen award winning self portrait? Pant, pant, pant! Good boy!
