A handful of times this year I’ve been asked or had to provide a blurb about why/how I go about my arts journalism work. Below are my latest thoughts on that:
Very few publications in the US today provide any real outlet for arts journalism and/or institutional critique. What’s left of arts coverage in the press geared toward the general public, after years of cuts, is almost exclusively consumer-oriented—i.e. thumbs up/thumbs down reviews that tell someone where and when to spend their money and often focus on well-known or celebrity artists. What is lost in this kind of coverage is any understanding of the issues facing artists or any critical look at how arts institutions and the arts economy function. On the flipside, while there is a great deal of critique within academic writing about the arts, very little of it reaches a wide audience or is written in a way that is accessible to a wide audience.
Given all this, my primary objectives in writing about the arts are: 1) to make more transparent how an artwork goes from the idea-stage to presentation before a public audience, with a particular focus on artistic process and research, as well as the funding and institutional structures that provide public platforms for artist; and 2) to cover work by and issues facing artists who are underrepresented in funding, institutions, and the press (female artists, queer and trans artists, artists of color, etc).
Most casual arts audiences have no idea what goes into a creating a single work of art—the time, resources, help, infrastructure, etc. That’s a problem for myriad reasons, but primarily because it sells the artistic process short, and it stands in the way of much-needed critiques around who has access to opportunity within the arts. Also, because I have been a practicing artist these past twelve years, as both a writer and creator of performance works, I have a vested interest in the subjects I am writing about, as well as personal experience trying to gain access to funding and opportunity. I began writing about the arts out of a desire to engage with the work of my peers and predecessors, and now consider this line of critical thinking and research to be integral to my own creative process.
