Today's new feature

In the right-hand sidebar, I've added a widget providing recent feeds from Over the net, ArtWorld Salon and Peter Peryer. Enjoy.

A better breed of art fair?

In a recent post on ArtWorld Salon, Marc Spiegler ponders Gallery Weekend Berlin as an 'antidote' to art fairs.

Gallery Weekend Berlin - Marc Spiegler, ArtWorld Salon

For GWB, 29 galleries hold openings on Friday night, and pledge to open on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. A pocket-sized programme is distributed. Dealers hold private dinners on the Friday night, and on the Saturday night there is a gala event, to which every participating dealer can invite six guests. Speigler writes:

"Now, an artworld idealist might say that good galleries should not have to coordinate their openings and engineer a big social occasion to attract out-of-town visitors. As a realist, however, I think it’s an excellent strategy. Much like an art fair, it leverages the strengths of many galleries - their artists and their networks - to mutual benefit, while acknowledging the time-crunched lives of today’s artworld players. Plus, the galleries get to show their artists in spaces the dealer chose to fit their program."

Which in itself is an antidote to the restrictions placed on dealers at this year's Auckland Art Fair.

Round-up: art and design blogs

Artkrush (nice name, huh Artbash?) has posted an issue on art and design blogs. As they point out, the immediacy of blogging, in combination with its ability to be international (reached from anywhere) and local (focused on a specific place or topic), is changing art commentary.

The issue features:

• a review of the art blogosphere (including one of my favourites, ArtWorld Salon)
• an interview with photographer and blogger Alec Soth
• a sizable list of art, architecture, design, photography and new media blogs.

The critic who collects

An article by Jen Graves posted on The Stranger has called forth a lot of debate across a network of interconnected visual arts blogs.

In the article, titled 'Critical Mess: the iffy dealings of Seattle's most widely published art critic', Graves follows up rumours that Seattle art critic Matthew Kangas has asked artists whose shows he has reviewed to give him a work. Nine artists went on the record for the article saying Kangas had requested works from them before or after writing a review.

The article takes the allegations and weaves them into a wider investigation of the propriety of critics asking artists to give them work (blatantly wrong) and critics collecting art at all (a question with considerably more nuance).

Opinions and positions range from 'critics should not collect what they write about' (Village Voice critic Jerry Saltz, for example, collects only junk shop paintings and ceramics) to 'critics might collect ethically' (Regina Hackett, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's art critic has her own rule: "She collects art by full-price purchase only, and doesn't sell anything. She talks with her editor when she fears she's written too much about an artist whose work she owns and is in danger of becoming the primary critic on the artist").

Edward Winkleman and Artworld Salon have both posted responses to the article, and the comment thread on Artworld Salon in particular is good reading.

It would be an interesting question to ask in New Zealand. Given the size of the New Zealand art world, people don't just do double duty - sometimes they're performing three or four roles: critic, curator, teacher, consultant, valuer, collector, spokesperson. And given what freelancers are paid, often they're doing this for peanuts. It's never going to be right to expect an artist to give you a work in return for a write-up. But when does the relationship become too cosy?

State art funding = mediocrity?

In an interesting post on Artworld Salon, András Szántó poses the question:

"Why is it that America’s sink-or-swim attitude toward arts support keeps producing world-renowned stars, while lavish state funding in Europe seems to achieve the opposite?"

Szántó is tackling the situation in Norway, but what he says resonates for New Zealand:

"The problem is that government programs don’t seem to do too well in nurturing the kind of artistic reputations that merit recognition abroad. Access to free training and living subsidies is a wonderful privilege. Enterprising artists can even take advantage of government travel grants. But in Norway – as in other European nations that spend generously on the arts – these forms of support have, by and large, failed to translate into international approval.

Let me suggest that this might be a perfect mission to embrace by private philanthropy, a phenomenon that is finally emerging in full force in Norway."

Szántó argues that private supporters and foundations can achieve things that government funding, hampered by politics and policies, cannot. His post is particularly when you put it against the Creative New Zealand Draft Strategic Plan.