The new grass roots: in which five bloggers, based in Seattle, Philadelphia, Portland, Washington, D.C., and New York, provide an inside look at the growing presence of art writing online

Art in America, Nov, 2007 by Peter Plagens

How do you attract readers/posters other than by word of mouth?

Fallon/Rosof: when we first got started four years ago, we made postcards to advertise the site that we dropped at cafes and at the Visitors' Center, thinking tourists looking for art might like to come our way. We got hold of the Pew Fellowship mailing list (any artist who's ever applied for a fellowship) and direct-mailed the cards to our target audience. We come up pretty high in a lot of Google searches for artists and at the top for "artblog." We look like a publication-blog and not a diary-biog. It looks professional.

Green: Word of mouth works for me. I'm also lucky that I was invited to blog on the ArtsJournal.com Web site, which is read by lots of arts-involved and arts-interested people. If I write something thought-provoking or newsworthy, other people will link to it, thus sharing my post with new readers. If I get boring or dull or factually wrong, people will stop paying attention. I like having to earn my readers instead of merely having them because I write in valuable real estate.

Hackett: By hopping up and down. That's why all art blogs have such a jaunty tone. It's the equivalent of wearing a funky chicken suit to attract customers to a diner. Ultimately, attracting readers online is the same as attracting them to print. If there's a difference between print and online, it's only that status doesn't count as much in the latter. It's not who you are, but how effective your argument. Eventually, I want to develop a style of criticism that works on the blog. I want an online voice that's transparent, that people read to see right into the art, rather than noticing the writer. I'm still fine-tuning the tone.

Jahn: PORT's specificity attracts readers, because we cover the art world from a Portland point of view. We are simply a better source of info on the Portland art scene than the New York Times or some individual's MySpace page. Also, our site has a clearer, less cluttered design than either the Times or your typical MySpace page. Then there's our Google muscle. If you Google "Brad Cloepfil," "Holbein Madonna," "Jasper Johns Land's End" or "Roxy Paine PMU," you find us on the first page. We attract writers because we pay them to write about what they're interested in, and they can see the fruits of their labors quickly. A magazine is often in circulation only four weeks or so, while our content is always online and is searchable.

Winkleman: Generally, I get readers through links out of my blog to other blogs, that lead readers of the other blogs to follow back the links and see why I linked to them.

In general, is blog art criticism more open and liberal, and print criticism more closed and conservative?

Green: I don't think that's true. The New Criterion has a blog and it's hardly liberal or open-mindedly receptive to contemporary art. But I think there is some truth to the underlying motivation: we don't see what we want to read, so we create it.

Fallon/Rosof: We're writing and thinking in a way that contrasts with that of the Philadelphia Inquirer. We're more liberal than our town's major art reviewers in print. But that's us, and not necessarily blogs in general.