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

Jahn: Generalist print media outside of New York and L.A. aren't natural fits for serious cultural analysis. I suspect corporately owned media outlets have difficulty justifying it to their shareholders. This is true in Portland, too. The Oregonian is pretty dismissive of most challenging art, be it Mona Hatoum or a resident art star like Chris Johanson. They do provide a lot of coverage in quantity, but the tone is provincial and reactionary. So we took the initiative. With so many newly rising national artists in town, something had to be done, and PORT is a community service.

Hackett: No, of course not; blog art criticism isn't "more open and liberal." It's not nearly as good (yet) as what's found in the top newspapers and magazines. If blogs have the potential of being more liberal, it's because nobody but the blogger is in charge, in most cases--like Tyler's on ArtsJournal.com. Dong McLennan, who runs Arts Journal, wouldn't consider pulling content, even if he strongly objects to it. I'm not in Tyler's position. My blog gets less scrunity from editors than my work in the print product, but there is some. The P-I would call most of my blog stories too "inside baseball" for the print newspaper. These entries include commenting on what other critics write, either in other newspapers or online; breaking news without having to assume a detached-reporter tone that's obligatory in print, and enlarging upon what I've previously written in a more summarized way in print.

Winkleman: Blog criticism, because it's overwhelmingly unpaid, is more enthusiastic and less edited, which might make it seem more open and liberal, but there's certainly no shortage of academic advocacy in the blogosphere.

Some people say there's a dearth of art criticism at length on blogs. Is this true? If so, does it have more to do with reading on a computer in general, or with art criticism in particular?

Jahn: PORT is a bit of a myth buster in that respect. We specialize in publishing criticism and interviews at length, and they are our most popular posts. From 4,000 words on the Holbein Madonna, to a two-part survey of Michael Ovitz's collection, to an interview with Terry Winters, and a long Kehinde Wiley review, PORT demonstrates that at-length art writing can be done on a blog. The Web has an advantage of nearly unlimited room for images along with text. It's ideal for visual arts coverage. Portland is a very high-tech city of avid readers, so it isn't surprising that people will read long pieces, though only a fraction of our readers are local. Brian Ferriso, the new director of the Portland Art Museum, reads PORT on his Treo PDA. It shocked me that we're legible on that tiny screen.

Fallon/Rosof: Blogs that post daily or almost daily are like newspapers, and newspaper art writing--usually reviews and news, not essays--is not lengthy. We're writing fast for quick publication. Then we're on to the next post. Finally, reading online for any length of time/s a big issue. Nobody reads the New Yorker's lengthy articles online. You print them out to read offline.