Contemporary art, uncovered: a survey of major newspapers and weekly magazines suggests that visual art is steadily losing ground in the popular press, even as its audience—and market—grows exponentially

"Why isn't anybody writing about art anymore?"--question put to me at an art opening a few months ago

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Today's art world is bigger and wealthier than it was half a century ago, a generation ago, or even a decade ago. In 2002, more than a quarter of the adult population in the U.S. visited an art gallery or museum, a rate of what the federal government calls "cultural participation" (movies are not included) behind only the number of people reading books and visiting historic sites, and ahead of attendance at concerts by double; (1) since then, the menu of art shows has only gotten larger, the crowds bigger. Most cities boast at least one gallery district, while the biggest ones have several, e.g., New York's Chelsea, SoHo, 57th Street, Upper East Side, Williamsburg and Dumbo, and greater L.A.'s West Side, Santa Monica, Culver City, East Hollywood, downtown and Chinatown. Everybody who's got a Range Rover in the garage, a closetful of Armani suits and can tell the difference between a Medoc and a merlot is buying contemporary art. In the past few years auction prices for even mid-range famous artists (say, Richard Prince) have escaped the gravitational pull of prudence. Museums of modern and contemporary art--often glamorous and costly edifices designed by international "starchitects"--have sprung up in practically every American city with a neon bank logo hovering more than 10 stories high. All of this has naturally led droves of ambitious youngsters--many of whom only a few years earlier would have chosen careers in graphic design, screenwriting or public relations--to declare themselves artists. The enterprise of contemporary art is now sufficiently noticeable to Cineplex-goers and couch potatoes to earn it a recent movie comedy (Art School Confidential) and a reality TV show (Art Star). In absolute terms, more ink is probably spilt on modern and contemporary art today than ever before. It would seem that there's not only enough material around to keep art critics currently writing for daily newspapers and national magazines busy in the extreme, but enough to require even more writers, more column inches, more coverage.

Those of us within the burgeoning art world, of course, need art criticism. As Michael Brenson wrote in "Resisting the Dangerous Journey: The Crisis in Journalistic Criticism," a 1997 essay commissioned by the Andy Warhol Foundation:

Art reviews are indispensable. They are ways of recognizing and following artists, of keeping in touch with the changing ways artists think and of the ways artists, dealers, curators and collectors function, of bringing new institutions and alternative spaces to public attention and tracing their rise or fall. They are ways for critics to evolve new ways of defining and thinking by finding out where their areas of ignorance and blindness are and working on them. (2)

But in 2003, James Elkins, an art history professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and perhaps the Anglophone world's leading concerned citizen regarding art criticism, opened his Prickly Paradigm Press booklet, What Happened to Art Criticism?, with "Art criticism is in worldwide crisis." He goes on:

Its voice has become very weak, and it is dissolving into the background clutter of ephemeral cultural criticism.... So it's dying, but it's everywhere. It's ignored, and yet it has the market behind it.... In a sense, then, art criticism is very healthy indeed. So healthy that it is outstripping its readers--there is more of it around than anyone can read.

Elkins's "more of it around than anybody can read" refers mainly to specialist art publications, from the glossiest and most readable to the most hermetic and small-circulation "little magazines." But occasionally, one of the mass-circulation magazines offers what's called in the business a "package" or "takeout" on art. The December 2006 Vanity Fair, for instance, devoted almost 80 pages in what its cover designated "The Art Issue" to the contemporary art "universe." To be fair, the VF treatment did offer a platter of red meat--a symposium on the state of the art world with a prominent dealer, collector, editor, artist, auctioneer and curator, profiles of established and emerging artists, and looks back at the Warhol Factory and the dramatis personae of early modernism. But, in the context of a magazine that smells like a cosmetics counter, feels like a Christmas catalogue and looks like a runway show, art bottom-lined once again as a frou-frou for the trendy rich. In W's "Art Issue," which ran a month earlier, art fared no better.

Judging by the newspapers of many major American cities and some national magazines, the more straightforwardly journalistic popular press appears to be covering art with some thoroughness. Roberta Smith, Holland Cotter and Michael Kimmelman at the New York Times, Peter Schjeldahl at the New Yorker, Mark Stevens at New York magazine, Jerry Saltz at the Village Voice, Jed Perl at the New Republic, Arthur Danto at the Nation, Ken Johnson (now) at the Boston Globe, Edward Sozanski and Edith Newhall at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Christopher Knight and David Pagel at the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Baker at the San Francisco Chronicle, Robert L. Pincus at the San Diego Union-Tribune and several others produce a veritable mountain of words about art every month. And most if not all of their publications also print additional art writing by freelancers and stringers.