Beyond Basic Blogging: Carving Our Niche in the Blogosphere

Panel discussion @ Art Miami
Saturday, December 5, 2009, 11:00 to 2:00
The panel will take place from 11:30 to 1:00, with time afterward for art bloggers to continue the discussion in smaller groups.
Art Miami is in Wynwood, next to Scope, across the street from Photo Miami, just down the street from Red Dot.

Call it journalistic physics: With conventional print media in decline, art blogging has filled an unexpected niche. Armed with free or low-cost web hosting and a raft of photographs and videos from tiny cameras (sometimes even cell phones), art bloggers are posting reviews, reports, interviews, opinions, advice, links, and Tweets. No, we’re not The New York Times. And that’s precisely our power. In an art world chronically short on coverage, we’re covering events—often from an artist’s perspective—with a democratic and regional take on who, what and where. The best of the art bloggers have carved out identities with defined points of view, good writing, and you-are-there pictures."

Six panelists—Sharon Butler, Roberta Fallon, Thomas Hollingworth,  Paddy Johnson, Libby Rosof and Hrag Vartanian will talk about blogs—their own and others’—which have built a following by filling a specific need or point of view. Joanne Mattera will moderate. Audience participation in the discussion is encouraged.

About the Panelists:

Sharon Butler, an artist and writer, maintains the art blog Two Coats of Paint and writes about arts and culture for The Brooklyn Rail and the New Haven Advocate. In July 2009, she started @ Bushwick & Main, an online photographic sketchbook that features iPhone notations from her wandering art practice.  Butler is an associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Eastern Connecticut State University.

Libby Rosof and Roberta Fallon started out making enormous sculptural installations out of concrete, but as they got older, they (sensibly) switched to making very small paintings and books out of paper. Everything they’ve made, large or small, has elements of autobiography because basically they think they’re really interesting. In April, 2003, they created the online journal “roberta fallon and libby rosof’s artblog,” twice recognized for excellence in Art in America. Both of them have taught, and they write essays and criticism off the blog. They also are big on the lecture circuit because they’re so much fun. Because nobody but their husbands and children can remember who is Roberta and who is Libby, in jest or perhaps in protest, they created the fictional character Liberta, who takes over the blog occasionally.

Thomas Hollingworth is a graduate of London Guildhall University who now lives and works in Miami. In addition to teaching and coordinating exhibitions on behalf of Miami Dade College he is the editor of Artlurker, a Miami based contemporary art blog that he founded in 2008. By documenting local, national and international cultural subjects and involving the local community for the local community Artlurker functions as both resource and a platform representative of the relative accessibility of Miami's art scene.

Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City is a writer who lives and works in Brooklyn. She has been published in artreview.com, Art in America, FlashArt, Print Magazine, Time Out NY, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, artkrush, Art & Australia, Flavorpill, and linked to by such publications as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and New York Magazine. Paddy lectures widely about art and the Internet at venues including Yale University and the Whitney Independent Study Program. She attended the 2007 iCommons conference in Croatia as a blogger. In 2008, she became the first blogger to earn a Creative Capital Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital Foundation. Paddy also writes a regular column on art for The L Magazine.

Joanne Mattera is a studio painter and occasional curator who maintains the Joanne Mattera Art Blog to record and share what she’s seeing in the New York galleries, at the art fairs, and in galleries and studios around the country.  Though the blog’s description is “Guaranteed Biased, Myopic, Incomplete and Journalistically Suspect,” she is in fact journalistically responsible (though, OK, she’s biased toward painting and sculpture).  She recently instituted Marketing Mondays, a weekly feature that helps emerging and midcareer artists navigate the art world.

Hrag Vartanian is a New York-based writer and critic. His work has appeared in the Art21 blog, the Brooklyn Rail , the New York Foundation for the Arts Current, Huffington Post and Modern Painters. He writes a street art column named Re:Public, which will soon be part of his latest project, hyperallergic (subtitled “sensitive to art and its discontents”).

Featured in Premiere Guide Miami
Noted in Art in America's 2009 Guide to the Miami Fairs