Addicted to Hits: On Art Blogging - ARTINFO.com
Addicted to Hits: On Art Blogging - ARTINFO.com At the present moment, the practice of blogging entails overcoming a slew of stacked odds. In a contest to assume the Web's loudest voice, bloggers publish writing out of thin air with scant editorial resources, little time, and often no funding. What has this done to journalism, where erudition, integrity, and thoroughness were once prime objectives? As blogging has emerged as a major player in the forced reinvention of criticism, the few print publications that successfully remain in existence only do so by recalibrating their function in contradistinction to that of Internet publishing. Even more problematic, the dissolution of private and public dimensions brought forth by the pseudo-anonymous interface of the computer has birthed a collective voice trickling through Web-based writing privileging duh-quality commentary, dark humor, and darker pleasures.
Content-mill companies such as Demand Media and Associated Content grasp not for journalistic integrity, but for large volumes of profitable Google hits by issuing snippet-long articles containing carefully calibrated constellations of highly searched words (see Thomas Frank's essay "Bright Frenetic Mills" in the December issue of Harper's). In the land of the Internet, we get what we think we want, though its consequence unknown. How can traditional journalism compete against the indulgence of the Web, and moreover, when it offers itself for free? Is blogging, in other words, just a cheap date? And yet, bloggers take cues from their print predecessors, adapting and transmuting journalism to fit their desired molds. The commingling of print and Web has given rise to sundry problematics, issuing a set of impossibilities for the contemporary journalist to untangle. Clearly, the transitional, awkward years of journalism and publishing are upon us.
Art-focused journalism is clearly no exception, and art blogging perhaps suffers more from a lack of populist marketability than do blogs in other sectors. This isn't terribly surprising. For example, an advertisement on popular blogs Perez Hilton or Boing Boing fetch many hundreds to thousands of dollars per day, whereas the most popular art-focused blogs would be hard pressed to charge even one thousand dollars per month — this is also, more or less, in direct relation to their traffic. Taking (albeit very low) base costs and taxes into consideration, this places the most popular independent art blogs garnering under $20,000 a year in net income, which needless to say, isn't a breeze to live on in New York City. Yet some art-focused bloggers still chase Google hits, hoping to capitalize their content, which tends to result in oft-vapid, ad hominem coverage of the art world. Hypothetically, for the art bloggers that are "in it for the hits," what would be a more successful story than an exposé on some weird kink of a major art world player, say "Klaus Biesenbachs's Toe Sex Fetish Outed by James Franco"? Yet, isn't this exactly what doesn't matter?
Content-mill companies such as Demand Media and Associated Content grasp not for journalistic integrity, but for large volumes of profitable Google hits by issuing snippet-long articles containing carefully calibrated constellations of highly searched words (see Thomas Frank's essay "Bright Frenetic Mills" in the December issue of Harper's). In the land of the Internet, we get what we think we want, though its consequence unknown. How can traditional journalism compete against the indulgence of the Web, and moreover, when it offers itself for free? Is blogging, in other words, just a cheap date? And yet, bloggers take cues from their print predecessors, adapting and transmuting journalism to fit their desired molds. The commingling of print and Web has given rise to sundry problematics, issuing a set of impossibilities for the contemporary journalist to untangle. Clearly, the transitional, awkward years of journalism and publishing are upon us.
Art-focused journalism is clearly no exception, and art blogging perhaps suffers more from a lack of populist marketability than do blogs in other sectors. This isn't terribly surprising. For example, an advertisement on popular blogs Perez Hilton or Boing Boing fetch many hundreds to thousands of dollars per day, whereas the most popular art-focused blogs would be hard pressed to charge even one thousand dollars per month — this is also, more or less, in direct relation to their traffic. Taking (albeit very low) base costs and taxes into consideration, this places the most popular independent art blogs garnering under $20,000 a year in net income, which needless to say, isn't a breeze to live on in New York City. Yet some art-focused bloggers still chase Google hits, hoping to capitalize their content, which tends to result in oft-vapid, ad hominem coverage of the art world. Hypothetically, for the art bloggers that are "in it for the hits," what would be a more successful story than an exposé on some weird kink of a major art world player, say "Klaus Biesenbachs's Toe Sex Fetish Outed by James Franco"? Yet, isn't this exactly what doesn't matter?
