What’s Wrong With Reviews / The End of the Review Strike
Chicago Art Magazine’s Great Art Review Strike of 2010 has come to an end.
The review strike was always more complicated than people made it out to me. Yes, I was pissed at the lack of advertisers and spouted off on Facebook that we were going to blacklist venues. But the truth is, we never did. We just cut reviews all together. But what people don’t know is that the incident above was just the last straw.
Flashback to 2008.
I’m just an artist who got tossed into this art writing > publishing thing because I needed a job. When Time Out asked me to write a review, I was excited for one moment, and then I remembered how much I hated reviews. Most reviews are awful . In most cases, the writing is awful, the writer is a lost lamb, its riddled with errors and there is a lack of insight, or more often the writer often being just dead-nuts wrong.
The other thing I implore everyone to understand, if only one brief moment: art galleries are stores. Art galleries are stores that have an inventory of product and the goal is to sell that inventory at a profit. I feel like cutting and pasting that in so that fact sinks into everyone’s heads: Art galleries are stores that have an inventory of product and the goal is to sell that inventory at a profit. When we “write criticism” we are a part of a consumerist chain in which, like Consumer Reports, we hire experts to rate the products so that other consumers can get their best return on investment.
Everything changed for me as an artist when I became a publisher. Nothing ever changed my art practice like being in this role. My art will be better, it will be more unusual and more informed. But my goals and definitions of success are forever changed and after what I’ve seen, I don’t think I’ll ever seek gallery representation. A gallery is no longer the goal, only audience.
In some ways, I came into my own as an art critic, without writing any reviews. Because, as Derek Guthrie taught me, an art critic doesn’t just criticize artists, the good ones are critical of the entire system. And from my vantage point, I see the ecosystem of artists, handlers, consumers, institutions, and commentators, and for months I was just reeling at the complete nightmare it is. Not just for artists, but for everyone. It’s bad all over. Visual arts in Chicago are a ghetto, and to think that reviews is the road out of the quagmire is moving chairs around on the titanic.
But that’s not to say that it’s not fixable.
And that’s where I come in. I had to put my energy somewhere, but it wasn’t to be a free PR firm for galleries, but a place to showcase good artists. No one in the art ecosystem needs more help than that artist. Artists don’t need to be publicly humiliated by some rookie who got paid $5 to say something snarky. They need help they need in expanding the potential visual art audience. The best way to do that is to show them the art. Let them see it, fall in love with it and come to the venues out of desire rather than obligation. Also, unlike reviews, which give a thumbs up or thumbs down of a select few pieces, these allow the artists to showcase the best pieces they’ve ever done. It also doesn’t limit us to covering objects that can fit within a room.
