BUSINESS ART May 2009 | Supplement to The South African Art Times | E-mail: subs@arttimes.co.za | Member of the Global Art Information Group
Deborah van Niekerk (2009), From the series ‘The hand that feeds’ Oil on canvas, Now showing at The KZNSA Gallery, Durban, Kwa Zulu - Natal. Until 10 May. see www.nsagallery.co.za for further details
With newspapers in terminal decline, what future for arts journalism? Coverage of the arts is migrating online but unless someone is prepared to pay for it, the outlook is uncertain
By András Szántó From The Art Newspaper www.theartnewspaper.com From Issue 202 (May 2009)
a coelacanth and a DNA machine.
New Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg rises Michael Coulson For some months now, those who travel along Jo’burg’s Jan Smuts Avenue have noticed a strange elliptical concrete structure slowly rising on the corner of Jellicoe, just down the road from the Everard Read Gallery. The corner site was actually bought by the gallery 20-odd years ago, when the then owner, the old Johannesburg City Council, decided it was surplus to requirements, but for most of the time since then it stood idle, used mainly for surplus parking during gallery openings. How to develop it has thus had a long gestation. For years the gallery’s present director, Mark Read, felt that the gallery’s handsome and much-loved premises rather petered out on the western boundary, and at one time considered building a small space – “nothing ambitious” for contemporary art there. But gradually the concept expanded, and a desire grew to put up a multi-purpose building that would be an adornment to the city. Also,
partly through the passage of time and partly given greater freedom after buying out other members of the family from the business, his own horizons expanded. The final building block fell into place when he met architect Pierre Swanepoel, and discovered in enthusiastic discussions that they shared a vision of what could be done. When I first spoke to Read about the building, last year, unofficial cost estimates were put at R10m-R12m, and he planned an environmentally positive project. Today he ruefully admits that those were vain hoped. “The cost has gone way north of that, as for an elliptical building almost every component has to be purposemade, and you can hardly have a less environmentally sound building than one made of concrete with an aluminium cladding.” Nevertheless, the building will reflect Read’s growing interests in things other than selling art, especially palaeontology. The building will basically have three levels (“Unless some day I build a pent
house on the top”). The ground floor he describes as a project and office space, with a ramp curling up to the middle level, a towering exhibition space big enough to suspend motor cars from the ceiling, and then another ramp up to the top to accommodate Darwin’s, an oyster bar which will be a private club for his friends. He doesn’t see the exhibition space as primarily for selling art, though that won’t be precluded. Rather, he envisages seasons displaying new technologies. Like building with bamboo, as is being done at a resort he’s involved with in the Seychelles. He’s also increasingly involved with people like Richard Leakey and Richard (The God Delusion) Dawkins and wants to show Leakey’s “amazing” East African fossils. He’d like to take works out of museums and show them in a different space, juxtaposed with other objects, and is confident museums will go along with this. For example, the old Transvaal Museum has a chunk of moon rock: he’d like to show this next to
Other possibilities seem limitless. “All I can say is that it will be a confused and non-directional path.” He hopes outsiders will also propose relevant projects and events. The building has been named Circa – Latin for about. “This is the perfect name, because it’s not actually any one thing. In some ways it’s like an opera house, but it’s really a techno-space that can take on many identities.” It’s planned to link it across Keyes Avenue with the existing building, though Read is still vague on precisely how this will be achieved, which will have to be determined in conjunction with the Jo’burg Metro. The first show, towards the end of the year, will be a collaborative effort by Willem Boshoff and Karel Nel. “I couldn’t wish for a better duo.” Read stresses that his relatively new minority shareholder, banker Paul Harris, has not put up any of the money, “though he loves the project.” The existing business will have to pay for it. “It’ll be tight, but we’ll manage it.” If passion is any determinant, this shouldn’t be a problem.
Before we succumb to nostalgia, let’s be clear: arts journalism has never had it easy. Culture, especially in its rarefied incarnations, has never been a high priority for the mainstream press. Criticism is a strange bird in an enterprise devoted to “objectivity” and mass readership. And news bosses rarely care about “soft” arts stories. They are into “hard” reporting on wars and money and sport—boys’ stuff. Instead of a reliable income, arts journalism has paid dividends in the form of access to art and a voice in cultural debates—that, and an occasional VIP pass, dinner invite or goodie bag. Recently, though, the situation has taken a turn for the worse. The imminent demise of printed newspapers is no longer a panel discussion topic, but a reality. Many US cities including Denver and Seattle are losing their second papers; others (including, possibly, San Francisco, Miami and Philadelphia) are contemplating life without a printed daily. The Detroit Free Press is only printing a paper edition three days a week. Even the New York Times, its stock worth barely more than its Sunday edition, has sold its Renzo Piano tower, imposed steep cost cuts, and is threatening to close its subsidiary, the Boston Globe. The massively overleveraged Tribune Company, owner of dozens of newspapers, is in bankruptcy, leaving the fate of the Chicago Tribune
and the Los Angeles Times in the balance. At the Los Angeles Times, newsroom positions have been cut by half over the past decade, and arts coverage substantially reduced. An aptly named blog, Paper Cuts, counts 24,000 newspaper jobs lost in the US since the start of last year. The outlook for newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic is dim. Arts journalism as we used to know it is sinking with the ship. The forces undermining the news business are the same everywhere and have been extensively catalogued by now. Studies show, however, that arts journalism is not being singled out for inequitable rollbacks. The problem is that the cuts are deepening an already miserable shortage of resources, set against a cultural universe that continues to expand. We are past the tipping point: it has become acceptable to run a paper with just a skeletal culture staff. Specialised writers are giving way to generalists. Culture sections are being tossed overboard (standalone book review sections, in particular, are a dying breed). Article lengths and “news holes” (space for editorial content) are shrinking. All this has eviscerated newspapers’ ability to deliver quality arts coverage, which, as a result, must migrate elsewhere. Beyond the tipping point But where? Many experts believe that daily newspapers will never find a way back to sustaining solid arts journalism. Magazines are doing marginally better, but they cannot shoulder the burden of timely local arts coverage, especially for
non-specialist readers—and some are folding. The news industry, on the whole, was too slow to embrace the internet and deploy its once abundant war chests to find new ways of capturing readers seeking information, services and communities. Myopically obsessed with their traditional product, newspapers failed to acquire, let alone invent, game-changing technologies such as Craigslist, Facebook or the Kindle. Under relentless shareholder pressure, publishers have tried every game in the book to monetise journalism on the web—from charging for online subscriptions, to fencing off “walled gardens” of premium content, to surrounding journalism with clever advertising. Lately, some executives have been pinning their hopes on an iTunesstyle micro-payment scheme. Last month, the Associated Press threatened to make sites that link to its content pay up or face legal action, while Rupert Murdoch warned: “People reading news for free on the web, that’s got to change.” But so far nothing has worked. No substitute for newspapers’ monopoly on local and classified advertising has emerged. For Douglas McLennan, publisher of ArtsJournal, a popular arts newsletter and link aggregator (with 50,000 daily users), it is simply too late for papers to innovate their way out of this quandary. “We just need to regretfully bid them adieu and get them out of the room, because they are sucking up oxygen. It is going to make it difficult for the new models to take hold until some of this dead wood is pushed out.” Now the good news: it is only a
matter of time before someone puts the pieces back together again. The search for a hopeful future begins with the insight that although journalists and publications are suffering, readership is up by wide margins. More people than ever are reading and writing about art, thanks to the web. The problem is not the scarcity or the quality of arts journalism (the latter has always been mixed), but that no one is paying for it—at least not yet. Broadly speaking, there are three ways forward from here. Recreating economies of scale Clearly, arts journalists aren’t disappearing. They are just moving online. Technorati lists 185,000 “arts” blogs at present, including 5,396 on “art criticism” and 1,858 on “arts journalism” (disclosure: I am a co-founder of one of them, artworldsalon.com). From a business standpoint, the question is how to generate audiences around these atomised writers to allow them to collect paid advertising. One strategy is for individual blogs to scale up to a size where their writers become popular “personal brands”. This has happened in political punditry and may happen in entertainment writing. But it is unlikely in visual arts journalism, where audiences even for top writers are thin. A more realistic, already extant scenario links blogs to heavily trafficked journalism, entertainment, or aggregator sites, which attract large numbers of readers by providing access to a wide range of news content.