I was at an art-world event recently and managed to catch up with a museum director who I have been “chasing” about becoming a commissioner on Artlance. I gave this person a good-natured ribbing about ducking my emails. We laughed about it, and traded notes about how crazy the past month had been and how emails pile up, especially when you run an institution, and sometimes it’s just not possible to reply to everything (I have thoughts about this—but that’s a different post).

But then this person let something slip. Well, not exactly “slip”: they came out and asked, conspiratorially, amongst friends, if they could say something “obnoxious.” I actually can’t recall if this was the exact word, or whether they said “rude,” but such was the sense of what was about to be said, and that was something to the effect of: “I don’t know about these other museums, but we’re getting our reviews.”

The comment struck me—the implication being that this particular museum didn’t need what Artlance was offering because it was already getting the attention of press and critics, presumably because what this institution presents is of such a high calibre and quality that it just “gets” independent, critical writing about its shows. To use the language of a different prospective commissioner’s dismissive email I received when pitching Artlance, this institution’s “communications strategy is focused on securing unpaid coverage driven by writers’ and editors’ interest.”

“Unpaid coverage.” Exactly.

But then this museum director did let something slip: they said the museum has been paying for press and critics to travel to see their shows, and noted that this had indeed been a “game changer.”

Now, this is not the place to go into the gross anatomy or history of the press junket, a legendary staple of soft-power politics though it is. I have at times enjoyed the strategic generosity of various art-world institutions, always administered by very kind and only slightly solicitous PR associates charged with keeping the press-types in line.

But let’s be serious: paying for press travel, like paying for advertising, or paying for PR itself, is an investment in the soft coercions endemic to the existing models of art-world “coverage.” As if paying for a writer’s plane tickets and hotel room and a meal or drink or two or three is somehow materially different from paying for an ad in the magazine that regularly carries the writer’s byline (about which editors will remind writers), or for a minder to make the writer’s work that much easier by assuming the mantle of something close to a PA for just this one engagement (“Can I make some time for you and the curator?” “We’ll get you that PDF of the catalogue as soon as proofs are back from the designer.” “Is there anything else I can help you with?”). None of this is done with the writer’s independence or interest, let alone their income, in mind.

It’s a courtship ritual. The institution buys the writer dinner with the hope, even the expectation, that she will put out. It’s transactional, just not legally or socially contractual (not even potlatch then). And over time, the less the writers make from their words, and the fewer outlets there are who will pay them, the more such institutions’ press-trip generosity becomes highly attractive. It does make the writer feel liked and wanted and important, after all. The privilege! The perks! The pastries! Aren’t these a fair exchange for a smidge of integrity when austerity is the order of the day? This comb-over of a show isn’t so bad, is it? I can handle that artist’s aesthetic halitosis just this once (Don’t breathe. Don’t breathe! For God’s sake don’t breathe!).

To be clear, Artlance is not opposed to institutions paying for a writer’s travel. But that should come secondary to a writer getting paid for their words, and for a guarantee, up front, that they have editorial independence.

This is what Artlance provides, and as of now, on Artlance, commissioners can add travel funds to their commissions to enable writers from other regions to visit their shows or presentations.

But this comes on top of paying $1.00/word. And these funds go directly to the writer, who decides how they should be spent. It’s recognition that traveling to write is not a “perk” or a “privilege”—a gift given to the writer with its attendant debt of (expected) gratitude—it’s work. And as work, it should be remunerated.

It’s also recognition that there are many excellent commissioners who want independent critical writing about their shows and presentations, but who are situated, geographically, where many of the writers aren’t. The U.S. is peppered with regional museums and galleries, many affiliated with universities and colleges, whose shows are intended to contribute to a high-level dialogue about art and culture in this country and beyond, but because their local media economies cannot consistently support an equally high level of critical writing, and the so-called “international arts media” can only dedicate so much space to what’s happening “out in the sticks,” that dialogue only echoes out into the world as the sound of one hand clapping.

What is more, a byproduct of the shit pay for critical writing about arts and culture is that writers must seek out other income in order to make a living, which often means they either need to migrate to places with the highest density of collateral arts and culture work—this being, presumably, what they know best; it’s their area of expertise—or they must become such omnivores in their appetite for written work that their expert opinion, their critical intelligence, their taste, becomes diluted and demotic. Coverage is not criticism after all. Full respect to the local writer who covers the jazz festival one week, the film festival the next, and that new theater on main street that just reopened after years of neglect (thanks to that big patron who also hired the PR firm to pitch the story). But this isn’t critique, and Artlance is betting that it’s not what commissioners are looking for.

Everyone in the art world is aware that the economics of art criticism have been shit for some time. But the general response—of which the “we’ll pay for press travel” is just one variant—has been to spend money on everything but writers. This was done in the name of editorial integrity, even as that integrity was slowly degraded by the mechanisms of a market for art writing that made such degradations all but inevitable.

Now there is an option, Artlance, which guarantees that integrity; can deliver a writer’s independent, critical intelligence, wherever it is commissioned; and pays the writers a respectable rate. “Unpaid coverage driven by writers’ and editors’ interest” isn’t real. Coverage gets paid for one way or another in the current model—by ads, by free travel, by PR hustle, none of which pay writers. And coverage isn’t criticism. If one values the latter, and most people in this art world—the one of galleries and museums and other organizations dedicated to art and artists and their highest promise—do claim to value it, then why choose another option?

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Read the most recent work facilitated by Artlance: Allison Hewitt Ward on the work of Greg Parma Smith at Hoffman Donahue in New York City.

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Greg Parma Smith at Hoffman Donahue

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4 months ago · 7 likes · 2 comments · Allison Hewitt Ward

The story behind the naming of the journal n+1 has it that the founding editors were sitting around wanting to start a new literary review, and one of them said “the world doesn’t need N + 1 literary journals,” or something to that effect, and so these founding editors, being the kind of thoughtful, intelligent, self-aware and self-reflexive Brooklynites that they were, had found their name, one that embraced its own gratuitousness and so paradoxically made it an essential ingredient in the concoctions of taste that would define a generation of literary and critical sensibilities.

Artlance does not have designs on being the Nth + 1 magazine of art criticism, and rather than chase the dream of defining a new sensibility or scene (which pursuit is to be applauded for sure), the point of Artlance is to get excellent and experimental art criticism paid for by paying writers to write it.

Because you are reading this on Substack or in your email, you are already aware that media is undergoing a “newsletter revolution.” Services such as Substack and Medium and Ghost have made it easier than ever for writers to self-publish their work and to build and connect with an interested and engaged readership. As I have written elsewhere, the business model for newsletters doesn’t work for art criticism (it doesn’t work for many other genres of writing, or for most writers, either). But for the model of “commissioned independence” that Artlance is pioneering, this wave of “social-publishing” has a number of advantages.

Writers First

Artlance is a “writers-first” enterprise. It’s a means to organize the economics and logistics of a genre of writing—criticism—which the legacy models of media have been failing to support, and which the new models of audience-monetized publishing can’t support either.

We have the advantage of having these other models in full view. Though they have revealed themselves to be lacking, they have provided an essential service: legacy outlets have been the proving ground upon which great art writers have developed their reputations, and newsletters and online outlets have created a means by which new talent can be identified.

But rather than attempt to wrap these writers up behind a branded masthead, which cannot help putting the interests of the brand—the business of the brand—ahead of its writers, Artlance meets writers where they are, which today is as freelancers (always with many other gigs) who publish in numerous places and increasingly through channels like this one.

Artlance has to lead with its writers because that is the value it is providing: the writers’ talents and intelligence. Artlance is not selling page views or an audience to advertisers, nor is it taking a cut of subscriptions, and so looking to grow reader numbers at all costs. It is offering ideas and evaluations in the form of the written word, and this to the people who claim to want them most. Which means the words have to be exceptional. Which means the people who write those words will always come first. Our proposition is that what is good for talented and intelligent critics—getting paid decently to apply their talent and intelligence in writing—will be good for Artlance.

Self-publishing shows who can write

I have served in editorial roles of one capacity or another in the arts media for more than twenty years. I have a deep appreciation for editors, and editing. For the very minor genre of editors writing on editing, I am a sucker.

And so it is with open eyes and a full heart that I side with Brian Patrick Eha when he writes:

Editors are not alchemists. They can nudge, suggest, critique, cajole, all of which may benefit a genuinely gifted author. Bad writing, though, can rarely if ever be transmuted into good through an editor’s good offices. The issue is one of arithmetic. Editors typically subtract, rather than add, material, and yet the fault of bad writing lies often in what is lacking: a finer ear, a more (or less) critical eye, a richer vocabulary; a sensibility more delicate or immense, an imagination more visionary or acute; or all of these; or none of these, but something equally invaluable and not to be supplied by dint of punctuation changes or deductions from the word count, however skilled.

Eha’s polemic against editing is worth reading in full (Sally Rooney fans beware: the sentences that follow the passage above cut deep and clean), if only because Eha details by extension what many of us already know: the art writing that appears in the pages of legacy and lifestyle magazines, or that gets pushed out of the various online content mills, has been dutifully styled and touched up by its editors so as to distract from what it otherwise lacks, and that is the raw beauty of an acute critical intelligence.

When a critic self-publishes, you get to see the mind at work. You may find an inelegant construction, a failure of a verb to hitch back up to its agreeable subject after some pregnant interregnum (or just bad mixed metaphors and purple prose like that), a typo or a homophone error—though A.I. has become good at catching these—but you also get a transparency, even a vulnerability, and something honest. You get thought about art, which is thought about the world, working itself out in words, and in the open. That is very worth reading.

Writing for one’s self

For all of that, then, self-publishing raises the stakes for the writer. Knowing that what you publish will appear on your own newsletter or blog or website or channel; knowing that it will not only go out to readers who have chosen to read you, and so have expectations (be they high or low), but also to a wider readership that one can’t know in advance (because nothing commissioned through Artlance can go behind a paywall); knowing that there is no heavy editorial process that you can secretly count on to “shape up” your writing because, well, you’re being paid dog shit for this copy so you don’t really put all that much care into those first drafts you write on your phone while waiting for your train or Uber to the next opening, thinking all the time that had you known this was going to be a volume business (well, not even a business, more like a volume “hobby,” which sounds worse), you might have made different life choices—knowing all of this means that you know the reputation of the writing redounds to you, the writer alone, and so the writing has to be good.

When commissioners ask me how Artlance ensures that the writing isn’t going to be junk, I have two answers: first, Artlance is working with the best writers. Our roster (which is growing) is exceptional and will continue to be. Artlance doesn’t have to worry about the quality of the writing because the writers who participate are—I would argue—incapable of producing bad copy. But if that doesn’t convince, then second, because these writers will be self-publishing their work commissioned through Artlance, they are very much writing for themselves as much as they are writing to fulfill a commission, and none of these writers became the critics they are by having low standards for themselves.1

Freedom

There is a world of writing that doesn’t need to adhere to the dictates of convention, and Artlance wants to tap into that world by encouraging writers to do so. Much art criticism today suffers from a kind of indolence (the same could be said for art), which has as much to do with the sedimented expectations for what criticism is, and with how and where it appears, as it does with the logistics and economics of how it is produced.

That it has been called a “newsletter” revolution belies its potential for experiments with other forms of writing and criticism that are available to writers who publish under their own steam. Fictions, scripts, dialogs, comics, letters, travelogues, legal briefs (er, maybe not), diaries, committee reports (er, really not), a fictional committee report made to the council of an alien city about its scandalous centennial exhibition (oh yes)—not every piece of criticism should be this, but some criticism should be this, or something like it.

“But writers need constraints!” it will be objected. “Writing short is harder than writing long!” it will be noted. “Criticism isn’t its own ‘art form’! It has a duty to the work and to its audience!” All true, in a way, but to which I would reply: Artlance has standards that must be met. Writers, as I have just written, have standards that they will not fail to meet. And commissioners—my wager is that commissioners want something more, and something different, than the standards they have been delivered to date: e.g., 675 dutiful words, squeezed down to 525 in a sequence of editorial wringings, all in the name of concision and that enduring fiction called column inches. “Don’t forget to mention the show or a work in an early paragraph, or else the reader won’t know what this is about!” “Could you describe this work in a bit more detail? We only have one image to run and it won’t be this one. But don’t go too long!” “Where were you going with this reference? It’s taking a bunch of space and you’re getting away from discussing the show.” “What’s this word? I’ve never encountered it before….” And so on.

Remind me how much I’m being paid for this?

Right.

“Self-publishing” on social platforms like Substack and elsewhere has long since stopped signaling that a writer couldn’t make it through the gates of legacy media. For much of what is appearing in the brand-name magazines and sites, it’s the first stop. Rather than treating those brands—with their particular standards and readerships and prestige—as the ultimate target, and so treating this work as a tryout for the forms of writing those brands valorize, why not take the self-publishing revolution out for a whirl? All we have to lose is our chains.2

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I can answer directly for Artlance in the former case: there’s nothing to “handle” — Artlance writers will write what they’re going to write; as long as the writing meets the commissioned criteria and Artlance’s standards of engagement, the opinion, the evaluation, is up to the writer alone.

And I can suggest how I believe commissioners should respond in the latter case: honest critique from an excellent art critic is valuable (I’m tempted to say that only honest critique from an excellent art critic is valuable), and so a commissioner should want that honest critique, be it received as positive or negative.

I have also suggested that, should a commissioner disagree with a writer’s opinion or evaluation, then commission again, and give the next writer the remit to respond to the first writer. Critics love nothing more than to disagree with one another. The challenge has been that they are given very little incentive to do so.

The more interesting question to consider is just why this question keeps getting asked. How is it that the negative review, the negative take, has become something to be feared, particularly in a discursive landscape where there no longer roam any alpha predators of the Clement Greenberg or Pauline Kael or Ben Brantley type? “Once upon a time the critic exercised some authority in the world of art and culture…” is the opening to the most boring of our era’s just-so stories.

In April of 1967 Donald Judd began a brief essay on Jackson Pollock with this: “Not much has been written on Pollock’s work and most of that is mediocre or bad. And not much more has been written on anyone’s work and usually not with any more thought. Art criticism is very inferior to the work it discusses.”1 In three sentences Judd throws the entire edifice of art writing under the bus. It’s an even deadlier throw when you consider that Judd, by the mid-1980s, thought that there were fewer than 100 good artists at that time, anywhere.

Two months later Michael Fried would publish “Art and Objecthood,” which many readers took to be a direct attack on the work that Judd and others were making. But consider what Fried had to say about Judd on the occasion of the latter’s first solo show at The Green Gallery in 1964: “As one might expect on the strength of Judd’s monthly criticism in Arts Magazine, it is an assured, intelligent show; it also provides a kind of commentary on the criticism and is doubly interesting on that account.” Fried recognized that Judd’s art was criticism by other means, an implicit (negative) reflection on the art of the time. At the end of his review, Fried even calls Judd’s show “the best on view in New York this month.” But that’s not the review that arguably made Judd’s career.

Such approbation is not at odds with the conclusions that Fried would come to within a few years; it informs them. And Fried’s “negative” review — for “Art and Objecthood” is very much that: a summation of assessments of what he’d been seeing in New York in the years prior to 1967, the bulk of which, including Judd’s work, he decided didn’t even rate as art! — did more for what came to be called “minimalism” than perhaps any other piece of writing of the period or after.

Think of it. Would Tony Smith’s Die be the work it is, sitting in the National Gallery, without Fried’s casting of it as “theatrical”? Would a story about a trip on an unfinished stretch of New Jersey turnpike come to define the next 30 years of art-making and discourse?2 Without Fried’s negative critique, it’s quite possible Smith’s work and so much that became affiliated with it would stand today as mere NPCs in the game of post-WWII American modernism.

That’s a pedantic way of saying that all press is good press. And not just for the attention that it generates or drives, but because—in the case of writing about art, writing that is often considered negative—it sharpens how others come to see the work.

The fear of the negative review resembles nothing so much as those fears that underwrite the censorious reflex: we can’t let someone read such a negative take, we cannot give those ideas an airing or a platform, because they are too dangerous or damaging to even consider. We are too easily swayed in our opinions, in our mere thoughts. Just to allow something potentially disagreeable to be heard or read would be to risk others’ agreeing with it. Art criticism is in essence a rhetorical affair, but how dare one attempt to persuade, or even to raise questions. Don’t you know how authoritarianism begins? With “author…” Just read the Republic; it’s all there.

One need not be a conspiracist of ideas to fear the negative review, of course; we can just as easily be conspiracists of “the market,” whose invisible hand shapes our behavior in all transactions, not just those involving money. But as I have written elsewhere, the marketplace for visual art, both its objects and its experiences, has evolved so as to erode the place and the stakes of art criticism at present, and whether one recognizes it or not, that is eroding the place and the stakes of art itself.3

What is Artlance?

Welcome to Artlance on Substack.

For those of you who have arrived here first without passing through Artlance’s pages, Artlance aims to be nothing less than a revolution in how quality, independent cultural criticism gets paid for and published. We are for excellence and experimentation in criticism, and for writers getting paid for this work.

What do we do? Currently, we provides visual art organizations such as museums, galleries, and other initiatives access to a vetted pool of the best art critics who can be commissioned to write, with total independence, about the shows those organizations put on. In practice, organizations pay Artlance to post commissions to our pool of vetted critics. Writers choose which commissions they want to fulfill by “claiming” them, and then, with full authorial independence, publish their work to their own sites or platforms. Once published and confirmed, Artlance pays the writer for their work.

By acting as an intermediary, vetting every writer in our pools, operating through a Charter, holding writers to Standards of Engagement, and setting up the commission → claiming → writing sequence on a one-to-many model (one commissioner; many writers), and managing all payments, Artlance ensures that (1) writers have complete independence in what they write and (2) commissioners receive high-quality critical writing about their presentations.

Why is Artlance on Substack?

Artlance is agnostic as to which platforms writers publish on. Writers who fulfill commissions through Artlance can publish here, on Substack, or on their own websites, or on Ghost, or Medium or Patreon; we could even see writers fulfilling commissions with an extended post (together with a carousel of images) on Instagram. What matters to Artlance, and what we believe should matter to everyone, is the writing: what gets written, not just where it appears.

That said, Artlance believes Substack is currently the most “writer-friendly” social-publishing platform with full functionality for its “free” tier, and as such, we will use it to digest, amplify, cross-post, and promote the writing that we facilitate.

Also, there are exceptional art writers and critics who do not currently maintain their own websites or use newsletter platforms or social media in any concerted way. And we do not want that to stop them from taking advantage of Artlance. So on occasion, Artlance will “host” those writers’ work here.

Not just the West Coast…

Though Artlance has its beginning in the Los Angeles and Bay Areas, Artlance plans to expand to wherever we can add great writers and willing (and high calibre) commissioners. We know there is important and relevant art being made and exhibited in Dallas, and St. Louis, and Kansas City, and Chicago, and Atlanta, and New Orleans, and in many other places across the U.S. — even New York City (we keep hearing there are great artists and great institutions and great writers in the NYC area; go figure).

Often the shows in these other cities and regions don’t get the recognition, or the critique, that they deserve. The “international” art magazines only have so much space in which to publish essays and reviews. They stick to the major metropoles; it’s what their readers and advertisers expect. Writers know this. No writer outside the art world’s “centers” wants to spend their time pitching the few paying outlets that do pay lip service to the “provinces” when they know there is rarely the interest or the column inches for what they have to offer. And when the pay is poor, why bother?

But if there are commissioners in these cities and regions — galleries and museums and arts organizations who are dedicated to exhibition-making and critical discourse; and we know there are — then their commissions through Artlance can make art criticism not just viable, but vibrant.

And not just art criticism…

The continued upheavals in media, and the newsletter revolution of today (parallel to the golden-age of blogs 20 years ago), have pushed writers to become increasingly independent from the outlets that once could be counted on to support high-quality criticism. Though there are many excellent magazines and journals and reviews out there — many of them new; and we applaud them all — ad-based and subscription-based business models continue to fail to pay critics a decent rate. What we have is “coverage” but not criticism: listicles, must-sees, profiles, and other kinds of writing that, while fine, are not the kind of discourse that recognizes the art, and artists, in any substantial, satisfactory way.

This failure is especially severe when it comes to the cultural fields, like visual art, that require in situ engagement: architecture, theater, dance, music, performance in general — all entail some kind of embodied, body-to-body, body-in-space experience. Such experiences are increasingly sought after, but few today receive recognition, in the form of critique, by knowledgable and talented critics. So though Artlance is beginning with visual art, if our new model proves workable, and sustainable, we plan to expand by connecting the best critics of these other cultural domains with commissioners (venues and producers, developers and creators) who value great writing and critical discourse.

It’s ambitious, we admit. But the current models aren’t working. Artlance is an attempt at something different.

If you want to keep up with all of the writing and other work that Artlance powers, subscribe here. Nothing we post will ever go behind a paywall. That’s not our model:

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