Extraordinary Art Blogs Series, Part five: Pushing at Boundaries

See Artblog.net’s art blog profile or visit Artblog.net.

The story so far
In the process of compiling over 100 art blog profiles, and developing an art blog directory, we accumulated a whole range of questions we wanted to investigate further.

So far, we have explored rapid development with Ruben Natal-San Miguel from ARTmostfierce, writing high quality art critique with Catherine Spaeth, providing cohesive coverage on a range of subjects with Christopher Reiger from Hungry Hyaena, and team working, with Seth Curcio from Daily Serving.

Today, we will explore the qualities and characteristics required to forge an art blog in your own image. I am pleased to be joined by Franklin Einspruch, who produces Artblog.net, for this discussion.

For those of you who do not already know Franklin, he is an established artist and writer, currently based in Boston. His art is represented in galleries in Miami, San Diego, and Scottsdale. His writings have appeared in various publications including the Boston Globe, and the Miami New Times.

Peter Cowling (Art Connect)
You started artblog.net in 2003, at which time art blogging was pretty embryonic. One of the factors that perhaps represented a barrier back then was the information technology side of things. Did you know a lot about that side of things before you set out, or is that something you have learnt since?

FE
I knew some basic HTML. In 2000 I helped start an online magazine with the encouragement of Bernice Steinbaum of the eponymous gallery, who was trying to light a fire under the art scene in Miami at the time. In early 2002 I handed that site, the Miami Art Exchange, over to Onajide Shabaka, who still runs it. At that point I had become convinced that the future of art writing was going to take place on the Web, and started to publish my own writing on a site called The Sunburn, still by hacking together static HTML until I found out about PHP and began using that instead.

PC
Okay, PHP is used by blogging platforms like Wordpress. It works well in a situation when you need to display one lot of content in a few different places.

FE
On a website, anyway. Once you want to move into other media, PHP starts looking pretty limited.

In 2003 I heard about blogging, and found to my amazement that no one had yet bought the domain name Artblog.net. I installed a beta version of Textpattern which worked fine for a while but broke irreparably after several months. It occurred to me then that if I was going to publish my own work digitally, I had better learn the ins and outs of it. I hand-hacked the content management system from scratch at that point, which was frankly beyond my capabilities as a programmer but I learned a lot in the process.

PC
I have been in the same situation as a programmer. One thing is certain when you self-teach yourself out of those situations, and that is you end-up with a very rich, permanent understanding of the problem.

FE
You ultimately have to do this with any creative medium, so it didn’t appear to me as idiotic as it probably should have at the time. And yes, I now enjoy a rather thorough understanding of the technical basis of online writing. Thinking of all the writers out there who are entrusting their journaling legacies to programs they barely control, hardly understand, and never back up makes me shudder.

PC
Anyhow, things have changed over the last six years, and a lot of people use a blogging service like Blogger to get started. At the same time, I have noted a couple of established writers have weighed-up their options and set up their own blog. What motivates you to maintain your own blog? Have you ever been enticed to take up another solution?

FE
I think we’ve just scratched the surface of digital publication of art writing. I’m now rewriting the Artblog.net CMS to work with Docbook 5.0, XSLT, and Python, all three of which have capabilities far beyond those of HTML. Myriad possibilities regarding multi-platform delivery and interactivity await someone who knows how to both write and code. I’ve played around with them a little bit with the publications I’ve done, but again, we’re all just starting out here.

PC
So, the idea with things like Docbook is that your writing is categorized much more precisely than articles tend to be. In something like Wordpress, you have a heading, and then you write an entire article and apply categories and tags to it, and publish it. The result is presented as a whole to your readers, who can then navigate to similarly categorized or tagged articles. You can also provide a search engine facility on your site, and search engines like Google and Yahoo! will crawl it, but all their work in deciding what to make of your article is inference. Things like Docbook act to break up your article into more meaningful parts. This general application of this approach leads towards what is often referred to as the “semantic web”.

FE
Hopes for the Semantic Web haven’t panned out in many respects. My original CMS used malformed XML to store data. When I could no longer tolerate that, I looked around at XML protocols already in existence before I came up with my own system, and decided I could make Docbook XML work for what I was doing. Docbook has roughly 400 tags for structuring data, four or five times the number in HTML, and people have done a lot of work on converting it from one format to another. Should the Semantic Web ever catch on, Artblog.net will find itself way out in front of everything ever published on Blogger. Until then, the data will have a level of integrity worthy of print. I could, in fact, convert it to print, using the same technology that converts it to an Atom feed.

PC
Having considered these things in some depth, do you have a specific view about the process of writing to the web?

FE
When you write for the Web, you’re really writing in two languages at once – English (or the human tongue of your preference) and HTML (or the coding language of your preference). A platform like Blogger abstracts away the second one, with the consequence that you’re letting a mechanical tool make decisions about your use of language. You would never allow a tool to affect your English like that. If your word processor stopped letting you type adverbs, for instance, you’d ditch it. Canned web-publishing solutions really give you many of the contstraints of print with none of the benefits of having an editor. And those non-human languages have expressive elements as well if you know how to employ them.

Tools shape your thinking. This is probably the great underappreciated fact about creation in contemporary times. But if your thinking can shape your tools, you find yourself in a highly generative situation. My motivation is that there’s a lot of good art out there and many unexplored possibilities of how to write about it.

PC
Coding options range from thing like machine code, on one extreme, to things like scala on the other. Ultimate control means machine code, whereas arguably things like scala offer the most sophisticated solutions. Yet people make a compromise selection, for a more popular, easier to program language. They then choose to utilize some framework, like Cake for PHP, use an OOP style of programming or something like that, and utilize design patterns like Model View Controller (MVC), etc. In the end people compromise in order to get things done. The problem, as I believe you note, is that this compromise can limit a person’s interest in further exploration, and does shape the results of their labor.

So I would say compromise is sometimes the only option, and in those circumstances it has to be okay. At the same time, there is a big ‘but’ in there, which as you note is easily overlooked.

FE
I know for a fact that some writers regard even basic HTML markup as an unfortunate imposition. Such writers, in a literal sense, don’t know what they’re doing. That may suit their needs and their temperament, but I find it all fascinating.

PC
Moving onto your wider considerations at the time: what motivated you to start an art blog?

FE
Miami, which I called home for many years, had (and has) only a handful of publications that print art criticism, as opposed to art journalism. Too, I didn’t see my voice fitting in anywhere, and really never had. I started writing about art while I was still in grad school thanks to the encouragement of Dr. Paula Harper and Walter Darby Bannard at the Univeristy of Miami. It was the mid-Nineties, and while people were complaining not long ago (on the occasion of the last Whitney Biennial, to be specific) about the convoluted quality of contemporary art writing, things are actually a little better now than they were back then. Darby read the first piece I had published in one of the local entertainment weeklies in Miami, and he said, “Well, you can tell what the work looks like from reading it, which is more than you can say for most art writing these days.” Postmodernism was really at the height of its powers about fifteen years ago and the art writing of the time shows it – obfuscatory, politicized, tendentious, speculative, vague, jargon-laden, and often remarkably free of content. I became interested in writing about art in a plainspoken, readable way. I met Peter Schjeldahl and admired his literary gifts, and I admired Robert Hughes’s courage, independence, high standards, and ability to whoop ass in prose. Darby produced some absolute jewels – I put together an online archive of his writings to showcase them. But most of all I took my cues from Henry Miller and Jean Giono. I strive, above all, for clarity.

So once I discovered a platform that encouraged individuality, independence, and self-determination, I took to it readily.

PC
I was reading over some of your earliest entries the other day. The first few contain fewer words than your typical entry today. Did your blog entries evolve in keeping with a predetermined idea of what you wanted to achieve… to what extent did you just think ‘I will start writing and see what I become comfortable with’?

FE
To a very great extent. My only determination was to publish every weekday. Everything else evolved organically, including my ability to produce greater word counts with relatively less effort.

I don’t make formal decisions about what to cover. I tried to go all-criticism at one point, and the reviews became cursory and unsatisfying. I have considered going all-studio-journal, but frankly I don’t find myself that interesting. So I switch around between studio journal, criticism, and pointing out interesting things in the churning landscape of the art world. There’s no real logic to it, but my readers report that they like the heterogeneity.

The one thing I stay away from is journalism. People like Tyler Green, Lee Rosenbaum, Richard Lacayo, and Greg Cook are already doing a fine job of that. Too, I’m not convinced that journalism and criticism are complementary exercises, despite their traditional coupling as a profession. I think that the cynicism that you have to maintain about human motives in journalism can creep into the critical mentality, causing art objects to appear through a filter of current events. Tyler Green recently wrote about the declining quality of Jerry Saltz’s output, saying, “…Jerry did more than show up and look. He explained why something was important; he built a case that could convert the unsure, the art-agnostic. … He explained why creation and invention was an artistic imperative and he did so in a way that made the recognition of such a broad societal responsibility.” But showing up and looking is easy to ruin with extraneous concerns. Criticism has become so journalistic that art aficionados frequently have trouble seeing things independently of their context. Looking is not some semi-conscious activity that only gains significance when we connect it somehow to life. It is life. Hui-Neng said that the meaning of life is to see. If we get that wrong, we might as well throw in the towel as art writers.

PC
By entry 100, in September 2003, you gave some consideration to the art blogging scene, and considered some feedback you had received on your blog to that date. You concluded:

I’m content to rant to my readership, and let my big, new thoughts percolate slowly as I think about this and that. I enjoy the discipline of posting five days a week. That anyone cares to watch me do it is a marvel for which I’m grateful.

More recently, you took some time out in the run up to the Artblog.net’s six-year anniversary to evaluate your blog and blogging activity. You have now recommenced posting. Did you decide to post less frequently than you have been in the habit of, or is that a temporary thing?

FE
That’s temporary. I became unhappy with what was going on in the comment threads a few weeks ago, so I shut them down. That gave me the opportunity to think about a code overhaul, which has taken longer than I projected, of course. Then some scheduled trips to Brooklyn and Portland, Oregon came up, and it’s hard to post at length from the road. Things are fairly close to getting sorted and I’ll be back to a weekday publishing schedule soon.

PC
In the past, you seemed to elect to cover subjects or events that most captured your attention, as those things came to your attention. Is that an accurate reading?

FE
Very much so.

PC
Okay, so do you tend to spend additional time researching something once you have committed to writing about it? I mean, do you set aside some time for general reading only to realize a couple of hours later that you ended up engrossed on one particular thing?

FE
I typically do my research after I’ve seen something, on an as-needed basis. I get engrossed in general reading all the time. I’m currently working simultaneously on the letters of Seneca, a jQuery introduction, and a book on urban vegetable gardening. On the plane back from Portland I read through a treatise on Buddhism’s Four Seals by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse. It all finds its way into the art somehow.

PC
Is there a clear break point between the act of seeking out and reading, and that of analysing, composing, and writing?

FE
No. Writing is a kind of formalized thinking. Typically people who write are avid readers, so reading, thinking, and writing take place in a holistic fashion. That has an influence on what appears to you in the world. Thoreau wrote beautifully about this: “Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i.e. we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.” But the driving vector as far as art is concerned is attention. You go and look. You go away and reflect, and perhaps study. You go and look again.

PC
Yes, if find that approach works for me both in visual art and music. I often listen to music that I start out disliking, or at least finding bland, only to suddenly ‘get it’ on the third or so playing.

So, when you commit your ideas to writing is it a case of sketching your ideas out or do you find the process pretty straightforward once you have thought out what you want to talk about?

FE
The process is straightforward but it’s hard to get right. You have to make every sentence true, and you have to make every sentence make the reader want to continue to the next one. That’s it! Any writer who is trying to do something else is lapsing into some kind of bullshit.

In my case, I try to put my thoughts down as honestly as I can, and explain myself as thoroughly as I can. Then I go back and clean. Unfortunately, I can be pretty clever, so I have to watch out for sentences that are great as zingers but just aren’t true enough. Sometimes cleverness and truth coincide, and at that point I’m having a good day. Just as often, the best cure is the Delete key. Good art takes place in a realm of sight and feeling, neither of which are conducive to description. So I work to find powerful analogues in language for them. Even just to describe a thing correctly is hard.

Not incidentally, this is why I value clarity so highly, and why I hate the academic tone so much. I realize that there are writers out there who really buy into theory, and regard the refusal to accept theory at face value as anti-intellectualism. On the contrary, it’s anti-intellectual to regard truth as temporary, subjective, and coerced. Many of these writers live in a world that is essentially linguistic and fraught with political battles. It’s not a true world, and I don’t accept its mentality or its vocabulary.

PC
One aspect I particularly wanted to talk to you about is your comments facility. A comments facility on an art blog brings a lot of benefits, but for each one there are challenges to be managed too. What aspects have you particularly enjoyed in the past?

FE
The price of unfettered discussion is occasional bouts of unfettered idiocy, but the payoff is moments of unfettered brilliance. The constant threat of correction, retaliation, and insult in the comments has obliged me to clarify my own thinking to a degree that I never would have achieved in another publishing medium. And now, as I tell people, if you want to hurt my feelings, you’re going to need an awl.

PC
What would you like a comment facility on Artblog.net to achieve in the future?

FE
At the moment I don’t have strong desire to reinstate comments. Since turning them off, I’ve felt a certain amount of relief. Maintaining a community has required a huge investment of time and labor on my part.

PC
…Well I can understand that. The sum total of a conversation with say 50 comments can easily represent three or four posts worth of ideas, and maybe the writer doubling their original word count. It is one of those hidden investments, comprised of lots of little, easily overlooked, deposits …

FE
Too, a few weeks ago, it finally hit me that I own everything that appears on Artblog.net, whether by producing it or countenancing it. My reputation has become thoroughly conflated with the often negative, frequently cutting tone of Artblog.net comment threads. We’ve had some great times, but I’m looking forward to developing a voice as a writer distinct from the vocal portion of my readers. On the flip side, I’ve lost interest in entertaining certain kinds of counterarguments. Just because I challenge the characterization of Marcel Duchamp as Jesus Christ and Clement Greenberg as Satan doesn’t mean that I believe the converse. People who come to those kinds of conclusions don’t deserve my time.

It doesn’t suit me to carry anyone’s flag. My position is this, simply: visual art should succeed visually. Ideas have enormous value to art, but they have zero value as art.

PC
The problem with a comments section is they are impermanent records of a conversation that can evolve in any direction. This is great for all sorts of new conversations or for getting feedback, but what comes out of these exchanges? Additions, redactions or other corrections may be made, extractions from the article or even the comments may be used by the writer or by other writers, but the actual information technology does not lend itself to a progressive debate. The most obvious downside to this is that determined debaters argue their corner ad infinitum.

Is the answer the adoption of technologies that are better suited to the writing and subject matter the answer?

FE
We already have the technology to shape comment threads any way we like. I think in my case, I never figured out the ultimate purpose of the comments. Instead I contentedly enjoyed the free-for-all, until one day I stopped enjoying it, and then I realized that I had abdicated responsibility for making my site a good read. It often made for a compelling read, in the sense that a car crash makes for a compelling spectacle, but it doesn’t necessarily produce anything except noise and injuries. The best content typically appeared thrity to sixty comments in, against a backdrop of increasing chances of incivility and whining that grew by one percent per comment. I regarded it as inevitable that I would see some kind of nonsense by comment #100.

If I put comments back on one day, I’m going to declare that the commenting functionality exists to make the original post stronger. Either mount a substantial challenge, reinforce what I’m saying with your own examples, or ask honest questions.