Apparently, in their massive lay-offs, The Chicago Tribune has eliminated the job of veteran art critic Alan Artner --- the critic who was both much loved and much hated in the local artworld.
More info here and here.
Now it appears Sharkforum, Bad at Sports, Proximity and The Art Letter are indeed all you have!
You forget New City and Pedro Velez in Artnet...we have more than enough.
Yes -- I especially like your stuff Pedro --- when are you going to contribute something blistering to Sharkforum. I was just making a quick joke, but as Jones District" pointed out to me on Facebook, "You posted incomplete info on Shark...you forgot about New City's great coverage, Lauren Weinberg at Time Out, the people from Artslant, Michelle Grabner for Artforum and Pedor Velez for Artnet...so there's more than enough criticism about Chi in general."
So, oops. Yes, those are also great places and people --- although the coverage any of the "biggies" (such as Art in America, my "home") give to Chicago is far too little. l like Michelle's and Pedro's stuff in particular, but to be a "real," active, large city you need tough but often supportive local, regular, criticism. LA has it. Chicago needs it and much more. BTW, I do NOT think Artner was ever of much use in this fashion. Nor very insightful. You shoul take over the Trib's art weekly stuff, Pedro!
Hey Mark,
the Trib won't pay...and the people I always hear talking about supporting each other don't get that the paddle in the back kind of support doesn't pay the bills.
I think that explains why Chi doesn't have the continuous coverage you want in all those rags but I think we have it pretty good for a place that doesn't move or shake the art market.
Yeah, you are right Pedro. Although, LA and even London built that coverage as a part of building their "scenes" and not the other way around.
I think, as always in Chicago (and many other more provincial areas at the moment), we (meaning mostly artists) have got to do it for ourselves. Keep up your good work --- let's all tie into each other as much as possible. Keep in touch and feel free to do some stuff here too. I will try to widen the interest of other placces in Chicago art as much as I can with my not-very-powerful position(s).
BTW, if it had been up to me, I would have pink-slipped AA a long time ago, but then have kept his position and given it to a couple of others. Odd, that no one ever sought my advice about that!
I'd freelanced visual-art features (journalism not "reviews") to a few different Tribune sections sporadically for many years. Around 2003-04, in response to complaints from a group of artists--who had a series of meetings with some of the paper's editors--the Trib did some serious outreach to local art writers, to generate more Artner-supplemented material. I later did a few more features, for the Sunday A&E & Friday sections. I thought they were good, intelligent Chicago art stories; some paragraphs even exceeded two sentences! Then, around 2006, it became puzzling, untenable. I got rewrite instructions (for the first time ever) that didn't make sense; something about being less promotional, I think. You can be a cheerleader like Howard Reich writing about the local jazz scene, because a lot of those venues bring in advertising dollars--& it's performance everyone can presumably relate to. Not so the local visual-art world. In local mainstream art coverage (a now-archaic term), editors don't want to appear as if they're giving anybody free publicity--as if artists & galleries & nonprofit spaces should buy ads every week. (Then you'd appear like you're flakking.) Anyway, around this time the Trib did a piece on an exhibition of carriage-horse photographs (at a city-run gallery). The writer--not Artner--did an article that was a simulated interview with one of the horses. I felt really embarrassed for the city--and for the artist. (Some answers went: "Snort.") I still have the clip: "A new low," I wrote on it. So how much lower now? See you around, Alan.