From Freelance to 'Artlance'

How a new business model for publishing and paying art writers can solve the "crisis of criticism."

Honoré Daumier, The Critics (Visitors in a Painter’s Studio), about 1862. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, bequest of Mrs. William R. Miller in memory of her husband.

Just over six months ago I wrote something of a retort to all of the hand-wringing about the “crisis of criticism” that was then — and perhaps still is — confronting the laptop class. In September, the “crisis” came in the form of overhauls to The New York Times’s roster of critics, which set certain corners of the internet alight. The episode was reprised just last month when The Washington Post cut its entire books section alongside large portions of its newsroom. The critics were scattered to the wind. Some found soft landings in the pages of prestigious legacy rags. Most were inhaled by the funnel cloud that is this platform. Business arrangements changed, and where most writers were concerned, not for the better.

None of this really affected the ongoing plight of art criticism itself, however, which has been relegated to the fringes of glossy trade magazines, alt weeklies and their online ilk, and other small, scrappy initiatives of one kind or another (I applaud them all). There are no full-time art critics anymore, at least ones who get paid as full-time employees (okay, maybe there are two?). We are all freelance: gig workers in an attention economy blithely holding on to the refractory illusion that the art “industry” values critical intelligence in written form, even as pay for it dwindles and our inboxes fill up with AI-written exhortations about the “12 must-see shows” during whatever “art week” it happens to be in some corner of the globe. Not to be too vulgarly Marxist, but the base gets the superstructure it deserves.

And yet, I keep hearing from gallerists and artists and curators and museum directors and collectors and other art-world folk that writing — good, critical writing, honest writing, writing which tarries with art and its cultural context and tries to understand it and assess it according to some rubric of value, some ethic if not some aesthetic, writing that is as conscious of itself as it is of the work it measures, and so writing that is good in itself — that writing is wanted, desired even. But it’s scarce, and no one seems to know why. Or really, we do know. We just don’t want to talk about it.

The Broken Business Model of Art Criticism; or, Feeding the Horses to Feed the Sparrows

If it is the case that good, critical writing about art is wanted, then it should follow that the people who want it do in fact value it, and if they value it, they will pay for it. But today the way they pay for it is inefficient at best and probably better described as perverse.

People interested and invested in the culture industry buy subscriptions to magazines and online outlets where they have access to “premium” content. But those subscriptions alone don’t cover the full cost of publishing, hence the need for ad sales and “sponsored” content in one form or another. Artforum was once the pinnacle example of the ad model, with pages upon pages of full-page, even double-page spreads of glossy announcements keeping the operation afloat (even if the prestige of it all meant the writers would continue to be underpaid). Cultured magazine is the pinnacle example of sponsored media, in which every profile appears paid for and the coverage that isn’t behind a paywall reads like advertising in writerly clothing. It is a cliché to say it, but in both cases, you, dear reader, are the product being sold, and the writing is sales copy, for which writers are still poorly paid (my last review for Artforum earned ~$0.36/word).

Some outlets do better when they sell a service rather than writing. Artnet produces some of the best journalism and criticism on offer to this corner of the culture industry. Outside of The New York Times it might be the one place that actually has a full-time art critic in its employ. But Artnet isn’t a magazine or news site first; it’s the purveyor of the art industry’s most comprehensive price database, for access to which industry professionals will pay real money. If only a handful of folks get the joke that the Times is a cooking app with a newsroom attached, everyone in the art world knows Artnet is a pricing comparison tool with Ben Davis attached (Not a dig! We’re lucky he’s there!). Something similar could be said of e-Flux, which parlayed an email list of seemingly every employee of nonprofit arts and educational institutions around the globe into a press-release blasting service which has underwritten a host of high-minded discursive activities: talks, symposia, books, a journal and, of course, criticism (my last piece for e-Flux earned ~$0.40/word).

What we have today, from the perspective of art critics, is what a mentor of mine once described as a case of “feeding the horses to feed the sparrows.” For the literal-minded out there (increasing in number every day), the horses are the branded magazines and websites, with their digestive systems of well-meaning editors, publishers, project managers, and their contracts with designers and backend engineers and printers and distributers and so on. All good people. All wanting the horses to get fed. We art writers? Well, we are the sparrows. And our feed? Well, it’s quite literally horseshit.

And in every case, critics write for the outlet and in its service. Voice and sensibility is shaped by the imperatives of the horse’s health and wellbeing. We are never fully or truly independent. We may float freely from pasture to pasture, and even begin to gain some recognition for the pretty and dexterous ways that we fly (that way we don’t get shooed away by angry farmers or ornery mares), but we’re all looking for the seeds of our next meal, and let’s just admit we’re not eating from the same trough.

Two models of going direct: Independent Newsletters or Commande Oblige

So we know that people will feed the horses, because the horses are getting fed (yes, some more than others). People will buy subscriptions and pay for services, they will take out advertising and go in for “sponsored content” and even hire PR firms on expensive retainers to do all of the things that are meant to attract prettier sparrows. And the question we have to ask is: Why not just feed the sparrows directly?

Leaving the barnyard behind, there are two models by which art critics can be paid directly for their work: newsletters and commissions.

If the success curve for contemporary artists is steep, the curve for contemporary art critics on newsletter platforms like this one (or Patreon, or Ghost, etc.) are perhaps even steeper. And of course success needs to be measured in both recognition and in dollars. The independence enjoyed by writers on Substack (I’m using this site as a stand-in for any subscription-based newsletter business model) means attention can come fast, in the form of follows and free subscriptions, but paid subscriptions will clock in often at only single-digit percentages of one’s free “attention” numbers. One needs 1000 subscribers generous enough to pay $60/year to gross a $60k income. Substack makes it relatively easy to see breakdowns of writers’ paid vs. free subs, and it’s no secret that very, very few people are hitting 1000 paid subscribers. You can be sure that not a single art critic is.

That is the price you pay (or don’t get paid) for independence. Those attention numbers can be helpful, however, when it comes to attracting commissions for one’s critical writing. It has long been something of an open secret that the reviews writers pen in the back pages of the glossy art magazines are tryouts for gallery- and museum-commissioned catalogue essays, which are often contracted at reasonable rates (I have received $2.00/word for this kind of work).

An artist or gallerist or curator likes what you wrote about their work or show a few months back, and so a nice email arrives in your inbox with an “invitation” to extend and elaborate on those thoughts in a lovely book that the gallery will use as high-minded swag for its clients and an ego-stroke for its artists (again, not a dig! We like swag and ego!); or that a museum will use to make the case to its donors and the tax authorities that it’s making good on its educational mission (real estate stylists like them for coffee tables too).

The double sacrifice here, though, is attention and independence. With these kinds of commissions, there is no expectation of independent critique. What you’re writing is in the service of the artist, or the exhibition, and the entity that is supporting or producing the same. This is well understood. It is commande oblige: one’s obligation to the order. One only “accepts” a commission if one has an abiding interest and so something broadly positive to say, and positive here runs down only one direction on the judgement spectrum, from intelligent to “gushing.”

And though every writer makes these decisions on their own, about which invitations to accept and which to decline, the measure of independence that is sacrificed in the deal is equal to the amount of attention such writing is destined to receive: the catalogue essay, like most “sponsored content,” does not travel far. It’s easier to compromise on the margins of one’s judgement when one knows that not so many people are going to read the thing. We writers can share that searching, provocative, critical account of the work — the one that matters, the one that demonstrates our recognition of the artist and their practice — when we visit the studio.

A new model: Commissioned Independence

But what if…

What if rather than paying for subscriptions or ads or for sponsored content; or for commissioned work that carries with it the obligation that a critic compromise, however subtly, her critical independence; or for a PR firm to incessantly spam writers and editors in the finger-crossing hope that someone will select their client’s show to write about — what if a gallery or a museum or an artist-run space or whatever other exhibition-making and art-presenting organization could access a pool of the best critics in their city or region and, through an intermediary (one that would mediate the money and so ensure the writers’ independence), commission those writers to write about those exhibitions and presentations? What if you could have the commande without the oblige, the talents of the writer applied fully and independently without the obligations or expectations of a conventional commission, whether from an art magazine or gallery or museum or other enterprise?

What if rather than commissioning the writer directly, galleries and museums and organizations paid the intermediary to post their commissions, which would then be claimed by the writers — not “accepted” but “claimed.” Unlike a conventional commission model, where direct contracting with a writer creates a direct obligation and compromises independence (weakly in the case of standard magazine writing and strongly in the case of catalogue writing and sponsored content), in this new model you would have, on one side, single commissioner → intermediary → writer pool, and on the other side, single writer → intermediary → commission pool, a parallel structure which obliges only the intermediary to deliver high-quality, independent, unobliged criticism (as much to the commissioner as to a reading public), and authorial independence to the writer. Call it “commissioned independence.”

And what if this intermediary wasn’t another magazine or media start-up, with its own ideas about voice and “position” and what’s missing from the “discourse,” and so a need to put its own brand before the reputation of its writers. What if this intermediary’s commitments were to excellence and experimentation in art criticism, and to writers’ authorial independence, and to paying writers a decent rate — say $1.00/word?

What if the writers posted to their own platforms (websites, newsletters, social media channels, etc.) and the intermediary aggregated those posts, linked to them, promoted them, and had its writers share them, thereby directing interested and dedicated readers to the writing and so to the writers?

What if the intermediary operated according to a Charter that protected both commissioners and writers, and to principles of transparency that ensured readers were aware that what they were reading was indeed commissioned but was also, indeed, the work of the author’s intelligence alone.

If we were to see such an intermediary emerge, I believe two things would logically follow: Either (1) we would see a revolution in the way art criticism gets published and art writers get paid (but not only art criticism and not only art writers); or (2) we would learn that our industry, the art industry, this network of artists and galleries and museums with all of their initiatives for presenting art to the public and who claim to want it written about honestly, critically, and intelligently — well, we would learn that that claim, like the current rate for even moderately and acceptably compromised art writing, is horseshit.

Either outcome would be salutary: the former for the revolution it would be; the latter for the illusion it would dispel.

But if we were to see such an intermediary emerge, what would it be? Not a magazine or new media property. Would it be a platform? An agency? An exchange? A network? A cooperative? Something like these, but none of these exactly? For the time being, then, I suggest we just call it by its name: Artlance.

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