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Contemporary art, uncovered: a survey of major newspapers and weekly magazines suggests that visual art is steadily losing ground in the popular press, even as its audience—and market—grows exponentially
Art in America, Feb, 2007 by Peter Plagens
Some heartland dailies, such as the Kansas City Star (whose art critic is Alice Thorson), devote considerable space to art. In a few mid-major metropoles, pockets of atypical sophistication exist. Nancy Barnes, an editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, says, "We have healthy arts coverage in the Star Tribune, and continue to [have it]. We have a large staff with expertise in popular and fine arts and most of our coverage is done in-house, with some contributing writers. We also are lucky to be in a market in which good arts coverage is appreciated, indeed, demanded." (3) Thorson says, "I am fortunate that [my] newspaper will print as much news, commentary and criticism on the arts as I can generate, as well as weekly gallery reviews by our regular freelancers." Even the Contra Costa [Calif.] Times, circulation 186,000, employs a full-time staffer to cover the visual arts. (4) So there doesn't seem to be much of a shortage of art criticism intended for a general audience.
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II
Nationwide, though, newspaper coverage of art is down, and not just over the long, long haul that Elkins indicates when he writes, "Newspaper art criticism is harder to measure, although it seems likely there is actually less of it, relative to the population size, than there was a hundred years ago." By most meaningful measurements--words, space on the page, the number of staff writers wholly or majorly devoted to covering visual art, etc.--the trend, over the last five or 10 years, is downward everywhere except perhaps at the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Such powerhouse newspapers as the Miami Herald (circulation 360,000 on Sundays) and the Chicago Sun-Times (333,000 on Sundays) employ no full-time visual arts writers. Dailies in Charlotte, Cleveland, Denver and Oakland do, but these writers cover art only half the time, splitting their beats with the likes of architecture and classical music. The national-average space devoted to the visual arts consumes but five percent of the total newshole for all of the arts, against about five times more for movies and three times more for books.
Owen Thomas, the unusually forthcoming features editor of the Christian Science Monitor, admits that art coverage in his paper--all written by freelancers who usually pitch their own stories rather than write on assignment--has indeed "declined" over the last decade. The Monitor is a national publication; at the Greensboro [North Carolina] News & Record, a perhaps more typical daily newspaper with a circulation of 100,000, editor John Robinson says, "We have what we call a visual arts columnist who writes for us about once a month.... Her columns--and our coverage--lean more toward features rather than criticism or reviews.... The visual arts get less coverage in the newspaper than any of the other artistic fields, with the possible exception of dance."
From writers' accounts, the situation is even more sharply defined, and it extends into "the arts," with an s. Here are a couple of typical comments, understandably offered under the condition of anonymity:
