While I realize many of you read the New York Times as regularly as we do, the Ryan McGinley photo essay in the past weekend's New York Times Magazine (here) seems worthy of a short discussion. For those of you who haven't seen the pictures, there are eleven color images of Winter Olympic athletes, outfitted in designer clothing (lots of wispy strips of fabric) and soaring through the air (as required by their various sports) against soft, pastel skies.
For photography collectors, these works will be immediately reminiscent of Aaron Siskind's Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation from the 1950s. McGinley has however traded Siskind's pared down, abstracted black and white silhouettes for unabashedly dreamy and romantic views. He has also expanded the scope of the pictures to include more sky, making the often graceful flying look even more precarious and unlikely. While not every picture in this series works for me, if these commissioned images are ever turned into artworks, I hope they are printed at monumental scale to cover a whole wall, the contrast between small figure and huge ground amplifying the peaceful bliss of floating.
Showing posts with label New York Times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York Times. Show all posts
Monday, February 8, 2010
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Thoughts on Negative Reviews
In the process of gathering the data for the Top Photography Shows of 2009 (coming next week), I have been thinking more about negative reviews and how they fit into the spectrum of important and valuable criticism. I was therefore interested to come across a set of data gleaned from the New York Times, where all of the short blurbs that appear in the Friday Art in Review section were tallied (either positive or negative) and sorted by reviewer. There are approximately 5 reviews per week, covering all of contemporary art, therefore totalling about 250 reviews in a given year. There were 38 negative reviews counted, the breakdown by author below. (The data apparently comes from a pamphlet associated with the White Columns Annual here, post/graph at 16 Miles of String here, via C-MONSTER here.)
Part of what may be going on here is some selection bias in the assignments, where Cotter and Smith get the most prominent shows to review, while Johnson and Rosenberg get the next rung down, thereby getting a more mixed bag of quality, and leading ultimately to more negative reviews overall.
But regardless of how we interpret the data above, in our own efforts this past year or so as reviewers of photography shows, I have come to believe that the negative review is the toughest article to truly write well. The challenge is that it is temptingly easy to be flippant, sarcastic, snarky, and generally make fun of bad art or poor curating/installation (and readers certainly find it entertaining when a good zinger is launched); it is altogether harder to show respect for an artist's (and curator's) work (however bad it may be) by giving it a thorough and thoughtful analysis that finds it systematically deficient in major areas. In these cases, the siren song of crafting a bitingly clever dismantling is oh so tantalizing, and yet I think in the end, this approach is ultimately counterproductive.
Why is this the case? I often receive emails from readers who ask why so many shows receive one star (GOOD) in our rating system, and why there are no zero star shows ever reviewed; surely there must be plenty of boring and awful photography on view in a city as large as New York. If you are the NY Times, and your mandate is to cover the best/most important of what's out there, it isn't particularly surprising that there aren't many negative reviews; in this case, a negative review is only needed when a big/important show is found to be severely lacking, which doesn't happen all that often. This type of negative review is an unmasking of an imposter, where both the artist and venue are generally already successful enough to know better, and should have thick enough skin to handle the feedback.
In our case, since we review photography shows out on the edges a bit more, including many first solo shows, we certainly come across plenty of astonishing clunkers. But in general, we have decided that omission (via no review on the site) is a better punishment for these shows, as opposed to a harsh or diminishing tirade, which may forever haunt the first Google search page for an emerging artist. This is not to say that we are not openly critical; regular readers here will hopefully realize that we do our best to be even handed, and to highlight areas of weakness we see within the larger context of the exhibit or the artist's career, particularly from the subjective perspective of a prospective collector of the work. We have to be balanced (good and bad) or we will lose the trust of our readers.
It's of course a tricky balance. No one wants "grade inflation" or a mass of content-free glowing reviews that parrot the unreadable press release text; we all want real eyewitness accounts of what's on view, with a dose of concise, realtime, critical thinking applied to these shows. If the work is uninspired or derivative, if the prints are lazy or fundamentally flawed, we want to hear about it. At the same time, it is our view that we also want to continue to find ways to encourage artists whose show today may be marginal, but whose next body of work may be transformative. This implies a careful toning down of the rhetoric, so as to find a higher percentage of silver linings rather than scathing dismissals.
Perhaps this desire to have it both ways is a result of our position as a commentator from within the photography community (as active collectors), rather than an objective critic from the outside. In any event, I have no definitive or "right" answers to these issues today, and therefore leave it to the rest of you to consider the rightful place of the negative review and whether or not we have found the appropriate balance in our efforts here.
Monday, August 3, 2009
Weekend Grab Bag
A handful of unrelated photography items from the weekend:
- Cindy Sherman's studio spread in Vogue (here). I'm always interested to see what is hanging on the walls of an artist's studio, especially when it's photography. There is a slide show linked at the bottom of the article, with shots of her work space, prop closets and the like.
- Erwin Olaf contributes some dark images of cobwebbed kitchens with rotting food to an article by Michael Pollan in the New York Times Magazine about the slow demise of cooking (here). Given the Edgar Martins fiasco, notice the extra obvious "photo illustration" captions under each image.
- A generally sad article in the New York Times about the deteriorating financial situation of Annie Leibovitz (here). It's an astonishing but seemingly real possibility that she could lose control of the rights to the output of her entire career.
- Alec Soth's new work, Black Line of Woods, done as commission for the High Museum in Atlanta, opens later this week (here) and is featured/profiled in the New York Times (here). The subject matter of this project is people who are living out in the woods, off the grid, separated from society: "monks, hermits, and survivalists" according to the article. While I haven't seen the pictures (except for the few included in the feature), I think this subject has some timely resonance, especially for those who are feeling trapped by the bad economy and the encroaching world, and are either forced to leave or are looking to "run away" and return to a simpler existence of some kind. I also liked the idea of his list of things to watch for while driving, taped to his steering wheel; it reminded me of the endless obsessive lists of things to photograph that Diane Arbus made.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
The Gallery Show Review is an Endangered Species
For those of you who read from far off locales or in different languages, please accept my apologies for a moment of myopic, New York-centric, English language-only commentary. This afternoon’s post touches on a topic of local interest, and perhaps larger and longer term international consequence: the slow demise of the standard gallery show review (photography shows in specific in this case) in nearly all forms of our media.
As background, let’s step back and take a quick high level survey of how the major NY media outlets take on gallery shows of photography:
New York Times: The big dog in this fight given its large circulation has four distinguished reporters who cover the arts, and who enter the fray of photography from time to time: Roberta Smith, Holland Cotter, Karen Rosenberg and Ken Johnson. These four split up the tasks of writing the feature articles, summaries and blurbs for museum and gallery shows of all kinds, in addition to wider gauged, more theoretical pieces about all facets of the arts. The reality is that photography is just one of many disciplines to be covered by this team, and as result, they tend to cherry pick the best (and often largest) shows to cover. In an average month, this might mean a handful of different shows get coverage, so the Times is a great resource for those who want the top level summary, especially since most of their writing is in long form articles, with deep background and thorough analysis. In general, their collective work is superlative, but by definition, they miss (or fail to report on) a lot of what’s going on.
New Yorker: I’ve come to believe that Vince Aletti is the hardest working photography writer in the city. Every week, he publishes at least a couple if not 4 or 5 fresh reviews of gallery and museum shows focused on photography (the New Yorker tends not to rerun the same blurbs week after week, which most of the other outlets regularly do). In general, these are well written, concise blurbs of 3 or 4 sentences; once a month perhaps, he writes a longer sidebar piece that might be 3 or 4 paragraphs and has more opportunity for a fuller discourse. Given my offhand and nonscientific perusal of gallery guest books, he’s often already seen the show we’re viewing, so he’s clearly also doing a good job of staying on top of what’s current and getting to shows soon after they open. But even Vince can’t be everywhere, so many, many shows go without his stamp of approval. (By the way, once in a while, Aletti will thoroughly dismantle a bad show or weak artist in one of his short blurbs, something that very few others will do (including ourselves) and that I regard with high esteem.)
New York magazine: While Jerry Saltz is a terrific art critic, like the team at the NYTimes, he is covering the whole waterfront of the arts, and not surprisingly photography tends to get short shrift. Most of the time, gallery reviews are limited to one or two sentences, stuffed in the listings in the back, with plus or minus half a dozen of these tiny reviews in any one issue, often repeated week to week. A few times a year at most, a larger, fully fleshed out photography article is written, almost certainly about a museum blockbuster or top tier gallery standout.
Village Voice, Bloomberg, TimeOut, Wall Street Journal and others: These outlets tend to treat photography as a feature story (often written by a freelancer rather than a staff writer it seems), covering the activities of the community from time to time as the situation warrants (big museum show etc.). While they are commenting on the world of photography periodically (which is good), it is not particularly consistent coverage, and certainly doesn’t provide a comprehensive view of what’s going on.
That’s really it, as far as I can tell, for the New York centric media. As a foil, let’s take a quick review of the arts centric media (which runs in parallel) and their efforts to report on gallery shows of photography:
Broad art magazines (Artforum, Art in America etc.): Both Artforum and Art in America do an excellent job of writing solid reviews of gallery shows, often in much more erudite language than the local New York media. The problem is of course that they are covering all of the contemporary art world, in every region and locale, and photography is just a slice of that pie. As such, while there might be half a dozen longer articles and 50 or more three paragraph gallery reviews in any given magazine, there are only likely a few focused on photography and perhaps only one or two in New York (in the case of the longer articles, the norm is none). The writing and scholarship in both magazines is always strong, but their coverage of the world of photography (both vintage and contemporary) paints an uneven picture of the local reality.
Fine art photography magazines (Aperture, Blind Spot, B&W, etc.): In general, it seems that printed photography magazines have moved away from the standard gallery show review, likely because as monthlies, the information lead time creates reviews that are a bit stale. Aperture does do a review or two in each quarterly magazine, but nearly all of these are museum shows that have longer runs. Blind Spot does no reviews at all, since it’s focused on new fresh work. B&W does a few each month, nearly always museums. So while there’s a lot to be gained by reading these and other magazines in a broad sense, their reporting on what’s happening in the galleries is thin at best.
Unless I’m missing something important, that’s basically it in terms of reviews of gallery shows of photography in New York, as seen through the world of printed media. In total, if you read them all (which we do), you’ll get a summary decent picture of the world of photography, but you’ll sure miss a lot of the exciting details that are hiding just underneath the surface.
All of this is background to a larger question that has been irritating me for quite some time. Imagine you are a gallery owner, with an exciting new show of photography now on view. You’ve listed your show in all kinds of arts listing services and sent your announcement card/email to your database list, so the word is most definitely out about the exhibit. If you hit the jackpot, the NY Times will review your show, and perhaps you’ll get an Artforum pick to go with it (the dream double). More likely, you’re banking on a solid blurb from Vince Aletti (which you will dutifully copy and send out to your client list and post on your website), and hoping for some smattering of other press from the other New York outlets.
But let’s say for a moment that Vince doesn’t come by for whatever reason (or God forbid, he slices and dices your show) and the rest of the fair weather features press doesn’t show up either. Then what? The unfortunate reality is this exact situation that occurs for better than half of the photography shows that occur in New York. The big nothing.
Enter the well meaning collectors from DLK COLLECTION, writing on gallery shows for fun. In the best sense of the word, we are amateurs: we are passionate, non-professionals. We don’t copy edit or fact check our posts, we don’t let them sit for a few days so we can wordsmith them to sublime perfection: in fact, we write nearly every post in one continuous draft, without much in the way of background work. And while we strive to be current, write concisely, and apply some level of critical thinking to each and every review, we do not confuse ourselves with real art critics who do this job for a living.
So far this year, we have reviewed 96 photography shows on this site (Vince Aletti certainly has us beat, but I doubt there are any others who have covered as much photography as we have). And here’s the scary thing: in many cases, our amateur review is the only review the gallery show in question received. Even scarier: do a Google search for some of the photographers mentioned, and our review comes up on the first page, again as the only critical commentary on the work. What the hell is going on here?
Now imagine you are the gallery owner we profiled before, and your only reviews are from DLK COLLECTION and others in the blogosphere (Conscientious and Fugitive Vision among others are doing focused photography gallery reviews from time to time as well). Do you disregard these reviews as noise? Do you embrace them as actual “press” and use their output as you would a review from the New Yorker? Do you abandon the old ways and go for a social networking PR strategy instead (Facebook it), especially if you are cultivating a younger collector base?
This post is not the place for answers to these mind boggling questions; I’m still scratching my head from the emails I get that are addressed to “editor”. But the erosion of print media, and in particular, the waning coverage of everyday run of the mill gallery shows, is going to continue to cause gallery owners to rethink how they build word of mouth for their artists, how they find new accepted sources of reference-able credibility to ease the concerns of uncertain collectors, and how they more broadly generate some buzz.
From our standpoint, the situation is certainly sobering. We are now much more aware that a backhanded, slipshod review can be a potential problem for an artist/gallery and that we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard than just cranking something out. Somehow, we stepped into a void (and one that seems to be getting bigger regretfully), and we need to rise to the challenge before us. This is not just for us, but for all of you reading and writing out there. Thoughtful, critical thinking/writing about photography is in short supply. So instead of writing “this is a cool show, check it out” and adding a link on your blog, take the time to take it a level deeper, to engage in some additional discourse. If the coverage of photography (and gallery shows more specifically) by the mainstream press is going to slowly wither away, we as a community need to step into the breach and start writing. Most of all, we owe it to the artists/photographers, who deserve more from this community than deafening silence.
As background, let’s step back and take a quick high level survey of how the major NY media outlets take on gallery shows of photography:
New York Times: The big dog in this fight given its large circulation has four distinguished reporters who cover the arts, and who enter the fray of photography from time to time: Roberta Smith, Holland Cotter, Karen Rosenberg and Ken Johnson. These four split up the tasks of writing the feature articles, summaries and blurbs for museum and gallery shows of all kinds, in addition to wider gauged, more theoretical pieces about all facets of the arts. The reality is that photography is just one of many disciplines to be covered by this team, and as result, they tend to cherry pick the best (and often largest) shows to cover. In an average month, this might mean a handful of different shows get coverage, so the Times is a great resource for those who want the top level summary, especially since most of their writing is in long form articles, with deep background and thorough analysis. In general, their collective work is superlative, but by definition, they miss (or fail to report on) a lot of what’s going on.
New Yorker: I’ve come to believe that Vince Aletti is the hardest working photography writer in the city. Every week, he publishes at least a couple if not 4 or 5 fresh reviews of gallery and museum shows focused on photography (the New Yorker tends not to rerun the same blurbs week after week, which most of the other outlets regularly do). In general, these are well written, concise blurbs of 3 or 4 sentences; once a month perhaps, he writes a longer sidebar piece that might be 3 or 4 paragraphs and has more opportunity for a fuller discourse. Given my offhand and nonscientific perusal of gallery guest books, he’s often already seen the show we’re viewing, so he’s clearly also doing a good job of staying on top of what’s current and getting to shows soon after they open. But even Vince can’t be everywhere, so many, many shows go without his stamp of approval. (By the way, once in a while, Aletti will thoroughly dismantle a bad show or weak artist in one of his short blurbs, something that very few others will do (including ourselves) and that I regard with high esteem.)
New York magazine: While Jerry Saltz is a terrific art critic, like the team at the NYTimes, he is covering the whole waterfront of the arts, and not surprisingly photography tends to get short shrift. Most of the time, gallery reviews are limited to one or two sentences, stuffed in the listings in the back, with plus or minus half a dozen of these tiny reviews in any one issue, often repeated week to week. A few times a year at most, a larger, fully fleshed out photography article is written, almost certainly about a museum blockbuster or top tier gallery standout.
Village Voice, Bloomberg, TimeOut, Wall Street Journal and others: These outlets tend to treat photography as a feature story (often written by a freelancer rather than a staff writer it seems), covering the activities of the community from time to time as the situation warrants (big museum show etc.). While they are commenting on the world of photography periodically (which is good), it is not particularly consistent coverage, and certainly doesn’t provide a comprehensive view of what’s going on.
That’s really it, as far as I can tell, for the New York centric media. As a foil, let’s take a quick review of the arts centric media (which runs in parallel) and their efforts to report on gallery shows of photography:
Broad art magazines (Artforum, Art in America etc.): Both Artforum and Art in America do an excellent job of writing solid reviews of gallery shows, often in much more erudite language than the local New York media. The problem is of course that they are covering all of the contemporary art world, in every region and locale, and photography is just a slice of that pie. As such, while there might be half a dozen longer articles and 50 or more three paragraph gallery reviews in any given magazine, there are only likely a few focused on photography and perhaps only one or two in New York (in the case of the longer articles, the norm is none). The writing and scholarship in both magazines is always strong, but their coverage of the world of photography (both vintage and contemporary) paints an uneven picture of the local reality.
Fine art photography magazines (Aperture, Blind Spot, B&W, etc.): In general, it seems that printed photography magazines have moved away from the standard gallery show review, likely because as monthlies, the information lead time creates reviews that are a bit stale. Aperture does do a review or two in each quarterly magazine, but nearly all of these are museum shows that have longer runs. Blind Spot does no reviews at all, since it’s focused on new fresh work. B&W does a few each month, nearly always museums. So while there’s a lot to be gained by reading these and other magazines in a broad sense, their reporting on what’s happening in the galleries is thin at best.
Unless I’m missing something important, that’s basically it in terms of reviews of gallery shows of photography in New York, as seen through the world of printed media. In total, if you read them all (which we do), you’ll get a summary decent picture of the world of photography, but you’ll sure miss a lot of the exciting details that are hiding just underneath the surface.
All of this is background to a larger question that has been irritating me for quite some time. Imagine you are a gallery owner, with an exciting new show of photography now on view. You’ve listed your show in all kinds of arts listing services and sent your announcement card/email to your database list, so the word is most definitely out about the exhibit. If you hit the jackpot, the NY Times will review your show, and perhaps you’ll get an Artforum pick to go with it (the dream double). More likely, you’re banking on a solid blurb from Vince Aletti (which you will dutifully copy and send out to your client list and post on your website), and hoping for some smattering of other press from the other New York outlets.
But let’s say for a moment that Vince doesn’t come by for whatever reason (or God forbid, he slices and dices your show) and the rest of the fair weather features press doesn’t show up either. Then what? The unfortunate reality is this exact situation that occurs for better than half of the photography shows that occur in New York. The big nothing.
Enter the well meaning collectors from DLK COLLECTION, writing on gallery shows for fun. In the best sense of the word, we are amateurs: we are passionate, non-professionals. We don’t copy edit or fact check our posts, we don’t let them sit for a few days so we can wordsmith them to sublime perfection: in fact, we write nearly every post in one continuous draft, without much in the way of background work. And while we strive to be current, write concisely, and apply some level of critical thinking to each and every review, we do not confuse ourselves with real art critics who do this job for a living.
So far this year, we have reviewed 96 photography shows on this site (Vince Aletti certainly has us beat, but I doubt there are any others who have covered as much photography as we have). And here’s the scary thing: in many cases, our amateur review is the only review the gallery show in question received. Even scarier: do a Google search for some of the photographers mentioned, and our review comes up on the first page, again as the only critical commentary on the work. What the hell is going on here?
Now imagine you are the gallery owner we profiled before, and your only reviews are from DLK COLLECTION and others in the blogosphere (Conscientious and Fugitive Vision among others are doing focused photography gallery reviews from time to time as well). Do you disregard these reviews as noise? Do you embrace them as actual “press” and use their output as you would a review from the New Yorker? Do you abandon the old ways and go for a social networking PR strategy instead (Facebook it), especially if you are cultivating a younger collector base?
This post is not the place for answers to these mind boggling questions; I’m still scratching my head from the emails I get that are addressed to “editor”. But the erosion of print media, and in particular, the waning coverage of everyday run of the mill gallery shows, is going to continue to cause gallery owners to rethink how they build word of mouth for their artists, how they find new accepted sources of reference-able credibility to ease the concerns of uncertain collectors, and how they more broadly generate some buzz.
From our standpoint, the situation is certainly sobering. We are now much more aware that a backhanded, slipshod review can be a potential problem for an artist/gallery and that we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard than just cranking something out. Somehow, we stepped into a void (and one that seems to be getting bigger regretfully), and we need to rise to the challenge before us. This is not just for us, but for all of you reading and writing out there. Thoughtful, critical thinking/writing about photography is in short supply. So instead of writing “this is a cool show, check it out” and adding a link on your blog, take the time to take it a level deeper, to engage in some additional discourse. If the coverage of photography (and gallery shows more specifically) by the mainstream press is going to slowly wither away, we as a community need to step into the breach and start writing. Most of all, we owe it to the artists/photographers, who deserve more from this community than deafening silence.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Danny Lyon's Defeated Demo Driver
Once in a while, a newspaper picture will stop me in my tracks, and this image from an article about Danny Lyon in the New York Times this past Sunday (here) did just that. It's called Defeated Demo Driver:
The targets painted on the door, the chain and duct tape holding the door shut, the skull tattoo on his wrist, the mashed up car in the background, and his dejected stare all come together to make a memorable image. The article is well worth a read too.
The targets painted on the door, the chain and duct tape holding the door shut, the skull tattoo on his wrist, the mashed up car in the background, and his dejected stare all come together to make a memorable image. The article is well worth a read too.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Photography in the New York Times
Back in September, I was reading Holland Cotter's review of Catherine Opie's retrospective at the Guggenheim (which we will cover soon I imagine), and I started to wonder what your view of the whole world of photography would look like if your only news source was the printed version of the New York Times (no online additions). October is a busy month for photography; there are lots of gallery and museum shows opening and the NY photography auction season takes place. So I thought I would do an experiment and cut out every article about photography for the entire month and then put them together to get a picture of how the NYT was reporting on the medium.
Of course, there is great photography published in every section, every day in the NYT. But I decided not to count great photojournalism in this tally; only the articles in the Arts section which covered the medium as an art form. (There was recently an article about a well known collector in the Obituaries which I also did not count.) I also did not count the advertisements for gallery shows and auctions, of which there were many.
So here's the data:
October 3
Full article in Arts about Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum (Cotter)
Short article in Arts about Josef Koudelka at Aperture (Smith)
Short blurb in Listings about Catherine Opie at the Guggenheim (Cotter)
Short blurb in Listings about New Photography 2008 at the MoMA (Rosenberg)
Short blurb in Listings about Hans Silverster at Marlborough (Smith)
Short blurb in Listings about Roe Etheridge at Kreps (Johnson)
October 10
Short blurb in Listings about Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum (Cotter)
Short blurb in Listings about Catherine Opie at the Guggenheim (Cotter)
Short blurb in Listings about Josef Koudelka at Aperture (Smith)
October 17
Short blurb in Listings about Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum (Cotter)
Short blurb in Listings about Catherine Opie at the Guggenheim (Cotter)
Short blurb in Listings about Susan Meiselas at the ICP (Johnson)
October 24
Short blurb in Listings about Catherine Opie at the Guggenheim (Cotter)
Short blurb in Listings about Josef Koudelka at Aperture (Smith)
October 31
Short blurb in Listings about Catherine Opie at the Guggenheim (Cotter)
Short blurb in Listings about America and the Tintype at the ICP (Rosenberg)
So what are the conclusions?
First, anecdotally, I think of photography as being generally well represented in the NYT, but at least in the last month, this wasn't the case. If you are a purist and eliminate Gilbert & George from your count, then there was only one real article longer than one paragraph in the entire month. I also think of the Sunday Arts & Leisure being a good place for photography in more depth, but not so this month.
Second, I had not noticed how the NYT clumps the Arts news together and pushes it out on Fridays. I also had not really noticed how the same shows get repeated week to week in the Listings.
Third, the group above is mostly established, well known artists. Not a lot of experimentation or coverage of emerging artists going on here.
Fourth, there is no coverage of any exhibits outside of the New York area.
Lastly, they have clearly delivered the message that if you are going to see only one exhibit of photography any time soon, it should be the Catherine Opie show.
This post is not meant as a gotcha on the NYT. I conceived of it as simply a data gathering exercise to see if there were any patterns (and indeed, there were). I came away with the conclusion that if you are passionately interested in photography (as we are), the NYT can be a good first pass source, but if you want a fuller picture of the real action in this medium, you will need to look elsewhere to bring in other viewpoints. All in all, perhaps that conclusion is not surprising.
Of course, there is great photography published in every section, every day in the NYT. But I decided not to count great photojournalism in this tally; only the articles in the Arts section which covered the medium as an art form. (There was recently an article about a well known collector in the Obituaries which I also did not count.) I also did not count the advertisements for gallery shows and auctions, of which there were many.
So here's the data:
October 3
Full article in Arts about Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum (Cotter)
Short article in Arts about Josef Koudelka at Aperture (Smith)
Short blurb in Listings about Catherine Opie at the Guggenheim (Cotter)
Short blurb in Listings about New Photography 2008 at the MoMA (Rosenberg)
Short blurb in Listings about Hans Silverster at Marlborough (Smith)
Short blurb in Listings about Roe Etheridge at Kreps (Johnson)
October 10
Short blurb in Listings about Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum (Cotter)
Short blurb in Listings about Catherine Opie at the Guggenheim (Cotter)
Short blurb in Listings about Josef Koudelka at Aperture (Smith)
October 17
Short blurb in Listings about Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum (Cotter)
Short blurb in Listings about Catherine Opie at the Guggenheim (Cotter)
Short blurb in Listings about Susan Meiselas at the ICP (Johnson)
October 24
Short blurb in Listings about Catherine Opie at the Guggenheim (Cotter)
Short blurb in Listings about Josef Koudelka at Aperture (Smith)
October 31
Short blurb in Listings about Catherine Opie at the Guggenheim (Cotter)
Short blurb in Listings about America and the Tintype at the ICP (Rosenberg)
So what are the conclusions?
First, anecdotally, I think of photography as being generally well represented in the NYT, but at least in the last month, this wasn't the case. If you are a purist and eliminate Gilbert & George from your count, then there was only one real article longer than one paragraph in the entire month. I also think of the Sunday Arts & Leisure being a good place for photography in more depth, but not so this month.
Second, I had not noticed how the NYT clumps the Arts news together and pushes it out on Fridays. I also had not really noticed how the same shows get repeated week to week in the Listings.
Third, the group above is mostly established, well known artists. Not a lot of experimentation or coverage of emerging artists going on here.
Fourth, there is no coverage of any exhibits outside of the New York area.
Lastly, they have clearly delivered the message that if you are going to see only one exhibit of photography any time soon, it should be the Catherine Opie show.
This post is not meant as a gotcha on the NYT. I conceived of it as simply a data gathering exercise to see if there were any patterns (and indeed, there were). I came away with the conclusion that if you are passionately interested in photography (as we are), the NYT can be a good first pass source, but if you want a fuller picture of the real action in this medium, you will need to look elsewhere to bring in other viewpoints. All in all, perhaps that conclusion is not surprising.
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