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.