The Brooklyn Rail

I’ve been writing about art for around fourteen years. I always wanted to be a journalist but wasn’t sure about what beat I wanted. Subjects like foreign affairs, fashion, travel, and art interested me. As an adult, I had a personal interest in art, and loved going to exhibitions. It probably started out from witnessing people like Barry McGee go from a graffiti artist to a fine artist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and as basic as it sounds, my passion for Impressionism started after I saw a Monet water lilies painting in Titanic. I never set out to be an art writer. Had I known I was going to be an art writer, I would have majored in art history. 

I started my career in hard news, but that could get heavy, and I found that I missed more creative subjects, so I started cold pitching interviews with artists and stories about art exhibitions to publications like the Economist and T, and they took them. When I had the opportunity to continue being an online producer at a major news network or write articles as the style editor for Artinfo for a pay cut, I took the pay cut to write more. Call it the naivete of youth; if I could rewind time I would have gone into tech or advertising. Back in 2010 it was much easier to survive on a full-time journalist’s or editor’s salary, so I didn’t worry too much about it not being too lucrative. I suppose I also believed that journalism was a career path in which I could always make a stable income. 

I started freelancing in 2013 after I was laid off at Artinfo. I had no idea what I was doing and nobody taught me. I started pitching, and I managed to regularly place articles. It was a lot easier back then. I could pitch something and get an assignment a few hours later. Now, you need to pitch weeks in advance, and editors need to run pitches by their teams, so I try not to pitch so last minute, but sometimes you can’t help it. Sometimes I’d randomly see an exhibition that I thought would be a great fit and pitch last minute. There are more exhibitions, artists, and art communications agencies than ever, but fewer platforms on which to publish criticism. For instance, in fashion, it’s easier for a designer to place their clothes on a celebrity than to get an editorial feature in a major publication. 

My writing educates the general public on art and culture; I usually don’t write for an art-specific audience specialized in art. My articles have helped careers, legitimized artists, and raised funds for institutions and organizations. My words have also put the spotlight on women artists and artists of color, two marginalized communities who deserve to be highlighted. It gives readers a window into a rarefied world that they don’t always have the opportunity to observe themselves. 

Phong Bui is absolutely correct when he says, “without a critical response and the documentation of exhibitions, a show might as well never have existed.” How will the world know art history when there is no documentation of an exhibition? There are too many exhibitions and too few platforms on which to document and review them. Something’s gotta give. What’s the solution? 

With social media and AI, things are a lot different. People don’t want to read, so I need to be savvy and venture into other mediums, like podcasts, Instagram, or TikTok. Written art criticism, or at the very least, features on artists and exhibitions, is essential for the general public and those in the art world to learn about art and to keep abreast of the changes. But I suppose, with all the opinions on social media, anybody and everybody could be a critic. 

Although we don’t get paid well, art writing has allowed me to travel around the world, visit places, exhibitions, and events I would have never seen otherwise and to engage with brilliant (and some not-so-brilliant) minds, ranging from my fellow writers and editors to artists and academics, curators, collectors, celebrities, and more. I may not be wealthy financially, but I certainly am in terms of cultural capital. 

I am still an art writer, but I can’t make a comfortable living freelancing or even working in-house at a publication. I’ve had to diversify my income streams in order to make a comfortable living, and I do that through copywriting, partnerships, and marketing projects. I’ve seen many young art writers work in art communications because it provides more stability than being a journalist, editor, or writer.  We do have to seize opportunities wherever and when they arise. Fortunately, they do.