in the year 2100 art journalists will type in invisible ink

With newspapers in terminal decline, what future for arts journalism?
Coverage of the arts is migrating online but unless someone is prepared to pay for it, the outlook is uncertain By András Szántó///The Art Newspaper

excepts/quick summary of article (because i like to add to the copying of information and scaled down fluff of what art journalism has become, wink-wink):

Arts journalism as we used to know it is sinking with the ship.
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Specialised writers are giving way to generalists. Culture sections are being tossed overboard (standalone book review sections, in particular, are a dying breed). Article lengths and “news holes” (space for editorial content) are shrinking. All this has eviscerated newspapers’ ability to deliver quality arts coverage, which, as a result, must migrate elsewhere.
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More people than ever are reading and writing about art, thanks to the web.
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The problem is not the scarcity or the quality of arts journalism (the latter has always been mixed), but that no one is paying for it—at least not yet.
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One strategy is for individual blogs to scale up to a size where their writers become popular “personal brands”. This has happened in political punditry and may happen in entertainment writing. But it is unlikely in visual arts journalism, where audiences even for top writers are thin.
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A more realistic, already extant scenario links blogs to heavily trafficked journalism, entertainment, or aggregator sites, which attract large numbers of readers by providing access to a wide range of news content...Under such arrangements, bloggers get a cut of the advertising fees along with greater visibility...
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When it comes to fair and balanced reporting, the record is mixed. On the one hand, bloggers are breaking stories, with arts organisations (or their disgruntled employees) obliging them with excellent scoops.
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Philanthropy can help to build a new arts journalism infrastructure to offset the collapse of local coverage.
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This brings us to the third, and arguably most controversial, cure for the ills of arts journalism—cultural organisations.
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Writers will struggle to reclaim the access and influence they achieved with the backing of prestigious journalism brands.
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Our notion of what a “news organisation” or an “art magazine” is supposed to do will be upended as new relationships crystallise between the arts, the media and the public.

Artists Are Not, Shana Lutker: The Highlights

"...An art historian might teach at a university, write essays, organize conferences, run an art journal, and curate exhibitions. Well, I do those things too—and all of those things are part of my role as an artist. But I also make art..." FULL STORY Artists Are Not, Shana Lutker
The Highlights

Silvia Kolbowski: Two in One

Silvia Kolbowski: Two in One
"The following is President Obama’s inaugural speech, edited to remove references to religion, the celebration of militarism, delusions of national power, the phantasmatic projection of enemies, the glorification of the struggles of the poor, the puritanical elevation of suffering, the erasure of difference, etc." CONTINUE
E-Flux Journal

time for your think break

"...For an artist to write reviews, curate exhibitions, or run a gallery is a contemporary art-world commonplace. But these occupations are usually regarded as secondary; the artist is identified primarily as a producer of a body of works, which other activities only supplement. By abdicating this privileged place of artistic identity, Lawler manages to escape institutional definitions of artistic activity as an autonomous aesthetic exploration. Her objective is not so much to uncover hidden ideological agendas, but to disrupt the institutional boundaries that determine and separate the discrete identities of artist and artwork from an apparatus that supposedly merely supplements them..." Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights

TRYHARDER is doing cartwheels

just read this one paragraph, I promise it won't hurt

"...Asher took Duchamp one step further. Art is not art because it is signed by an artist or shown in a museum or any other 'institutional' site. Art is art when it exists for discourses and practices that recognize it as art, value and evaluate it as art, and consume it as art, whether as object, gesture, representation, or only idea. The institution of art is not something external to any work of art but the irreducible condition of its existence as art. No matter how public in placement, immaterial, transitory, relational, everyday, or even invisible, what is announced and perceived as art is always already institutionalized, simply because it exists within the perception of participants in the field of art as art, a perception not necessarily aesthetic but fundamentally social in its determination. Asher took Duchamp one step further. Art is not art because it is signed by an artist or shown in a museum or any other 'institutional' site. Art is art when it exists for discourses and practices that recognize it as art, value and evaluate it as art, and consume it as art, whether as object, gesture, representation, or only idea. The institution of art is not something external to any work of art but the irreducible condition of its existence as art. No matter how public in placement, immaterial, transitory, relational,
everyday, or even invisible, what is announced and perceived as art is always already institutionalized, simply because it exists within the perception of participants in the field of art as art, a perception not necessarily aesthetic but fundamentally social in its determination..."
Andrea Fraser: From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique, Art Forum Sept. 05
OK, now read one more time.

Josh Smith Talks About Currents, 2008- /// Art Forum Feb 09

(click to read full size, duh)

I enjoyed:
"...I can just look at anything and paint it. Maybe not perfectly, but I can do it. I can make a really good painting. Last year, I started making paintings of fish that way. I thought it would be nice to have a big painting on the wall of a fish jumping. That is exciting. It makes you wonder why it is there. It makes you proud of seeing it. There's a stupidity to it—and then again, it's nature. Courbet made a career out of that..." Josh Smith