Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is making culture a frontline in its impending war against the New York Times, with the addition of arts reporters in its soon-to-be launched local section. And last week, The New York Observer, the scrappy pink rag read by culture and media mavens around town, announced a major expansion of its arts coverage, starting March 31, under former Wall Street Journal culture editor and AWS-friend Alexandra Peers.

What can this mean for the visual arts? We may get some behind-the-scenes reporting on the art business, as the Observer has reliably done on the media and film businesses. Peers, a 22-year veteran of arts journalism, summarizes her aspirations for the section this way: “As entertainment, pop culture and TV coverage mushroomed in the past few years, fine arts got a little lost in the shuffle. The same culture sections that are recapping “Lost” don’t want copy on Marina Abramovic; it just doesn’t jive. At the same time, people are choking the aisles at the Armory fair and lining up round the block to see Gogo’s Picasso show. The fine arts needed more of a place of their own.”

Peers believes the Observer can use the new space to go beyond the usual suspects. “You would think the art world was just Gagosian, Richard Feigen and Philippe de Montebello having espresso at Sant Ambroeus. Which of course it is, but I hope to pull in a few more of the players: curators, photo gallerists, museum trustees, bloggers, the foundations. The art world’s power base is broader – and more interesting – than most general readers know.”

Amen. It bears noting, however, that these experiments will need to be backed up by advertising sales and buzz. Meanwhile, the carnage in the culture-news business continues unabated. If you read the terrific recently re-launched arts journalism blog, ARTicles, you know that the industry-wide defenestration of arts writers is now reaching the point where there are no more staffers to fire. Arts blogs remain a labor of love, a journalistic sideline, financially unsustainable. And the sort of name dropping and name calling that has made Facebook an art-talk venue lately is hardly a substitute for serious journalism.

Clearly, though, there is a hunger for reliable writing on the arts, and the recent developments offer a sliver of hope. When newspapers finally realize they’ve completely lost their breaking-news franchise to electronic media, will they rekindle their friendship with art?

I think we’ve seen that some number of art fairs are now fixtures of the art world’s event-cycle; they offer a service that I think is reasonable: to bring together in one spot a wide variety of dealers from around the world to showcase the work of the artists they represent (and, in some cases, those that they don’t.) Are they ideal venues in which to view and to think about works of art? No. But do they offer, as Sarah Thornton wrote about the Armory, a “terrible viewing experience” because of their “indiscriminate lighting, bad acoustics, awkward floor plan, and dearth of food and drink”? I don’t think so. (If Thornton had added “droves of tourists snapping iPhone pictures and obliviously jostling everyone and everything while plugged into an audio tour,” I’d have thought she was describing what it’s like to visit MoMA.)

I just don’t find this kind of commentary interesting or necessary. Let’s treat the fairs like what we know they are: trade shows. What do I think of the trade shows?  Were they strong? How did they look…”overall”? Are they forums for engaging with and thinking about and assessing the aesthetics and politics of works of art? Really? Are these the questions we want the answers to where art fairs are concerned? Did dealers make sales, and by making those sales, put money in their artists’ accounts so that those artists can keep doing what they do (or do something different, if they so choose)? That’s the bottom line question (no pun intended) in my mind. If the background din and lack of snacks made it harder for collectors to buy work, then yes, let’s talk about that. But if not, then let’s not.

And so sorry, but for as much as everyone squealed with delight about Independent (a.k.a. the ‘Black and White and Monochrome’ show), it was not that great. It was not some revelation. Was there good work? Of course. Was it self-congratulatory? Unquestionably, yes. But there I go, commenting on an art fair as it if deserved the attention. It is what it is…and that should be enough.

There must be an astronomical term for this week’s stellar array of events in New York. It’s certainly a cluster of some sort.

Once distant galaxies, the ADAA Art Fair and the Armory Show, are opening on back-to-back nights this year, forming a unified mega-event constellation. They are flanked in time and space by the Whitney Biennial and the William Kentridge juggernaut, which is merrily winding its way from the Southern Hemisphere through the top cultural institutions of Manhattan. Established events with names invoking celestial phenomena—Nova, Scope, Pulse—add to the epic convergence. Toss in the newcomers, such as the Independent art fair-exhibition hybrid, plus dozens of piggybacking gallery shows, lectures, panel discussions, and cocktail parties, and the results will overwhelm the endurance and attention spans of even the most dedicated art-world regulars.

What we are witnessing, in fact, is the Miami syndrome, transplanted to New York. Opportunistic calendaring, mixed with fear that collectors will only fly in once, has created a matrix of activity that is as impressive as it may be self-defeating. Game theorists call this the tragedy of the commons: Too many cows grazing on the too little land. We shall enjoy it while it lasts. But will quantity translate into quality, sales, and critical impact?

Bloated biannials and survey shows were a boom-time phenomenon we can do without. They are self-defeating in terms of their purpose, which is to provide a point of view about what’s going on. And for better or worse, art fairs offer a more comprehensive summary of the totality of artistic activity.

Cultural bloat is an understudied phenomenon. Its effects are subtle and pernicious. On the surface, bloat entices us with more and more of a supposedly good thing: brick-size novels, three-hour movies, fancier museum buildings and cultural extravaganzas that betoken civic pride and scaling national ambitions.

Underneath all this more-ness, however, lurks the shadow of unsustainability. And that’s hardly the biggest threat. The lure of large numbers relieves the pressure to leave material on the cutting room floor. The cacophonous results mimic the quick verdicts and ceaseless profusion of the marketplace. A more restricted format, by contrast, tilts power to curators. It flushes away the fluff and injects some editorial discipline into the enterprise of art. Think of it as slow cultural food: Harder to cultivate and prepare, more satisfying to consume.

There’s been a lot of writing lately about how austerity is good for art. Much of it is sentimental bunk. Artists deserve to live well, like anyone else. But a case can be made, I believe, for trimming output and narrowing distribution channels. We may have less art to see, but more attention to lavish on it.

The hefty tome turned up in the mail the other day, and, somewhat to my surprise, I actually enjoyed thumbing through it. The work of a team lead by the Russian financier Sergey Skaterschikov, it includes a solid overview of the art and art-services market, along with detailed analyses of the market’s top tier, the 1,000 top-selling works at auction tallied in the so-called Skate’s Top 1000.

The book should delight all cultural enthusiasts who thrill to obscure quantitative trivia. We learn, for example, that:
• Works by 300,000 artists, valued in total at $400 billion, are available to trade at any time on the global art market, resulting in a trading volume of $60 billion per year (with 90 percent of transactions falling under $10,000).
• One million individuals and estates, 50 art funds, and 500 museums buy art regularly.
• The 1,000 most expensive works sold at auction since 1985 were made by 183 artists and are collectively valued at $13.2 billion as of Apr. 30, 2009.
• The world’s museums hold 100 million works of art; 100,000 of these can be expected to come to market annually through deaccessioning.
• Art valuation decreases with size.
• There are 10 million art works with pricing information available in published databases, and one million additional works come to market and are added to such databases each year.
• Between 2002-2009, the combined value of living artists in the top 1,000 works grew by 350 percent.
• Despite much talk about globalization, and a 20-fold increase in artists from Brazil, Russia, India and China in the market’s top tier, these artists account for only 1.5 percent of the combined value of the top-1000.
• About 70-150 million works of art circulate on the market at any time.

On and on it goes—a seemingly bottomless trove of information, charts, and graphs. I relate these factoids without any ability to vouch for their accuracy. As Skaterschikov himself advises, “be careful what you read here.” Even so, they illustrate the vast scope of the art-investing universe today, and the audacity of those who seek to enter it and gain from it. How do the numbers sound to you?

I imagine that no one will agree with me, but that’s OK— I have my reasons. Sehgal took a situation that takes place daily at the museum —people having directed or undirected conversations— and extracted the art from the equation. (In the spirit of disclosure, I used to work at the Guggenheim’s education department there for seven years, organizing the museum tours and talks, which may have colored my experience, but I think that is besides the point).

For those of you who still have yet to visit, here is a report: As I went up the first ramp a 9 year-old girl greeted me. “Welcome, this is a piece by Tino Sehgal. Can I ask you a question? What is progress?” As we walked up the ramps, I spoke about wanting to become a better person when you grow up. While I was trying to explain that, a teenager appeared and took over, while the 9 year-old disappeared. “Can you elaborate?” As I labored to understand myself what I had meant after a few minutes a tall guy in his 30s arrived speaking to me about sprinting, which tied somehow with progress. He was replaced a bit later by an older man in his 60s who told me: “you know, my two best friends are alcoholic, and I wonder what that’s about.” This conversation became the most existential of all, so much so that neither of us had realized that we had reached the top of the ramp and my interlocutor was so absorbed by it that he temporarily forgot that he was part of an art piece. “Oh my god”, he said. “Usually I am not here by this point”. Then he added: “Thank you. This is a piece by Tino Sehgal” and left. Finally alone, I felt a bit of melancholy at that point, I am not exactly sure why.

The piece in essence uses the most basic technique of a gallery tour, which is to extract the information of the viewer, only that in this case the object from which one starts the conversation is not an artwork on view but the viewers themselves. It also is based on the principle that in discussing art what we truly learn is not an abstract concept that is bestowed upon us, but the personal meaning that we construct on our own either by conversation with others or with ourselves. I also find it interesting that Sehgal calls his actors “interpreters”. But to say something is educational is the kiss of death in art, that is why it is better not to tell anyone.

But then again, I know I am being facetious about this work being education: in truth, while I have been up and down those ramps in museum tours, I had never had a conversation like that. Something strange and different had happened. So, aside of whether Sehgal may or may not be championing the causes of museum education, my question for all of you is: how do you feel about artworks that are only about social interaction? Do they represent progress?

To measure the pain and the sorrow, Americans for the Arts, the Washington based advocacy group, has come up with a National Art Index, “the first study to measure the health and vitality of the arts in the United States.” It’s not a pretty picture. The index fell 4 points last year, reflecting steep drops in attendance and support, along with other downward trends. Thirty thousand arts nonprofits have been added since the index peaked, in 1999, so demand clearly “outlags capacity”—a problem that won’t go away even when the economy perks up.

Meanwhile, a group of arts wonks (myself included) are debating the language of arts-policy and advocacy this week at ArtsJournal. The headline so far: we lack compelling and uncompromised language to galvanize support for the arts and expand the purview of cultural policy to include the things that really matter, such as technology, media, and intellectual property regulation.

What does this mean for the visual art world? Americans for the Arts is largely concerned with the nonprofit arts. Its indeces may not faithfully reflect the condition of visual art markets and institutions. Are we any better off? What would be the right measures to diagnose the health of the visual arts? And where do you see the trend lines leading in the year ahead?

Private donors remain skittish. Corporate support is hard to find and ever more tightly tethered to marketing priorities. Public funding is jeopardised by imploding budgets and competing needs. Foundations, too, are smarting from losses. Some are rethinking their support for culture altogether. Venerable charities like the Ford and Rockefeller foundations no longer have divisions with “art” in their names. Museum income from tourists, members, publications, shops, rentals and restaurants is stagnant. It has been a perfect storm.

Whilst András is right to highlight the woes of incumbent institutions trying to fit existing plans into shrinking budgets, I wonder if some of this wasn’t inevitable?   The hubris of recent years and the multitude of new small private museums seeded by privately amassed collections has spread curatorial resources rather thin and scattered good works into more buildings.   Maybe we have too many institutions?   András again.

Museums are joining forces more readily on publications and web projects, such as Artbabble, a kind of YouTube for art videos. But while content partnerships are proliferating, museums have stopped well short of the kind of consolidation that reshapes other distressed industries. “There is a pride factor that makes it very difficult to merge,” notes Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

One hears a gentle sigh of relief around the globe, as the financial markets rebound, so this may all soon become academic.   But I wonder…   So what do you think?  A disaster for Art Lovers everywhere?  Or a much needed shake-up amongst our venerable institutions?

Jerry Saltz, New York magazine:

It looks like the sacrosanct wall between museums, galleries, and private collectors in the art world is about to come down. In what is a game-changer and a hail-Mary pass that will likely be fretted about by many, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art appears ready to name New York art dealer Jeffrey Deitch its new director, according to multiple art world sources. [...] American museums usually pick directors from the curatorial or academic ranks; none have ever been run by a former gallery owner. Scolds will imagine immoral scenarios of a wolf in the fold and tut-tut over the possibility of an uncouth, craven commercial dealer trading museum treasures for market-share, making back room deals, and violating ethics.

Mike Boehm, Los Angeles Times reporting:

Jeff Poe of the L.A. gallery Blum & Poe [said] “My immediate response was that there’s no way, it doesn’t make any sense” that a leading dealer like Deitch would give up his business to lead a nonprofit museum, Poe said. “But the more I think about it, it would be really interesting. He would be able to deal with the politics involved in a job like that. I’d welcome him with open arms.”

[Hugh Davies, director of San Diego's Museum of Contemporary Art] predicted that if Deitch, who is in his late 50s, was the choice, he would face skepticism or worse about his move from the commercial end of the art world, championing the work of Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, to museum work.

Even before opening a gallery myself, I never quite understood the widely held notion that commercial art dealers should be automatically disqualified from such positions. To be blunt, with many US museum directors known to have engaged in activities ranging from smuggling objects into the country to using public funding to finance vanity exhibitions designed to flatter certain powerful trustees, mere “immoral scenarios of a wolf in the fold” would be a significant ethical upgrade at many institutions. Moreover, among all the authority figures within the art world, the small business owners who trade in art are rare in putting their own money and hence personal financial security where their visions are. When Jeffrey Deitch or any dealer invests in an artist’s career, it is predominantly at his/her own personal risk. If there’s anything that MoCA seemed to have been in short supply of recently, it is this degree of real-world accountability.

Paraphrasing something journalist and museum monitor Tyler Green noted on Facebook over the weekend, the question shouldn’t be “Is it appropriate to make an art dealer the director of a museum?” but rather only “What makes this art dealer appropriate as the director of this museum?” In other words, why assert that there’s something inherently corrupting about the gallery owner profession? The only valid question is: what are this candidate’s qualifications for the job?

In the case of Mr. Deitch, Jerry Saltz makes the following case in his post:

Deitch, a gadfly and jack-of-all-trades, is a consummate insider with credibility and real-world skills. He not only has a Harvard MBA and was a Vice President of Citibank, he’s a great writer, a seasoned curator, has advised international collectors, and knows the inner workings of art and money, artists and collectors, institutions and the public. Really, the iffiest thing about Deitch has been his gallery program, loaded as it often is with youth-culture attractions, gratuitous raciness, and snazzy production numbers.

Besides what’s actually been published over the weekend, the amount of behind-the-scenes chatter over this rumor has been truly off the dial, at least in New York. The arguments against Mr. Deitch’s qualifications seem to range from he’s too New York-centric to understand what MoCA needs (an odd concern in the era of museums casting their nets globally to recruit) to he has no non-profit experience to he has no museum collection-building experience (although he has helped build some significant private collections and I’m pressed to understand the significant difference, save in funding methods).

One of the most interesting threads among the gossip, from my point of view anyway, is what happens to a dealer’s program in such a case? As there is no precedent, per se, it leaves several questions wide open, including Would he naturally favor the artists he’s been working with at the museum over others? Would his gallery program be taken over, intact, by someone else or simply dispersed? and Will he still throw those fabulous parties in Miami every December? (OK, so apparently only I am interested in that answer, but….)

Putting the fun of gossip aside, however, the only valid points for discussing the rumor seriously are comparing Mr. Deitch’s applicable experience in funding, managing boards, and building collections with those of the other candidates. He has proven himself capable of switching hats and doing an exemplary job in multiple work environments. The suggestion that somehow he’s ineligible because one of those environments was the commercial art world strikes me as unfounded and silly.

Like so many of its recently-axed midsize peers, I.D. — International Design — leaves a much larger hole in our cultural landscape than its modest circulation numbers suggest. Say what you will about the promise of online media, there is a kind of energy and legacy that develops around a magazine that remains unique to the form. A great magazine is a network and a through-line: something that, done right, can lend a segment of our culture a sense of coherence, validation, continuity and substance. The event last night, attended by several generations of former editors and contributors, was a clear manifestation of the kind of discourse a magazine can create. It is a decades-long conversation between those who care about something, and one that is unlikely to be satisfyingly supplanted by an online alternative, at least not soon.

Along with these magazines, we usually lose their archives and libraries, their established voices and obsessions, their particular and often quirky ways of going about things. Also gone, or left without a common anchoring point, are the clusters of fans and gawkers who follow the moves of these magazines avidly and who are tied together by their love or hate of what their current stewards decide to do.

For design, the loss of I.D. (disclosure: my wife used to work there, and I had written for them on occasion) means the loss of a platform for serious dialogue about a cultural form that sorely needs it. Design is one of the most exciting corners of our culture right now. But without a thoughtful exchange of ideas, it devolves into mere consumption, trapped in its own glamorous, self-referential ghetto.

I.D. gave expression to the highest ambitions of design. At its best, it reminded us that design is about art, urbanity, civilization, and our shared hopes for a better future. We can all drink to that.