Introducing New Site for Art Criticism
If you’re in our Facebook group, you already know that the latest branch in the Chicago Art Magazine tree has been sprouted, and is held in the capable hands of Senior Editor and art critic, Bret Schneider.
Schneider is:
The Co-director of alternative art space Mvsevm
Contributor & member of Platypus Journal
Curator of the Home Listening Series at The Green Bicycle Organization
Working Artist (in a broad range of media)
Editor of Idea Bank Journal
Co-director of MoSo experimental music label
And most importantly, a ping pong enthusiast
It’s always been in the plans to launch a criticism site, as there is a great deal of consensus that Chicago needs more thoughtful, long-form criticism in order to encourage dialogue within our art community. On this site, we’ve always differentiated between reviews and criticism, and we treat them as separate editorial entities because it’s our feeling that you need both forms to best showcase a large city’s art scene.
So Mr. Schneider goes boldly forth with this new venture. He made an interesting comment once about not just creating written dialogue about art, but dialogue about art that comes from a physical community. So the hope is not just a written discussion, but also a community that gathers together in a room to discuss ideas, and some of the documents featured come out of those types of discussion as well.
For those of you interested in the business/logistics angle, Chicago Art Criticism is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chicago Art Magazine. You might want to look at the “Big Magazine Theory“, which details the plan for commercial content that subsidizes scholarly content. The hope is to develop a core, niche audience for Chicago Art Criticism. We can enter into this knowing that it’s fine for Chicago Art Criticism to not drive the large-scale traffic needed to satisfy advertisers. It’s the job of the commercial content (the top 10 lists and catchy features) of the other sites to draw enough funding to float this more non-commercial venture.
