An Arts Blogs Primer

Arts bloggers are creating a vibrant world of chatter, critique and debate online. [Image: Screengrab, Theatre Notes]   

Blogs are basically a brilliant concept of user-friendly software. They are updateable online web pages, easy to set up and, crucially, interactive, allowing readers to comment underneath posts. They first caught on as everyman’s chance to exhibit himself: there are blogs in which teens pour out their hearts, the sex blogs of housewives, work blogs in which employees bitch about their bosses, blogs in which people record each mundane detail of their day or upload endless photographs of their cats.

But it wasn’t long before people exploiting the public potential of the form. Independent journalists began their own blogs at the beginning of the Iraq War and raised money from readers to send themselves to the war zone, the new century equivalents of the indie journalists of Vietnam. In the US, political blogs swiftly transformed themselves into major players in the volatile courts of public opinion. Now the star political bloggers get invited to White House press conferences and are interviewed on television.

Last year, blogging hit the bigtime. Rupert Murdoch, always a savvy reader of media trends, marked a watershed when he told mainstream media outlets that institutions “ignored blogs at their peril”. Time magazine noted the prevalence of user-generated content on the internet and named the Person of the Year as “You”. Some people announced that the brave new blogoverse was ushering in a new era of democratised opinion, challenging the stranglehold on information held by the mainstream media; others decried the Balkanisation of opinion it created, with small online communities gathering together to reinforce each other’s kooky world views. Still others claimed that blogging, the work of amateurs, was giving an undeserved legitimacy to uninformed, unprofessional opinion.

And so the debate goes on with the truth, as usual, existing somewhere in the middle. Like everything on the internet, it’s impossible to generalise about blogs. Everything you say about them, no matter how bizarre or perverse, will be found to be true in some dark corner of the blogosphere. Insupportable claims – that blogs will eventually obliterate mainstream media, for instance – are made regularly (usually, it must be said, by mainstream commentators scoffing at the hubris of bloggers – I haven’t actually seen a blogger say that. Though no doubt, somewhere, sometime, someone has). Whatever the truth, there is no doubt that blogs signal a major shift in how public opinion is received and perceived, and the mainstream media and assorted world powers are nervously wondering what to do about them, and – more insidiously – how to appropriate and control the blogosphere.

In the small corner of the world that is arts opinion, blogs are having an increasing impact. Writers – especially poets – embraced the internet early, but disciplines like the performing arts have been rather slower in the rush to cyberspace. Two and half years ago, when I began Theatre Notes http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com, people stared at me in bewilderment when I announced that I had begun a theatre review blog. “A what?” they would ask incredulously. “A blog,” I’d say, my heart sinking. “A kind of on-line diary…”

How times have changed. Now every major newspaper has its bevy of blogs (although, aside from the lively Guardian http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/arts/ site, which has always been the leader in mainstream new media, they tend to be disappointingly superficial). Theatre Notes was, to my knowledge, the first Australian blog to concentrate solely on theatre issues, and for a time was a lonely little soldier, although it soon made friends with a bunch of chatty New Yorkers and some English blogs such as the excellent Encore Theatre Magazine http://www.encoretheatremagazine.co.uk/ . Now it exists in a network of active cybervoices, both local and international, and new theatre blogs cross my purview every week.

I think of arts blogs as a quite specific phenomenon. The best of them – and there are many of those – grew out of frustration at the dwindling space and diversity offered to the arts in the mainstream media, and see themselves as offering an alternative space for the kind of extended meditations that no longer exist in mainstream newspapers. Even more importantly, blogs offer dialogue: a space where interested people – audiences, critics, and artists – can exchange their views. It is in the realm of arts blogging that I see most clearly the truth of those who say that blogs are the contemporary equivalent of Grubb St pamphleteering – they reflect a world which is robust, lively, argumentative, informed and, most importantly of all, diverse.

The dozens of blogs I read regularly are a miniscule percentage of what’s out there, and here I can only mention a few of those I regularly read. And even these are dizzying in their variety: there are group blogs, literary news blogs, photo blogs, review blogs, academic blogs, visual art blogs… The trick, for the bewildered reader, is simply to find a blog you like, subscribe to an RSS feed www.ojr.org/ojr/lasica/1043362624.php and to keep an eye on the blogroll – the list of links in the sidebar – which will lead you to other websites of interest.

One is not, fortunately, obliged to read everything, and everyone has his or her own tastes. At first, sorting out the gold from the dross can be confusing; but be sure, there is gold out there. Even the briefest tour will reveal that the cliched view of blogs as written by spelling-challenged teens or aggrieved politico wingnuts with apocalyptic fantasies is a very small part of the truth. And by no means the most interesting part.

I turn to my favourite arts blogs for a variety of reasons: for news (they are very often well connected and well informed), stimulating opinion, good writing and sometimes just for fun and gossip. I go there because, quite simply, they are the work of amateurs in the best sense of the word: amateur, after all, derives from the Latin verb “to love”. In a good blog, I will be reading the opinion of someone who is moved to blog – which I can attest is hard and consuming work – because they are passionate about art, because they take it seriously, because they have something to say.

Unsurprisingly, arts blogs are very often written by practitioners: poets, novelists, theatre directors and actors, visual artists. Melbourne director Daniel Schlusser is responsible for Our Man in Berlin http://ourmaninberlin.blogspot.com/ , where he is uploading some fantastic street art, and actor Ming-Zhu Hii keeps Mink Tails http://minktails.blogspot.com/ , a blog responsible for a wonderful dust-up last year when she was bitingly frank in her views about the Short and Sweet Festival. The rather brilliant Thompson’s Bank of Communicable Desire http://beescope.blogspot.com/ is maintained by Chris Goode, UK poet and theatre artist, who recently performed here for the Sydney Festival, and British playwright David Eldridge keeps a blog, One Writer and his Dog http://onewriterandhisdog.blogspot.com/index.html, which combines arts commentary, often in italics, with regular reports on his social life and his dog. Isaac Butler, an up and coming director in New York, keeps the lively Parabasis http://parabasis.typepad.com/blog/, and the heavyweight among poetry blogs, a vast enterprise of review and commentary, is by poet Ron Silliman http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/.

Despite the snorting of some mainstream gatekeepers about the unprofessionalism of arts bloggers, the real story is, as always, rather more complex and fluid. It is common for mainstream critics to start their own blogs as a kind of dialogue with their mainstream work. Wall St Journal theatre critic Terry Teachout runs About Last Night http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/; David Cote, theatre editor of Time Out New York, keeps Histriomastix http://histriomastix.typepad.com/weblog/; Chloe Veltman, SF Chronicle reviewer, has just started her own blog http://www.chloeveltman.com/blog/index.html and our very own Chris Boyd, reviewer for the Herald Sun, has The Morning After http://chrisboyd.blogspot.com/. And it’s common for bloggers to moonlight in the mainstream media – playwright George Hunka, whose stimulating blog Superfluities http://www.ghunka.com/index.cgi was one of the first theatre blogs, has reviewed for the New York Times, I freelance for the ABC and other media. Arts journalists like 3RRR’s Richard Watts http://richard_watts.blogspot.com/ or Sydney freelancer Nicholas Pickard http://artsjournalist.blogspot.com/index.html keep regular blogs. And so on.

Some blogs, like cinephile Paul Martin’s Melbourne Film Blog http://melbfilmblog.blogspot.com/, or Matthew Clayfield’s general arts blog Esoteric Rabbit http://www.esotericrabbit.com/blog/ (which also features excellent recipes) are written by informed enthusiasts. There are group blogs like Sarsaparilla, an eclectic bunch of Australian cultural commentators commenting on, well, just about everything. And some blogs, like Blog of a Book Slut http://www.bookslut.com/blog/ or Ready Steady Book http://www.readysteadybook.com/, are now institutions in themselves. The blogosphere often seems as infinite as Borges’ library, but I will stop there and let readers find their own way through its fascinating byways.

For arts bloggers, art is not a leisure activity which fills up the space between advertisements, but central to how they live in the world. And this is why the mainstream media can’t fake them: blogging is at heart not simply a matter of shovelling information out into cyberspace, but an organic and volatile network of relationships. Institutions, by their nature, can’t generate the passion or the anarchy that makes a good blog: with rare exceptions, their structures in fact inhibit it. Which is, of course, why arts blogs exist in the first place.

Editor's Note: You can visit Alison Croggon on the web at: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com/