Visual art news, views & reviews in Dallas, Texas, USA
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February 2002
Other Rambles are listed on the
Ramble Index
DARts Members:
Last month, I told you about openings that were gonna happen the following weekend, but if you really want to know about those things, you know you can read the latest, updatest info in the DARts calendar. If it's not correct there, chances are it will be by tomorrow. I'm pretty sure there are some good ones coming up this weekend.
So this DARts (pronounced darts, like those things ya throw at walls in Irish bars -- I've always envisioned a dart that flies across the top of the page just after readers open it. Then disappears completely, just to emphasize the darts connection, but I promised no flashing ads, and I don't want to spend the time making animation, etc.)
Where was I?
This time with this Midnight Report I'm going to do what I do best. I'm going to ramble.
This issue of this E-mail "newsletter" is about stuff off on tangents. Like DARts stuff I have been experimenting with and thinking about lately.
I keep trying different ways to lure people into the magazine. Most people never get past what I call "the cover." That page that comes up when you type http://www.DallasArtsRevue.com in your browser. More than four times as many people only ever make it to that page than go to any page inside.
So I change it often. Sometimes hours. Usually days. Used to be I'd only change out that cover pic every two weeks. It gave me time to think of something else to put there.
But since I got my new camera, and I've been taking more pictures of more art... I've been driven to shoot more art. So I've got more choices. And more chances.
I'm not sure it's helping, but it seems to. The rule is that the more energy ya put into a website, the more people it will draw. I do not know if there is a finite number of people in this area who would be drawn to DARts.
When I published on paper, I was told that there were only 150 people in all of Dallas who would ever subscribe. The editor of Art in America or some such assured me of that in the early 80s. The number seems to have grown.
At http://www.dallasartsrevue.com/feedback/Reports_i.shtml , there's a Report page that tells a lot of the nit-picky details about how many readers read DARts, when, etc. I don't upgrade that page more than about monthly, but it's sorta interesting, although some of the data seems to be contradictory. Which probably just means I don't understand it very well, yet.
[ Deep breath ]
Heretofore, we ( there actually is a we now. There was a time when I did most of the stuff alone, and I still do, of course. But more and more people are getting involved with this E-rag on an ongoing basis. I like the feeling of building a staff. Even though I know it's not really a staff.
For one thing, nobody is getting paid. Memberships still have a long way to go to meet expenses, but that experiment is moving along rather well, considering that the site is free and open to anybody who wants to read it. It takes a special kind of person to "join.
Thank you for joining.
As I was saying, "Heretofore, we -- but I really have no idea what I was going to say. I do have to end the parenthesis, though. )
Last month, I renewed the domain registration for nine more years, mostly because it was a lot cheaper than one year at a time. And I was feeling optimistic.
I've had a lot of them over the years, but my single, all-time favorite business card simply stated, "Cynical Optimist" in big letters. It also had my phone number, but you get the drift.
Someday, I still hope to pay people who write for DARts. I suspect I'll attract a wider variety of writers that way. For the now, though, it's mostly just Kathy DelloStritto and me. I love publishing opinions that aren't mine, that I disagree with, and that I'd never even dream of having or writing. And she's got lots of those.
In the on-paper version of DARts, I used to publish a story every once in a while that I had never read. It was a fun little game. I'd always choose a writer I trusted completely, like Michael Helsem or Jim Dolan or somebody.
Then I'd read it only when the thing came off the press, or out of my LaserWriter. It was delicious. It was easier at Hooka (The Humanitarian Order Of Kosmic Awareness, an underground paper here in the early 70s), because we did have a staff, though also an unpaid one.
Some have castigated me for being on both sides of an issue. "But you wrote a story saying so-and-so was an idiot, and now you're saying she's a saint."
I love it when I get a chance to do that. To speak honestly about at least two sides of an issue. Many readers don't understand. I don't know if you do. I hope you at least can appreciate the concept.
For example, we've come down pretty hard on Joan Davidow lately. My true feelings — or some of them — are that she's done this thing just about every possible wrong way, every step, so far. Elitist, screw the local artists, blast through those traditions, stomp all over those expectations, revise the history to boost some financial egoes, but don't tell 'em anything ahead of time...
But when she gets finished, my gosh, what an amazing institution we are going to have in this town. Not in far distant Arlington, for cryin' out loud, but right here in Dallas.
Meanwhile, of course, we're going to have to put up with a lot of major BS from way too many fragile egos and idiot rewritings of history and worried artists, and pissed off members and former members, etc.
And the — gag-me — newly named, Dallas Center for Contemporary Art may never turn into anything worthwhile, ever again. But here's one of our fragilest egos of all time maniacally going after her dream, come hell or low membership renewals. The woman may not be a communicator, but...
Well, we'll see.
* * * That ramble really needed three asterisks between it and my return to things experimental at DARts these days.
DARts usta put all the reviews on separate pages. But hit counters showed that nearly nobody went to those pages. So I started posting them on the already stuffed Calendar page that nearly everybody goes to anyway.
[ And much more recently on the cover page itself, where everybody seems to go.]
I try to cycle them out after a couple of weeks — quicker if they're longer. The calendar page fairly bulges at my self-set limit of a 35-second download at 56k modem speed.
My new camera makes bigger pictures more plausible. I can now shoot art under almost any lighting situation — the front of Edith Baker, for prime example, is lit by a nasty mix of sunlight and bright overhead tungsten bulbs that always drove my old camera — and me trying to correct it in Photoshop — to distraction.
My new, expensive (I saved up for it for a whole year), Sony F707 makes it almost easy, not quite automatic. Colors now are much more accurate. Details are... uh... more detailed. I want to run more and more pictures. And I like them big, even though it takes longer to download bigger pictures...
The review Kathy and I wrote about the new Brookhaven gallery's inaugural show is one of the best things I've ever written.
[ And Mary Vernon is still one of the spare, rare few artists to ever thank me for a review mention. ]
Let me back up and explain how Kathy and I do this reviewing stuff. She takes notes in the gallery. I take pictures. She writes comments on paper. I type comments I remember when I look at my photographs. We talk about it, agree and disagree. I run her comments, and mine. Then I tie them all together in a big, cohesive, mostly intelligent heap.
[ Lately, Kathy's graduated to writing whole sentences...]
But running it with all the pictures it just had to have couldn't be done in the confined space of the calendar.
Mary Vernon's piece alone needed, I thought, a whole page of white around it. I couldn't imagine it small. It was just too big in my mind. I couldn't see it crammed into the calendar. I said in the story that I thought I understood her paintings there, but of course I didn't and still don't. I just knew it needed a bunch of space around it. Ya can't confine a riot of color like that into postage stamp space.
So, I've gone back to putting new reviews on their own, profusely linked to the calendar, pages. I'm always amazed at how many people actually do tread through the links and discover those external pages, but I wish I knew how to drive everybody to all those peripheral pages.
The rule is to never have a page where readers have to scroll to see more. But I have noticed that when I do that, darned few readers link off to the next page.
[ Sometimes the rules are just plain wrong. ]
Read the hit counters on bottom left any of the membership pages -- except Mr. Shaddock's, of course. The first page gets hit a lot. The second page only gets about half that.
So now I'm offering all members the option of putting it all on one page. You can do that, too, if you want. Longer pages take longer to load, but...
[ ... but you don't have to find out that a lot of people weren't all that fascinated with your art that they had to see even more of it. ]
I've also been making bigger pictures smaller after they've been in place awhile. I like to see a picture on every scroll jumping page of the calendar. I'd love to run even more than that, but a lot of us are stuck with slow-motion, 56k modems.
[ Boy did I get tired of that game fast. ]
I've seen a couple of web pages out on the Internet where whoever put them together was not even vaguely aware that some people do not have DSL or Cable Modems or whatever's hottest and fastest next week. Pictures take long tens of minutes to download on those sites. It's crazy. I had to quit commenting about that on the Artists With Web Pages link page, because I kept ruffling feathers of well-meaning ducks.
DARts is, in many ways, a lowest common denominator kind of web space. Any good internet site has to be, I think. I've read the books, I know a lot of the rules. But I'm struggling with how I am still learning that things actually work.
As always, any feedback is appreciated.
Thanks for letting me ramble. I feel better now. And I don't have to do another one of these till next month.
And it's almost midnight.
Did I mention how grateful I am that you joined DARts.
Thanks,
;j r