 Hello, my name is Nancy Ravenel. I'm board director of communications for AIC, and it is my great pleasure to introduce to you Tyler Green. Tyler writes and edits Modern Art Notes, which features art criticism, analysis of art, and art institutions, and regularly breaks art-related news stories. Last year, Tyler debuted the Modern Art Notes podcasts, which are available through iTunes as well as Modern Art Notes. And just so you know, it's not just about Modern Art. He also has conducted interviews with the, in addition to the interviews that he's conducted with artists like Richard Sarah, Robert Irwin. Tyler also offers discussions with curators and art historians, including Craig Harbison and Ron Sprunk, individually interviewed about their work on Jan van Eyck. Tyler's got some very impressive credentials, but in deference, and so that we can hear more of him, I will ask him to come to the podium, please. Please welcome Tyler Green. It's kind of nice to hear a conversation of that value that doesn't revolve around auction houses and art fairs, isn't it? During your conversation, I found myself thinking of the recent threats to Paul Rudolph buildings in New York and Florida, and how we assess how we value them. And I guess because I'm a journalist, I thought about how people who care about Rudolph have or have not communicated about how those Rudolphs should be saved. A lot of the discourse around the Orange County Government Center building was about the cost of maintenance, much of it long deferred, as I recall, and not about cultural value, which is kind of a disappointment. It seems to me a really clear case of the importance of communication, outreach, and advocacy as an important part of the public discourse. Not sure how well journalism did on that one. And of course, there's a reason, and that's that cultural journalism has substantially gone away. Arts journalists and architectural journalists that tell stories or who tell stories about what matters and why have been eliminated in mass from American journalism. And before I get to how maybe we can communicate better about conservation and preservation, I think it's important to kind of lay out how stark the current environment and indeed the future of art journalism is regardless of whether or not we're talking about probative reporting, about institutions, government funding cuts, or whatever. We're also talking about reporting as storytelling, what nonprofits do, what conservators do, what historians do, what historic preservationists do. And to a degree unfathomable a decade ago, art journalism has substantially stopped telling those stories. So why? Today only three or four American newspapers have full-time art critics on staff. That's probably down from about 25. Dozens of papers have consolidated the positions of art-related reporter and critic, cutting coverage in half and more, creating hybrid jobs that don't really allow for enterprise reporting or in-depth criticism. The Washington Post is a good example. It's had an art critic for decades. It's a major paper. It's followed by its practices or followed by the industry. It recently eliminated the standalone position of art critic and combined it with a hybrid job. So in one staffer, Philip Kanekot, who's one of, I think, one of the most brilliant writers in journalism, he's now the paper's art critic, cultural critic, writ large, and its architecture critic. So instead of there being three separate jobs, there's one kind of miasmic job. And I think Philip would probably be the first to tell you that often frustrates him. And of course, the Post no longer has an art reporter who covers the arts. So I guess really four jobs are down to one and a half. Among the papers that have cut art critics and or art reporters are pretty much every big paper in America you can think of, the Chicago Tribune, the Philly Inky, the Detroit Free Press, the St. Louis Post Spatch, San Diego, Miami. Other papers have not formally eliminated the position, such as the Dallas Morning News. But the position's been vacant for years, and we all know what that means, right? The story's not much better in the magazine world. New Yorker recently lost its Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, he won his Pulitzer at the New York Times, of course, to Vanity Fair. And I have heard of no plans to replace him. One of the reasons that critic, Paul Goldberger, left for Vanity Fair is that he was kind of getting, as he said on the Modern Art Notes podcast, plug. He was kind of tired of not having opportunities to write. And to the, yeah, I don't think the New Yorker has any plans to replace him. Only one or two of the top 100 magazines by circulation in America has an art critic or reporter. Smithsonian Magazine has, although I believe they just recently eliminated the editorial position in charge of art's coverage. The New Yorker has full-time writers who do the arts. And I'm not sure where the new Newsweek Daily Beast hybrid ranks among the top 100 in circulation. It's right around 99, 100, 101. But of course, they have Blake Offnick, a dedicated position. I wanna really emphasize that this industry-wide elimination of what I do is not evidence that the public's interest in cultural journalism has declined. There's not a lot of great recent data on this because journalism organizations, media outlets have learned the traffic data and readership data is proprietary and valuable information and they began to make it less available in recent years. But there are some bits out there that the Provide Tea Leaves we can read. The Los Angeles Times, for example, they have a blog called Culture Monster and it's this big kind of... All of their cultural news goes there, whether it's opera or dance or art or architecture. And since its inception three years ago, it's ranked in the top five or seven of the museum's most read blogs and they have about three dozen blogs. And on particularly art newsy weeks and often on Thursdays and Fridays, when it has the most content, it's the paper's most read blog or second most read blog. Recent news stories in Boston and LA, friends of mine who work at newspapers there report that cultural news stories about the future of the Brandeis Art Museum or what's happening at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA have been the paper's most read stories on the days those things have happened. And just speaking anecdotally, the podcast that Nancy was kind enough to mention about Jan Van Eyck, most of what I do is modern and contemporary art and the show on Jan Van Eyck's the most downloaded one I've ever done. I think that was because Craig Harbison and Ron Spronk were really, really great. I mean, really great. So there's interest in this stuff. I've only had one conservator, I think, on the show in 26 shows, but that was the most downloaded show, which means I'm probably stupid for not having had more than one on, right? So I don't know of any data or any journalism research studies that point to a lack of reader interest or listener interest about art in the arts. What we're seeing in the cutback in cultural coverage is simply symptomatic of the decline of the newspaper and magazine print business. Over the last decade, newspapers and magazines, that long common starting place for public discourse have had an increasingly art dissolving. So absent these traditional means of experts, such as y'all, communicating what you think is important about what you do, the functions we once assigned to the news media, people like me, have now fallen to the actors and relevant fields. There's no reason left for conservators or historians or even artists to rely upon the media to tell their stories because we're just, we're wasting away. It's increasingly important that you reach out and advocate about what you do. So I wanna spotlight five ways that I think you should do that. Maybe keeping the Paul Rudolph examples in the back of our minds, and maybe thinking of those two examples as kind of failures of my side of the business and to maybe think about what people like you could have done that people like me didn't. I think the first important thing to do is to bypass long accepted channels for the dissemination of information. I guess I'm mostly speaking about communications and PR professionals. If you're at a museum, you can't rely on your communications and PR professionals to get the word out about what you do because the people that museum communications professionals are used to dealing with don't exist anymore. Museum PR offices have been amazingly sluggish in responding to the decline of cultural media. Furthermore, and this will get me in trouble, PR departments are the greatest institutional bastion of keep your head down conservatism. Except in rare cases, museum PR departments are really skittish about sharing stories about conservation and preservation of objects. There's that little bit of something in the back of a PR person's head who says, wow, if it's a 5% chance this story could go wrong or that the reporter won't really understand that we're taking care of the object and not altering it. There are exceptions to this. The Getty does a great job of telling conservation related stories. The Getty is how, for example, Ron Sprunk was on the show. They essentially went out and got him for me, which was great. And if you're a business, I think the same thing applies. Hiring a PR firm or working with communications professionals to get you a 24-inch story on the section front of your local newspaper is not that effective not only because of staffing cuts, but the readership of those forms of media have dissolved, which brings us to number two, which is digital. I think that in museums and other places there's a lot of resistance to going digital with communications. Digital delivery of news and information is no longer new. Newspaper circulation figures have fallen to pre-baby boom levels in the United States even as the population has increased 140%. According to Pew, their research center for the people in the press, December 2008 was the last time that more Americans received their news from print sources than from digital sources. So for almost four years now, digital has been the primary way news and information has gotten out. That's become our public commons. What is new is mobile delivery of all this through cell phones, iPads, and all that kind of thing. I don't even have an iPad, I'm not going there. Number three, go to where the audience is and that's increasingly not the daily newspaper. So seek out the digital version of the daily newspaper. So what is that? When I was a kid and maybe even when I was in college the first place people went for news was the newspaper, the magazine. That was kind of the baseline for the starting point of public discourse around whatever that was, politics, art, sports. That's changed. So I would urge you to tell your stories in the places where people now go for that baseline of public discourse. And those are sites like Flickr and Twitter and Facebook and Wikipedia and Tumblr and even the much detested by those of us who lost our jobs in the upheaval, the Huffington Post. All those places have brilliant business models. They all get content from you and from me for free and they sell ads and they keep that revenue. And part of this grand bargain is that they're gonna bring really large audiences to our content, to the content we put on Twitter, to the content we put on Facebook or on Flickr. If you're me, that's not the best thing in the world. But if you're you, that's a great bargain. If you're you and you wanna share the story of what you do or an object you're working on or something you've taken care of, their willingness to hand that audience over to you is a really valuable thing. And it's the absolute bottom line as to why my old industries are dying. Number four, special notice to Wikipedia here. Richard McCoy at the Indianapolis Museum of Art has been innovative in this area in understanding why Wikipedia is important. Not only can you put anything you want on Wikipedia, but everybody uses it. And it's got a great Google rank and Bing rank and every other search engine rank you can think of. It is an increasingly effective place for the sharing of stories. As I made notes for this talk a couple weeks ago, I realized that if you look for Tyler Green on Wikipedia, you get a baseball player and not me. Which concerns me. I should probably do something about that. Richard will talk, right? Thank you. And number five, and this last one is particularly important to me because I'm an art guy and I love art museums and I'm pretty much my happiest when I'm in an art museum. Art museums are where the history of our best and most important cultural objects, where that history is stored and studied and conserved and preserved and researched and shared. And museums are still pretty gun shy about sharing conservation stories. I mean, I think we can all come up with some examples of museums that have done exhibitions or presentations or displays or programs about conservation. But I would argue they have done not nearly enough. Museum websites should be a great place where conservation stories can be told and shared that Milwaukee Art Museum did a great one about the conservation of a Duane Hansen sculpture last week that I've read about five times. I mean, it's absolutely fascinating. I linked to it from the website for Modern Art Notes last week. If you work at a museum or you work with a museum, make arguments inside your buildings for space, be it digital or physical. Show that art museums, I think Americans tend to think that art museums, I think a lot of people in my business also think this, tend to think that art museums just hang art and put on exhibitions and that's it. And I think many museums kind of, I think also people think that art museums are a place where rich people show off their stuff. And unfortunately, massively, unfortunately, I think a lot of museums contribute to that idea. I guess as I picture art museums and rich people showing off their stuff, I'm picturing George Carlin and I wish I could picture George Carlin ranting at certain museum directors because that would make me happy. But for a lot of reasons, obviously, that's not gonna happen. I think it's really important that art museums do a better job of demonstrating the totality of what they do, not just hanging art, not just doing exhibitions, but demonstrating the totality of what they do in terms of what they do with objects, of how they care for objects, of how they make sure that objects will be there for their visitors' kids to see. And I think that this is especially important now for a couple reasons. Think of the news media coverage of art in the last two weeks. And if your computer screen is anything like mine, it's been full of $107 million mooks and rich people taking floating fairies to art fairs in New York. And I think that the public attention to art is increasingly about market and monetary value and not about the things that we're discussing here, cultural value. And I guess if objects are being undervalued in another way, it's in part an ancillary and unintended benefit of, say, the Google Art Project, which presents objects in digital form and is so kind of holy cow gee whiz that it's easy to forget for a moment.