This is Artlance, on Substack
What we are, what we are doing here, and what to expect.
What is Artlance?
Welcome to Artlance on Substack.
For those of you who have arrived here first without passing through Artlance’s pages, Artlance aims to be nothing less than a revolution in how quality, independent cultural criticism gets paid for and published. We are for excellence and experimentation in criticism, and for writers getting paid for this work.
What do we do? Currently, we provides visual art organizations such as museums, galleries, and other initiatives access to a vetted pool of the best art critics who can be commissioned to write, with total independence, about the shows those organizations put on. In practice, organizations pay Artlance to post commissions to our pool of vetted critics. Writers choose which commissions they want to fulfill by “claiming” them, and then, with full authorial independence, publish their work to their own sites or platforms. Once published and confirmed, Artlance pays the writer for their work.
By acting as an intermediary, vetting every writer in our pools, operating through a Charter, holding writers to Standards of Engagement, and setting up the commission → claiming → writing sequence on a one-to-many model (one commissioner; many writers), and managing all payments, Artlance ensures that (1) writers have complete independence in what they write and (2) commissioners receive high-quality critical writing about their presentations.
Why is Artlance on Substack?
Artlance is agnostic as to which platforms writers publish on. Writers who fulfill commissions through Artlance can publish here, on Substack, or on their own websites, or on Ghost, or Medium or Patreon; we could even see writers fulfilling commissions with an extended post (together with a carousel of images) on Instagram. What matters to Artlance, and what we believe should matter to everyone, is the writing: what gets written, not just where it appears.
That said, Artlance believes Substack is currently the most “writer-friendly” social-publishing platform with full functionality for its “free” tier, and as such, we will use it to digest, amplify, cross-post, and promote the writing that we facilitate.
Also, there are exceptional art writers and critics who do not currently maintain their own websites or use newsletter platforms or social media in any concerted way. And we do not want that to stop them from taking advantage of Artlance. So on occasion, Artlance will “host” those writers’ work here.
Not just the West Coast…
Though Artlance has its beginning in the Los Angeles and Bay Areas, Artlance plans to expand to wherever we can add great writers and willing (and high calibre) commissioners. We know there is important and relevant art being made and exhibited in Dallas, and St. Louis, and Kansas City, and Chicago, and Atlanta, and New Orleans, and in many other places across the U.S. — even New York City (we keep hearing there are great artists and great institutions and great writers in the NYC area; go figure).
Often the shows in these other cities and regions don’t get the recognition, or the critique, that they deserve. The “international” art magazines only have so much space in which to publish essays and reviews. They stick to the major metropoles; it’s what their readers and advertisers expect. Writers know this. No writer outside the art world’s “centers” wants to spend their time pitching the few paying outlets that do pay lip service to the “provinces” when they know there is rarely the interest or the column inches for what they have to offer. And when the pay is poor, why bother?
But if there are commissioners in these cities and regions — galleries and museums and arts organizations who are dedicated to exhibition-making and critical discourse; and we know there are — then their commissions through Artlance can make art criticism not just viable, but vibrant.
And not just art criticism…
The continued upheavals in media, and the newsletter revolution of today (parallel to the golden-age of blogs 20 years ago), have pushed writers to become increasingly independent from the outlets that once could be counted on to support high-quality criticism. Though there are many excellent magazines and journals and reviews out there — many of them new; and we applaud them all — ad-based and subscription-based business models continue to fail to pay critics a decent rate. What we have is “coverage” but not criticism: listicles, must-sees, profiles, and other kinds of writing that, while fine, are not the kind of discourse that recognizes the art, and artists, in any substantial, satisfactory way.
This failure is especially severe when it comes to the cultural fields, like visual art, that require in situ engagement: architecture, theater, dance, music, performance in general — all entail some kind of embodied, body-to-body, body-in-space experience. Such experiences are increasingly sought after, but few today receive recognition, in the form of critique, by knowledgable and talented critics. So though Artlance is beginning with visual art, if our new model proves workable, and sustainable, we plan to expand by connecting the best critics of these other cultural domains with commissioners (venues and producers, developers and creators) who value great writing and critical discourse.
It’s ambitious, we admit. But the current models aren’t working. Artlance is an attempt at something different.
If you want to keep up with all of the writing and other work that Artlance powers, subscribe here. Nothing we post will ever go behind a paywall. That’s not our model:
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And of course, if you have questions or comments you would like to send to us, please don’t hesitate:
Thank you for reading. Time and intelligence are the most valuable assets that any of us have. We appreciate you spending some of yours with us.