Best Art Blogs in New England

My limited experience with news blogs has given me the impression that they’re wild and lawless places where rampant rumors, unvetted and untrustworthy, and partisan opinions, unexamined and unedited, are passed along willy-nilly by pseudonymous correspondents who could be anyone and anywhere. Of course, that may just be the old ink-stained wretch in me.

I’m aware, however, of some very fine art blogs — idiosyncratic, yes, but also informative, insightful, and entertaining. I pass them along to you here, as I perceive blogging to be more a matter of conversation than competition.

Modern Art Notes is written by Washington, D.C., art critic and journalist Tyler Green and has been called “the most influential of all visual arts blogs” by the Wall St. Journal. That may be because Green is a professional print journalist who writes knowledgeably about art and artmaking, sharing his passion for contemporary art daily on his blog. MAN also features “Site Seeing,” one of the best link lists to arts blogs that I’ve run across in my Net surfing.

The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research is a regional arts blog written by Greg Cook, an underground cartoonist and journalist rumored to live in or around Gloucester, Massachusetts. Cook’s blog is an excellent source of art news and reviews and features a running list of free art exhibitions.

Megan and Murray is the blog of video and installation artists Megan and Murray McMillan, who live in Providence and comment as insiders on the art scenes of Providence and Boston.

Girl in the Green Dress is one of the most active arts blogs in New England. Written by Boston-based freelance interior designer Traci Roloff, Girl in the Green Dress is a feast of personal enthusiasms for architecture and art, furniture and fashion, photography and green design.

Blogs strike me as essentially high-tech diaries or journals, the frequent postings inviting a remote dialogue about art. It’s my hope that Just Looking will become a form of dialogue. Although blogs seem less about permanent records of artistic endeavors than about immediate responses, they are nonetheless, like essays and reviews, part of the second life of art.