ArtDaily Can Boost Your Fine Arts Coverage

By: Charles Bowen Years ago, as a young editor, I met a local patron of the arts who also -- to journalists, at least -- was quite patronizing. She had called the city desk, not so much to complain, but almost to boast about how the newspaper had completely missed the news of a recent visit to our town by a up-and-coming painter.

Trying to determine who had dropped the ball, I asked which of my reporters she had spoken to in advance of the event. Grandly, she sniffed and allowed as how that was not information she had been prepared to retain in her busy brain. After a few more questions and answers, I concluded that she had talked to no one on my staff.

Over the years that I had to deal with her -- and she was in a rather prominent position with a large local museum, so we often dueled this way on Monday mornings -- I came to understand that she was among those peculiar newsmakers who enjoyed (1) knowing things that we at the paper didn't and (2) watching us miss them. I suppose that in her case, it helped her verify her suspicion that journalists were generally philistines who couldn't possibly appreciate the finer things.

Now, I would never suggest that all art patrons have that attitude. I will suggest that some of them do. I think too that we ought to cover the art world better, if for no other reason that it will drive them nuts. The problem is, of course, that many of us don't know our Picassos from our Pissarros -- they didn't cover that in J-school -- and still fewer of us have time to find the fast track on fine arts.

Fortunately, once again the Internet has our backs. A wonderful site called ArtDaily.com has spent the past seven years covering the art world the way you cover City Hall, and it can be your first stop for news about major exhibitions around the planet, as well as for links to artists, photographers, and extensive art resources around the Web.

The site's regularly updated front page gives you the quick overview of the latest developments, from a major upcoming art auction in Milan to an exhibition of "The Urbanites" in London to a feature on new digital artwork by students at the University of North Carolina. Scroll behind the news summaries for bullet headlines of several other stories of interest, such as the appointment of new curators and the opening of arts fairs.

And while these folks mean it when they say "daily," they also do anticipate that not everyone can check in every day. So a "Last Week" link listed at the bottom of options printed on the left side of the screen enables you to see front pages from the previous five or six days.

Other considerations for using ArtDaily in your writing and editing:

1. Need to find information on a specific artists? The site keeps a remarkably extensive collection of links to sites and backgrounders on hundreds of artists, from the Raphaels, Rembrandts, and Renoirs to others that only the art historians might know. Click the "Artists" link on any page of the site.

2. Similarly, the site also assembles links to museums, exhibits, architects, photographers, art auctions, fairs and art education resources. See the relevant options listed in the navigation bar along the left side of any page.

3. If you write about the site in your news columns, you might want to mention the "fun features," such as the site's art quiz, as well as its collections of 3D animations and 360-degree images, also linked from the navigation bar.

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