Contemporary Art Daily Forrest Nash Interview
Metropolis M talks to Forrest Nash, founder of the world’s best visited artblog Contemporary Art Daily.
How and when did Contemporary Art Daily start? Where did you get the idea for it?
Contemporary Art Daily started in the fall of 2008, when I was close to finishing college. I had been keeping a “notes” section on my personal website where, along with pictures of my cat and links about politics, I included pictures from exhibitions I was seeing online. At one point I went on vacation and stopped posting anything for a couple of weeks. A few friends asked when I was going to add more exhibitions, which told me that some tiny audience of people were following along and had an interest in what I was looking at.
Formalizing this research into Contemporary Art Daily was, at the beginning, mostly about trying to push myself to look at more exhibitions. Even then I had to consider many exhibitions before I found one I wanted to publish. The site ended up spreading fairly quickly, and I figured out that I could convince galleries and museums to share high resolution documentation with me that normally wasn’t available to the public. The first few times I received images of exhibitions that couldn’t be seen on websites I realized that what I was doing was genuinely helpful. Around the same time I could see that an audience for the project was growing on its own.
How would you describe Contemporary Art Daily?
Contemporary Art Daily is a website that publishes documentation of at least one contemporary art exhibition every day. We have an international purview, and we work hard to get especially high-quality documentation of the shows we publish.
Since last year, we’ve become a not-for-profit organization, and our mission is fairly straightforward. Like any curatorial project, we have a motive to advance artists we think are important, but we also want to make contemporary art as a field more accessible to anyone who’s interested in it.
Which shows are presented? Which not? Who is deciding which one to show, how and when?
At the beginning, I made all of the decisions myself, but I’m now lucky to have a small office with a wonderful staff and volunteers who are now included in the process.
I do an initial round of research myself, considering basically every exhibition at every space in Contemporary Art Venues, our directory of galleries and museums. I determine which shows I want us to consider, and make a note for a colleague to send a message to the venue asking for full documentation. I also comb through the hundreds of submissions we receive each month and mark some of them for closer consideration.
We have a few meetings each each week where anyone who’s in the office participates in a conversation about which exhibitions we’ll publish. In most cases there is a clear consensus one way or another, but sometimes we have long arguments about a particular artist or exhibition. If I feel strongly, I can insist, but more often when there isn’t a clear answer I defer to the votes of the staff and volunteers who are in the office.
Our criteria for Contemporary Art Daily is complicated and not perfectly reducible, but I like to say that we are generally trying to balance two motives that sometimes conflict with each other. On the one hand, we do have a kind of journalistic motive: we hope to in some way represent the breadth of what is happening in contemporary art, even when a particular artist is not of personal interest to us. On the other hand, we have a curatorial motive, to advance art we believe in and think is important. I am usually more concerned about making a mistake and failing to see or include something than I am accidentally letting something through the filter that doesn’t belong.
Go to www.contemporaryartdaily.com
The complete interview is published in a Dutch translation in Metropolis M No 5-2013
Domeniek Ruyters