Mid-August in Boston is a transitional season. Students and faculty are trickling back, but the pace is still slow—and the news is even slower. It seems as good a time as any to share what we’ve been up to this summer.
This June and July were a first for the Wonk. I’ve been writing about art for more than a decade, but this was the first time I was invited to a journalism conference. Since the universe has zero chill, I was invited to attend not just one conference but three—all within four weeks. I attended the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) conference as a fellow, the Momus convening for independent art publishing as a panelist, and the Knight Foundation’s conference on audience engagement.
These invitations were heartening because they signaled a shift that might be underway: a recognition that art publications tend to fall through the cracks of awareness and infrastructure, both as members of the arts and the press.
Members of the art press are the third-culture kids of the art and media worlds: too arty to be “real” journalism outlets, too media-y to be arts organizations. The irony of being considered neither is that our work requires us to be both. As Mary Louise Schumacher has written, art “is often a lens through which debates that occupy the country—about race or gender, for instance—are seen.” Read this way, our job as arts journalists is to connect artists’ aesthetic decisions to both the news and history.
As colleagues from local and mainstream media discussed the challenges they face and how philanthropy has been supporting them, I realized how our proximity to the culture field creates unique risks for us. A main challenge is that the value we contribute—publishing about artists and exhibitions—doesn’t circulate back through the system in ways that support art media, even though our work has a much longer “tail” than other types of articles, as it becomes part of artists’ CVs and the public record for later scholarship.
Succumbing to these dynamics, Art Papers officially closed earlier this year. So did Variable West and 4Columns. Mainstay publications are also reducing their arts coverage. For example, our local paper of record, The Boston Globe, reprinted an AP story to cover the “Olympics of art,” the Venice Biennale, rather than send or commission a reporter. Year over year, fewer outlets publish documentation, news, and analysis about cultural life. Katherine Maher, CEO of NPR, has testified to Congress that among the societal good local journalism contributes, cities with access to local public media have higher rates of civic engagement, greater societal cohesion, and economic advantages, including better municipal bond ratings. Art journalism is part of that local media ecosystem. So when art publications disappear, it puts civic cultural life and the arts sector, both within the communities these publications cover and beyond, at risk.
During the Momus convening (supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, Critical Minded, and the Terra Foundation for American Art), a panel featuring CARLA, the Inuit Art Foundation, and Art Papers shared numbers highlighting the resources these nonprofits need to keep producing their respective magazines. The amount needed to keep the projects running is small. Lindsay Preston Zappas, founder of CARLA, discussed the difficulty of driving memberships and donations, noting, “It’s hard because we are showing so much love for the community, and sometimes it feels like the community doesn’t love us back.”
A report by the Rabkin Foundation, which presented the results of an early 2026 survey of 141 independent arts publishers, found that the average operating budget of these independent publications was just $181,000. “Foundation and philanthropic grants are one of the largest categories of financial support for these publications,” but they are also the largest source of funding decline, with 41.9 percent of publications reporting a decrease, the report noted. Worse, the report found that of the publications experiencing a decrease in foundation and philanthropic grants, 76.9 percent feel their current business model is not sustainable. This financial precarity, the report noted, leaves publications vulnerable to censorship. The survey results also refuted the suggestion that arts publishing is too niche or elitist, finding that the growth rates of art publication audiences are exceeding those of general-interest media.
Three conferences in four weeks didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s often hard, if not impossible, to know whose invisible hand cupped a whisper to which philanthropic ear. BAR’s inclusion in these events is likely the result of sustained work by the Regional Art Publishers collective—of which BAR is a founding member, along with Burnaway, CARLA, Glasstire, and the now-defunct Variable West—and by grantmakers Critical Minded (of which I’m a fellow) and the Rabkin Foundation. Both funders have been working to address structural barriers that hinder arts journalism and prevent writers from marginalized communities from entering the field.
Those of us who come up through arts education are trained to write about art, but we are less likely to be trained to understand the business of media companies—much less how this business is changing in a post-literary society. Critically, we don’t have networks of journalists at legacy publications to turn to for help because our corner of the media is so atomized and isolated. As we look to navigate these new paradigms of reader behavior—through social media news consumption, the turn to video, and the omnipresence of AI slop—we need to figure out how to sustain operations through a balance of earned income and philanthropic funding. But crafting a message that drives both is necessary. Sarah Higgins, executive and artistic director of Art Papers (until the end of the year), noted during the Momus panel that “Art Papers became a victim of the outside perception of its success.”
For writers, there are also structural problems. Curators are invited, expected, and encouraged to write in leading outlets. It’s decidedly far less common to see writers curate at institutions. Arts publishing, in general, serves as a staging ground for arts workers to increase their personal brand visibility and leverage it into their next role. But within arts publishing, mobility is limited. Generally speaking, the going rate for the industry-standard 800-word review hasn’t budged in years, sitting at around $250 to $300.
