Watch Where You Are Putting That Pencil

There might only be one thing worse than the financial support structure for artists: the support structure for art writers. Today, to try and be a writer of essays for catalogs, magazines or journals without being an academic, even a lowly adjunct academic, is to play against long odds. Which is why it feels that traditional scholarly art history writing styles and concerns, which in the past often felt distinctly different than the style and concerns of art criticism, are increasingly on display in contemporary art writing. Academics have the training to finish a text fairly fast and are the only ones who can afford this writing habit, excepting the insane and the independently wealthy.