24/10/2024
Substack is a subscription model for writers who don’t want to be published under today’s conditions of mass stupidity and bad faith – people who are sick of being unable to express their views without editorial intervention and unwarranted censorship. It is especially good for displaced journalists and writers who can no longer find anyone to publish what they write. As newspapers have either disappeared or become completely irrelevant, there is no basis for a reader community around any particular writer of the kind which used to happen in the old newspaper days.
This of course destroys the possibility of criticism, as we have understood it, and thoroughly silences “public intellectuals” which you may think is the intention if you are a conspiracy theorist as we all must be these days. Substack offers a way for displaced writers and refugee journalists to go on writing things that readers want to read and to make a living from it. While a number of Substack writers offer free material, most have a paywall.
I started with Substack a short time ago and not long afterwards cancelled it. I really didn’t like the paywall, where the reader was drawn into following someone’s writing only so far and then had to pay $6 or $8 or whatever per month to keep reading. Now this mightn’t seem much, but these days if you have three, four, five, or more subscriptions for streaming television which you just cannot live without, there isn’t much likelihood that you can afford more subscriptions for individual writers. I cancelled my original Substack when I discovered it was almost entirely US based and consisted of an alarming amount of personal whingeing and moaning and stuff about healing and self-development. However John McDonald has led me to change my mind and I opened a new Substack using a different email address.
Substack offers a place where criticism can exist. Many people don’t like critics. In these delicate times, criticism is understood as hostility or attack, or, at the very least, it is dismissed because “it is just that person’s point of view”. Now that the Real has been displaced and Truth is considered an absurdity, the very idea of criticism is an insult to delicate sensibilities. The Sydney Morning Herald has seemingly embraced this damp Zeitgeist enthusiastically, and in the process dispensed with John’s services.
Art critics have always had a particularly hard time of it. Often they didn’t seem to have any idea what they were writing about, but I followed John McDonald, who wrote a coruscating prose based on a profound understanding of painting in particular and its role in Australian culture and history. John was once the Curator of Australian Art at the National Gallery in Canberra until he fell out with the director Dr Brian Kennedy over the purchase of Eugene von Guérard’s monumental Govett’s Leap and the Grose River Valley. How much I adore that epic romantic painting. It’s one of the main reasons I moved to the Blue Mountains. But that’s another story.
Above: Eugene von Guerard. Govett’s Leap and Grose River Valley. 1873. Oil on canvas, 68.5 x 106 cm. NGA 2000.53.
John was Sydney’s most thoughtfully outspoken art critic. I never failed to read his columns. I was especially impressed by and grateful for the way he championed the art of Elisabeth Cummings over the many years when her spectacular art was almost entirely overlooked in mainstream public contexts. (See my comments here: https://annette-hamilton-art-writing.com/tag/elisabeth-cummings/) John McDonald was one of the few who truly grasped the importance of her painting.
He also ran his own website and distributed a newsletter, but I did not subscribe because … well, because I thought I would read it in the paper… but I completely stopped reading any Australian journals or newpapers other than the Blue Mountains Gazette around two years ago. Only when I saw a flurry this week about his sacking from the Herald on Instagram did I realise I hadn’t read his column in ages. I do have access to a digital version of the Herald but I hardly ever read it.
Until recently, if you didn’t regularly buy or subscribe to the Herald, you could read John’s pieces at his website from which he issued a Newsletter.
That site is still up and is absolutely full of gems about the Australian art scene over recent decades. I strongly recommend it for a good read.
BUT from last week, 17th October 2024, John is writing on his own Substack and has announced this change of address officially to@ jmcdartcritic. I signed up right away as a paid subscriber. This is exactly what a paid subscription is for – so someone can go on being a public intellectual or writer with an audience who follows and hopefully engages with them.
You can read about what happened here:
I hope lots of people sign up, and will also engage in some sensible and meaningful discussion of Australian art via the site. I just hope there are ways of keeping trash and trolls off it.
Annette Hamilton Art Writing from Australia 