Maria Puente also needs some help with research

Howdy!

A feel good and make nice article from USA Today on artists who blog. Unfortunately, Ms. Puente and her editors decided that lines like "The result: More people are making a living as artists, more people are buying art, and more art is selling at a wider spectrum of prices" must be the truth because Ms. Puente wrote them. In fact if more people are making a living as artists I would suggest it is because there are more people alive now then there have ever been before, not because of blogging. There are also more people making a living as firefighters, and more people making a living as nuclear scientists, and we all know how popular those firefighter and nuclear scientist blogs are. Ditto for the more people buying art.

The reason art is selling at a wider spectrum of prices now has absolutely nothing to do with blogs. The spectrum of prices has become larger because there are people named Ronald Lauder who are spending more and more money on art. Ten years ago the spectrum of prices for art went from $0 to about $80 million. Today the spectrum of prices for art goes from $0 to $135 million. Bloggers had absolutely nothing to do with the spectrum becoming 68% larger, unless someone out there knows the URL for Ronald Lauder's blog.

Ms. Puente then goes on and quotes the guy who runs this gallery as saying 'The bloggers are just "a little blip in the art world, something that will fill a niche for those people who want to buy something real and not just a poster."' Which given the art he stocks and the types of painting he sells is the equivalent of surry maker (you know with a fringe on top) what he thinks of those new fangled aut-o-mo-bile makers. Heck! I betcha dollars to doughnuts Howard Rehs, co-owner of Rehs Galleries in New York doesn't like anything made after 1960, and still uses a rotary phone.