Thursday, July 14, 2016

Help Us Improve Contemporary Art Writing Daily

July 11th, 2016

It’s become a tradition that twice each year CAWD cutn'pastes asking for donations, often struggling to find the right way to duplicate the urgency of having your support, only a nano-fraction of our visitors ever make a donation. So that's why I'm telling you, we've got totes
It's weird to see your writing embalmed in Simon Lee's press packet for Merlin Carpenter, wondering if its ever been the clincher in a sale of forty+ thousand dollar painting, because, as you may know, we don't even have the money to become a 501c3 non-profit with our small, totally uncompensated staff. My colleagues work to produce Contemporary Art Writing Daily, considering 28-31 exhibitions each month and organizing a single thought about them. This means e-mails, downloads, uploads, exhibition records, verifiable tasks, conversations, and several handfuls of lines of original code (most of which I’ve written, for worse, myself). We use and maintain a suite of Google tools to edit our productivity, which allows us to produce a lot less words than some publications whose size and length is totally half fluff anyway. In turn, this efficiency minimizes the time-impact of every word you read, leaving more time for the fun things. In addition to the work of researching and sometimes spell-checking our projects, each week we spend probably not enough hours attempting to raise money from anyone, including none of the following: sponsors, private donors, and public foundations. All donations have been made by reputable artists like you. We’re very grateful to all of the generous supporters that make Contemporary Art Writing Daily possible, and with their help and yours we’ve been able to accomplish more and more each year.
Your donations have helped us produce original writing in large-scale exhibitions like 'Rum, Sodomy and the Lash" at Eden Eden curated by Ed Atkins and James Richards, build the shallow artist archives we’ve been republishing on Past Exhibitions program, and probably leaving well enough our backend system that is enabling us to work and integrate the work we’re doing across all of our projects. We have some exciting plans for new projects that will take advantage of this infrastructure. If you have any questions or feedback for us, please feel free to e-mail me directly. I’d love to hear from you.
So this summer, instead of asking for general operating support, I have a specific request for you.
We’d like to raise an unprecedented $like any amount of money at all this summer to pay our staff. If we’re successful, I can pay our staff and enlist another programmer to help me add a submast header that says "A Daily Journal on International Exhibitions" to mimic CADs. Which we don't currently have and we’d like it to load as fast as it possibly can.
Please, help us provide you with an even better Contemporary Art Writing Daily.
-CAWD


See too:  In the beginning...