Ionarts Hits the Big Time

Well, you knew it had to happen, but no one is more surprised than we are here at Ionarts. In the beginning, we faced some disappointments from press personnel not treating correspondents from Ionarts, a mere Weblog, in the same way as print journalists. Since those lowly days, however, we have had a past season full of reviews, usually much more substantial than those found in our neighborhood newspaper (the result of limits on arts coverage). In fact, we were even invited to see and cover new opera productions this summer. Finally, the ultimate proof, Ionarts reviews are being blurbed on Web sites around the country.

Santa Fe Opera quotes from my review of Britten's Peter Grimes (without a hyperlink, though: grr!), one of only two such Web reviews (with artssf.com) alongside the big boys from the mainstream press. (I am surprised that they did not take a blurb from my review of Lucio Silla, which I know the press people liked, too.)

Long Beach Opera coproduced the Jonathan Dove adaptation of the Ring that I reviewed this summer at Opera Theater of Pittsburgh. Long Beach will mount all four of the operas this January, and they will be sending their patrons to the Ionarts reviews to give them an idea of what to expect.

This follows upon our first appearances in newspaper articles, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and others. Of course, this is nothing like the heaps of glory covering blogging pianist Jeremy Denk, whose URL was actually printed in one of Alex Ross's articles in The New Yorker (A Little Late-Night Music, August 29).

Also, "Ionarts is like a normal golf club, but it never gets tired." This is according to the Prior-Art-O-Matic, a random generator project run by The Surrealist. By the same token, "Charles T. Downey is a postage stamp that shoots laser beams! It catches flies and plays Nethack," "Jens F. Laurson is like a normal artificial limb, but it's monogrammed (up to three letters)," "Mark Barry is a telephone that makes reassuring noises! It is made from recycled cardboard and catches spiders," and "Todd E. Babcock is a mousemat that shouts 'WARNING!' at the first sign of danger! It obeys simple instructions." That thing is just too much fun.