Them's the Breaks: Spring Sprung

Thanks to all of you who voted for Ionarts in the Arts Blogger Challenge, sponsored by an organization in New York. This contest will probably turn out to be the shrewdest $2,500 spent on an advertising budget in a long time. How do you get Web sites to link to your Web site without paying them anything? You offer them the chance to win $2,500. Sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, Ionarts is not going to wear the tiara and had to go home without even making it past the first round.

Since Ionarts was ranked at no. 11 by the reader voting poll, it follows that the problem was that we got no love from the panel, which was made up of Katrine Ames (former senior editor at Newsweek), the redoubtable Douglas McLennan (founder and editor of ArtsJournal), and composer Nico Muhly. Is it relevant that I have expressed in public my disappointment with Nico Muhly's music, and that the Metropolitan Opera, which I described as having "lost its edge" in my response to the first-round question, is co-producing Nico Muhly's opera Two Boys next year? I doubt it.

SVILUPPO:
One of the bloggers who was approved for the second round has since withdrawn from the competition, for quite reasonable reasons, thereafter receiving a somewhat catty note from the organizers.