A few weeks ago I wrote a post responding to A.D. Coleman’s talk “Dinosaur Bones.” At the time, I sent it over to Coleman to see what he would think of it; I figured that he probably wasn’t going to get too many responses that engaged him, and that he might like to read what I wrote. As it turns out, he enjoyed the post, and proposed that we continue to talk about the issues brought up in “Dinosaur Bones” through a kind of loose online correspondence. I agreed, and Coleman’s first article “Letters to a Young Critic (1)” went up online a couple of days ago.

I do have a small reservation about being cast as the “young critic.” I don’t want to be treated merely as a foil for A.D. Coleman’s eminent brilliance, though I do trust that Coleman is not approaching the dialogue in that way. (The subject line of my original email to Coleman did include the words “young critic,” so I probably brought it upon myself!) A quick look back at the history of “young” correspondents does not bode particularly well: as of today, there is no Wikipedia entry for Franz Kappus, Rilke’s “Young Poet.” Jean Beaufret, the addressee of Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” has a pretty nice one though. Perhaps the greatest danger is that by “young” you will read “immature,” which has its own Kantian implications that are really not important to discuss here. You understand what I am saying.

Coleman has started out the exchange by talking concretely about the way that critics make a living. He’s shared some figures of the income he’s made over his career: roughly $20,000 in 1995 and roughly $7,000 in 2011. (I’m assuming that there is a more or less even decline between those years.) He also calculates the amount of money he’s made from the donation box on his blog, divides it by the number of posts, and comes up with a figure of $7 per post. Ouch! Of course, this is not a helpful way to examine blogging, because the form is not just limited to what Coleman says he posts online, namely “lengthy, deliberated essays, written to the same standards as the work I’ve published in print.” Blog posts can be written in 10 minutes or less, and it’s often those posts that get the most attention—for better or worse.

What’s the value of a blog post? I wouldn’t look at it strictly in terms of money. A friend of mine in San Francisco had a video Tumblr whose tagline read: “New media existentialism. Fake it until you make it.” She’s now the online video editor at The Atlantic. Is each post she made on that blog worth a fraction of her new salary? Probably not, but that activity has value as a whole, in the same way that this blog is the resume that got me a job at American Photo.

This may appear to have an only tangential relation to the problem of making a living as a photo critic, though I think it helps set the stage of online media, where bloggers can be called up directly to the big leagues without any seasoning. Still, as Daniel Campbell Blight noted in the comments of the last post, this discussion is “too general.” That’s probably true! There are a lot of concepts being tossed around here—photo criticism, photo theory, bloggers, online writing, offline writing—but I’m happy to sift through the mess and see what comes out of it.