All change

Having tried for the last 10 months to break into the world of art restoration and conservation, as time has ticked past it has become more and more apparent that it is quite literally impossible unless you can afford to do a 3 year course followed by several years of apprenticeships - plus the big and final problem of there being very little work out there at the end of all of this. Not that I want to sound like I'm giving up but my determination to beat the system began to waver over Christmas when my father and I had a stern talk.

This very blog got me thinking about arts writing after making the decision that my chosen career path  wasn't really feasible right now. So, back to the drawing board...

After a few months of job hunting I am now working at The Art Newspaper. Founded in 1990, the monthly investigative newspaper is for people serious about art, it covers everything going on within the art world on a global scale. With offices and sister publications in New York, Turin, Paris, Athens, Moscow, and as of this month Beijing. It covers everything - news, exhibitions, fairs, museums, art market, conservation, interviews with artists and collectors and more. Reporting on old, new, commercial and non-commercial - seeking to know and show where the power lies in art. 

The Art Newspaper or 'TAN' for those in the know, is a campaigning newspaper, regularly publishing breaking news that gets taken up by the daily papers. One journalist went undercover to met tomb-robbers in Italy and find out the economics of the trade in illicit antiquities, another into Nablus to discover the truth about damage caused by Israeli troops to the ancient buildings. During the first war against Saddam Hussein TAN disclosed how many of Iraq's major archeological sites were close to bombing targets and published maps. It has also lobbied Italian politics over the threat posed by climate change to Venice.

Fear not, I shall continue to blog and certainly am in the right place to do so - never will I be at a loss for new material for it!