Jonathan Jones has been complaining about the banal way in which Wikipedia covers art and artists. He cites the entry for Goya as an example.
I thought I’d test this by checking out the entry on Patrick Heron, an artist I’d like to think I know a little bit about. Here’s what I found…
Plenty of summary background information, but almost nothing about the art itself.
This can be repaired by pointing towards Andrew Wilson’s excellent essay, Drawing Space in Colour, for the 2008 Heron exhibition at the San Francisco Hackett-Freedman Gallery – the first American exhibition since Heron’s death in 1999.
http://hackettfreedman.com/templates/publications.jsp?id=175
The problem with amateurs is that they’re (we’re) amateurs. They have the time, but not necessarily the depth. Meanwhile the experts currently have the depth but not the time. Is it a public service to improve Wikipedia entries, or is it just an opportunistic means of getting content for free?
Four Cultures 