4Columns
Dublin Core
Title
4Columns
Subject
Description
Arts criticism website
Contributor
Coverage
Contributor Item Type Metadata
First Name
4Columns
Years Affiliated
2017
Birthplace
United States
Biographical Text
4Columns is a website of arts criticism aimed at a general audience. Its title refers, quite literally, to what you’ll find there each week: four new columns, each with a distinctive voice and perspective. Together, they offer a complex and compelling view of contemporary culture, from film to literature to performance to the visual arts. 4Columns’s mainstay is the thousand-word review—a length that both enables critical reflection and demands writerly rigor. Centered, but not moored, in the New York scene, 4Columns reflects the cosmopolitanism of today’s culture through the sensibilities of a similarly diverse group of contributors. The site’s flexible, modular framework supports a multiplicity of styles, approaches, and ideas. It, further, maintains meaningful distinctions between artistic disciplines while accommodating the hybrid nature of much contemporary practice. Launched at a moment when the Internet is increasingly the dominant outlet for critics and criticism, 4Columns exploits the resources of online technology but avoids one of the blogosphere’s most prevalent shortcomings: the poor payment of writers. 4Columns nurtures excellence by compensating its contributors fairly. It also counters the web’s information overload and tendency to foster hyperspecialization by focusing on four well-chosen works a week, bringing together writing on varied cultural forms within a single venue. Combining sophisticated analysis with broad accessibility, 4Columns insists on art’s capacity to serve as something shared, even—perhaps especially—when it is the object of criticism.
Professional Website
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Public Resource Centre Affiliation
Contributor Type
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Citation
“4Columns,” NTU CCA Singapore Digital Archive, accessed April 18, 2024, https://ntuccasingapore.omeka.net/items/show/3986.