Jason Farago’s blog Art in Common addressed public art in New York and its relationship to the city. The blog provided information about new commissions and critiqued contemporary public art on both art historical and civic grounds. It also engaged in a kind of “archaeology of the present,” revisiting lost or dismantled works of public art (of whichTilted Arc is only the most obvious example) and reassessing forgotten projects. Frequent short entries were interwoven with longer essays investigating the stakes of public art, the civic responsibility of the artist, and the specific conditions of viewing in the New York street. Art in Common also employed geo-tagging to create a map of public art across New York.
Jason Farago is an art critic for The New York Times. He is also the editor and co-founder of Even, an art magazine devoted to long-form criticism, founded in 2015. Before joining the Times, Jason served as US art critic for The Guardian, and he has also been a regular contributor to The New Yorker, the BBC, Artforum, and other publications. He has published monographic essays on the art of Sheila Hicks, Simon Hantaï, Kishio Suga, Jonathan Horowitz, Meleko Mogkosi, and Julia Dault. In 2017 he was awarded the inaugural Rabkin Prize for arts writing. Jason was born in New York and holds degrees in art history from Yale University and the Courtauld Institute of Art.