Daily Morning: Art Writing in Turkey, 2019-2020 charts the intellectual development of an American journalist who, after moving to Istanbul from New York City, embarks on a vocational transformation in the local art world. It is filled with impressions of the city through the eyes of a newcomer grappling with greater geopolitical currents and histories of dispossession and assimilation, integration and disruption. Inspired by the unwitting, knockabout neighborhood poets of 1970s Manhattan who turned to art writing to scratch out a living, the Bosphorus villages, Anatolian quarters and Levantine districts of Turkey’s biggest metropolis become a fertile testing ground on which the author cultivated his peculiarly singular perspective as an individual acquiring taste for visuality, aesthetic and conceptual, beyond linguistic limitation in and among the urban crowds, gallery openings and museum fetes. These writings, produced on a weekly basis for print and online publications from 2019-2020, are the result of countless interviews with working artists, attending exhibitions, reading catalogues and, with fresh eyes, encountering a society ever on the cusp of its own self-discovery, a path shared by the writer in these pages of political naivety, cultural sentimentality and earnest curiosity.
