Ian McKay (born 1962) is a British writer, art critic, publisher and translator. A former editor of Contemporary Art magazine, and the founder-editor of The Journal of Geography and Urban Research, throughout the 1990s he was best known for his writings on the arts of Eastern Europe, being cited as the first British art critic to emphasize the negative impact of the western art market in that region. Throughout the 1990s and early-2000s, he was a contributor to a wide range of art journals, as well as writing on subjects relating to photography, cinema, and music. Since 2007 his publishing activities have mainly centred on UK Rural Affairs, and the environment however. Though periodically he continues to publish works of art criticism, his most recent publications concern social justice in rural Britain, as well as environmental conservation in the wider European sphere. He has also worked as an academic in several UK universities.
Life and career
The son of former National Hunt jockey and racehorse trainer Geoff Laidlaw, Ian McKay was born in Epsom, Surrey, and studied at Chelsea School of Art. His first known publications were a series of punk fanzines in the late-1970s, including Peroxide (from which he was said to have been ousted by Norman Cook for serial incompetence). In the early-1980s he also was founder editor of 'The Irony of Romanticism', a short-lived alternative arts publication. In 1984, with several other writers and filmmakers, he was involved in the setting up of the organisation Music for Miners during the UK Miner's Strike of 1984–1985. He has worked as a critic and writer for art journals internationally, with his work appearing in over thirty countries worldwide. He has also curated visual art exhibitions and for some time was a senior academic in the field of Media and Cultural Studies in the UK. His recent writings largely relate to UK Rural Affairs, particularly in relation to the New Forest, as well as conservation and environmental crime in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Occasionally he still writes on the visual arts.
Critical writings
McKay began writing on both the visual arts and the environment in the 1980s, and throughout the 1990s was a regular contributor to journals and magazines that included: Apollo; Art Monthly; Arts Review; Artscribe; Computer Weekly; Contemporary Art (for which he was assistant editor); Creative Camera; The Face; Geographical Magazine; The Independent on Sunday; and Private Eye. He has also been an occasional contributor of film reviews to Sight & Sound magazine, special correspondent (Vienna) for Photoicon magazine, and is listed as correspondent for both the photography magazine f22, and State magazine. In the mid-1990s, McKay published a series of undercover reports that exposed the complex political dealings of the British Green Party's Arts Policy Working Group at that time. He also spoke regularly on a pro-censorship platform at conferences in the UK, appearing alongside figures such as the media lawyer and freedom-of-expression advocate Mark Stephens and the journalist and writer Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. During the later-1990s–2000s, he worked mainly on a series of book projects relating to the dance culture and urban youth topics, as well as becoming the founder editor of The Journal of Geography and Urban Research, In 2005, he returned to writing on the arts and culture industries for numerous magazines and as editor at large (Eastern Europe) for the British arts newspaper State of Art however, and in 2007 published a controversial series of articles that sought to expose low-level corruption and spin within the UK's independent artist-curator networks. For his research into this topic he was invited to participate in the Agendas V symposium in Venice, at the time of the 52nd Venice Biennale. He has also curated several visual art exhibitions for which he has written catalogue essays.