The NYT is running an article about Nick Knight today, written by Alice Rawsthorn. It’s a big sloppy wet kiss of a profile, complete with gushing quotes from Nadja Swarovski, who’s not only a major Knight client but who is also the lead advertiser on Knight’s website, showstudio.com. Rawsthorn herself can’t say enough wonderful things about the site:
In 2000, Knight founded the Web site SHOWstudio as a laboratory where he could experiment with interactive technologies. SHOWstudio has since produced more than 250 projects by Knight and others, placing him at the forefront of developments in 3-D scanning, digital sculpture, interactive film and a raft of other innovations…
Despite the beauty of his still images, SHOWstudio may yet prove to be Knight’s most influential project. He has bankrolled the Web site since 2000, at considerable personal expense. As well as enabling Knight to experiment, it has nurtured a new generation of multimedia stylists, designers and digital artists. When a famous face, like Moss’s, is featured on SHOWstudio, as many as 500,000 people log on in a day.
First, about that 500,000 figure: I don’t believe it. Half a million unique visitors in a day? I just don’t buy it. But I have a couple of friends at the website, and I’ll ask them if it’s remotely realistic, or what it’s referring to. I guess it’s conceivable that if Kate Moss gets naked on the site and it’s picked up by the gossip blogs, then traffic might spike. Lord knows sex sells on the internet. But that kind of traffic hardly represents the “new generation of multimedia stylists, designers and digital artists”.
And second, don’t you think that Rawsthorn, when writing for the New York Times, might have disclosed that she was a founding editor of showstudio.com? This is America, where some people actually care about those kind of journalistic ethics.