Dear subscribers, readers and friends:

Please vote for my blog (Critical Rant) in Spring For Music‘s “Great Arts Blogger Challenge”.

**IT APPEARS YOU CAN VOTE ONCE A DAY**

It gives me the opportunity to advocate for N. Texas arts on a national level. It’s a cool, national competition with a weekly public voting component. All that’s missing is your vote for my site….

Here’s the URL:

http://springformusic.com/2012-great-blogger-challenge/

Here’s the scoop:

2012 Great Arts Blogger Challenge

Welcome to Spring For Music’s 2012 Great Arts Blogger Challenge. The Challenge will run for four weeks March 26-April 19 with the winner announced Friday April 20. Each week a question will be posed and participating bloggers will write their response on their own blog. Below you can see the bracket of all the participating bloggers with links to their posts. Forty-two bloggers registered to enter. There are four rounds. At the end of the first week the field will be cut to 16, then 8 and 4 in subsequent weeks.

Visitors to this site are encouraged to read the entries and vote  in the column at right. Then return to this page to vote for your favorite post(s). Audience voting continues till Thursday noon EDT of each week and accounts for one-third of the decision. There are three “official” judges who will account for the other two-thirds of the vote. The judges are: Katrine Ames, former senior editor at Newsweek; composer Nico Muhly; and Douglas McLennan, founder and editor of ArtsJournal. Judges will vote and comment on entries. Bloggers who will advance to the next round will be announced Friday at noon EDT each week.

First prize is $2,500 and two tickets for each of the six Spring For Music concerts at Carnegie Hall May 7-12.

Apt New Yorker cartoon.....