LTB Holding Ltd. was set up in 2001 by Louise Blouin. Louise Blouin Media was started in 2003. A website, artinfo.com, was launched in 2005 and later changed to blouinartinfo.com. It has regional editions in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Brazil, India, Russia and the United Kingdom. The company acquired or started the Art & Auction, Gallery Guide, Museums, Culture+Travel and Modern Painters magazine titles and bought the databases Art Sales Index and Gordon's and the French artbook publisher. In 2006 the company closed Spoon magazine, which it had recently bought. In 2008, two years after it was started, Culture+Travel was closed down. Former Village Voicefilm critic J. Hoberman began writing for blouinartinfo in 2012. As reported in July 2017, blouinartinfo had restructured and downsized after eliminating the entirety of the editorial team based in the United States. Blouin charged the company's Indian contractors with generating content, giving them fictional bylines to present the veneer of an international staff.
Controversies
In December 2011, Louise Blouin Media was sued for defamation in United States district court for a September 16, 2011, article written by Noah Charney on blouinartinfo.com, in which he wrote that a forensic art expert "was part of a family of art forgers, and that he had been planting the forensic evidence into the questionable works himself". In 2010, an article in the New York Post noted controversy over payments to freelance writers for the arts publications of Blouin's company. One group, WAAANKAA, demanded back payments of $18,000. In December 2013, Artinfo.com abruptly laid off 26 international employees. The New York Observer posted a 1000-word internal email from Blouin to staff explaining that the move was part of a new direction in which, "One person doing all and not good we need less of one but many more." In February 2014, the New York Post reported that two former executives were suing Blouin for $250,000 in pay and commissions. In 2016 further reports emerged of the company failing to pay "about 40 journalistic freelancers money... with freelancers owed anywhere from $500 to more than $20,000". President David Gursky resigned in early 2017, following the departure of editor-in-chief of Modern Painters Scott Indrisek, and Karen Quarles, the editor-in-chief of Blouin Lifestyle. It was reported that "at some of the publications, staffers began leaving the names of contributing editors off the masthead because it would have been misleading to pretend to have large staffs when many were not getting paid," and that "the work often used generic bylines to obscure the fact that it was being written overseas." By January 21 it was reported that the remaining employees checks were bouncing and that the entire finance department of "one guy based in India... is scrambling to ‘fix’ the problem sending PayPals to people who have no money."
