Sebastian Smee, Pulitzer-winning Boston Globe art critic
Yesterday was Pulitzer Prize Day, or, as it’s known in my house, Passover (to riff on Bob Hope‘s famous quip regarding Oscars Award Night). Actually, I wasn’t “passed over” this year, because I didn’t apply (as I had for the previous two years).
Wait a minute! Last night actually WAS Passover. In fact, I’m still in recovery mode after my seder feast for 14 (intimate, compared to my baleboosteh heyday of 30-plus), the preparations for which were disrupted by semi-disaster. (More on that later.)
The Pulitzer winner for criticism, as you have doubtless heard by now, was Sebastian Smee, the Boston Globe‘s art critic, who was cited for “his vivid and exuberant writing about art, often bringing great works to life with love and appreciation.” He had been a finalist in 2008, when NY Times critic Holland Cotter got medaled.
The jury this year included Jonathan Landman, culture editor of the NY Times and (could it be?!?) Doug Mclennan, editor of ArtsJournal, which hosts CultureGrrl. Maybe I SHOULD have applied this year! Then again, I’m sure that Doug would have been required to recuse himself from consideration of any AJ bloggers, just as Landman probably had to be hands-off regarding his architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff, who was named a finalist this year.
Still, with Doug on the jury, we’ve come a long way from 2009, when the Pulitzer arbiters refused to consider my entry on the National Academy’s stealth deaccessions (and even refunded my fee), because they didn’t regard ArtsJournal as an eligible news organization. (Incidentally, there was more on the National Academy’s evolving situation, a story that I broke in December 2008, in yesterday’s NY Times.)
The year after I was bounced from Pulitzer contention, what I termed “The CultureGrrl Exclusion Rule” was officially lifted: Bloggers were invited to vie for the prize. (When a blogger actually WINS, that’ll really be something!)
One distinguished non-winner, Blake Gopnik, former art critic for the Washington Post (now with Newsweek), last Wednesday spoke from the audience that had gathered at Christie’s to hear a panel discussion on The Future of Arts Journalism. Blake expressed his distress at what he views as a disturbing sea-change in his field, exemplified by the fact that his journalistic colleagues (presumably those as the Post) were much more interested in his article about “the Wojnarovicz scandal” than his long piece on Velázquez‘s “Las Meninas.” You can hear him vent his frustration (to which Eric Gibson, editor of the Wall Street Journal‘s “Leisure & Arts” page, sympathetically responds) about two-thirds into the video of the panel discussion (to which I link below).
But first, you should view my CultureGrrl Video of Gopnik’s lament, which has the advantage of focusing on Blake’s face, rather than on the back of his head. Sitting across the aisle and slightly in front of him, I caught him on camera just after he started saying the following:
In the 15 years that I’ve been a salaried art critic, there’s been a huge change in what many editors want from even their art critics, let alone their art journalists, which is stuff that has anything to do with anything other than actual works of art.
Then Blake said this:
If you watch the entire panel discussion on Christie’s website, you’ll also see me pop up as the last questioner from the live (as distinguished from online) audience. More on that (perhaps) later.
But for now, here’s my report on our family’s unscripted Passover afflictions: The long table that I had temporarily set up in the middle of my kitchen, on which I had just plunked down my half-done turkey for basting, suddenly collapsed at the end where the bird was perched,
causing a slow-motion cascade of poultry and a large assortment of dishes and platters. Happily, the 20-pounder landed rightside up, snug in his roasting pan. Only two platters and a gravy boat were totaled (not to mention my husband, who had neglected to lock the folding leg of the table). Our kitchen’s wood floor got well basted.
CultureDaughter, meanwhile, is licking her wounds, having cut her hand (requiring two stitches) the night before driving to us from Maryland. She got the worse of her knife attack on 12 apples, while attempting to make our seder’s charoset. This afternoon, she almost didn’t make it back in time for her job interview in Washington, because her car’s tire went flat in our parking lot.
“Next year in Jerusalem” (as we say on Passover night) sounds like a very good idea to me at the moment!