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SOME things have gotten a bit better since I published my book two years ago; some have unraveled more or less on schedule. One thing that does not seem to be improving is the state of cultural journalism: Arts critics (and reporters, like yours truly) continue to be laid off as publications scale back and decide — just as school boards do in lean times — that culture, especially the fine arts, is expendable.
This is not a new story: When I arrived at the Los Angeles Times as an arts reporter (a role a bit different than that of a critic, but governed by the same economics) in 2002, I was one of four generalist arts scribes, alongside a dedicated visual-art reporter, pop music reporter, theater reporter, several movie reporters, numerous culture editors, a standalone book section with its own staff, and whole raft of critics including a fulltime dance writer. (This was, of course, the largest and most ambitious paper west of the Hudson, with Sunday circulation above a million, in a city driven economically by culture of various kinds, so these numbers and this commitment to the arts and entertainment was hardly typical for American dailies.) In any case, my, uh, departure in the wake of the 2008 recession was part of a process that would lead to the paper employing a single arts reporter and slicing and dicing most of the rest of the staff. (Oddly, and thankfully, most of the critics remain.)
In any case, Alex Ross — one of my favorite writers on music — has just dropped a story in the New Yorker on the decimation of music critics. I don’t have that much to add to “The Fate of the Critic in the Clickbait Age” — and I applaud its shoutout to my old friend and colleague, former Angeleno Timothy Mangan — so I’ll just quote from it a bit. Ross begins with the seemingly irrefutable logic — laid down by our corporate overlords and the editors who do their bidding — that the arts in general and criticism in specific draws fewer readers — at least those counted online — as just about everything else, so why keep it going in lean times? (In the world of culture, this means every inch of classical coverage competes against coverage of superhero movies and celebrity divorces.) But, Ross says
Those who subscribe to the print edition are discounted—and they tend to be older people, who are also more likely to follow the performing arts. A colleague wrote to me, “The four thousand people reading your theatre critics might be extremely loyal subscribers who press the paper on others. People in power often speak of ‘engagement’ and ‘valued readers,’ yet they still remain in thrall of the big click numbers—because of advertising, mostly.”
And
Also, even if the data could measure every twitch of every eyeball, should that information control editorial choices? Foreign reporting often draws fewer readers, yet the bigger papers persist in publishing it, because it is felt to be important. One guesses that play-by-play accounts of baseball and football games receive relatively few clicks, yet the sports section is considered sacrosanct.
Thus
The trouble is, once you accept the proposition that popularity corresponds to value, the game is over for the performing arts. There is no longer any justification for giving space to classical music, jazz, dance, or any other artistic activity that fails to ignite mass enthusiasm.
Ross hits it on the head pretty well here. And if you value what arts journalists — reporters, critics, and the editors who advocate for their work — please subscribe to one of the few publications that still employs them.
In my case, unfortunately, you are preaching to the choir. But then, the choir also has intrinsic value, or else churches of all denominations would not have employed choirs so ubiquitously for so many centuries.
The debased, dumbed-down culture that now swamps us is the result of centuries of a remorselessly materialistic, dog-eat-dog capitalism that values ONLY the bottom line. Meanwhile, the HUMAN population that any society should serve has become more and more coarse, reductionist and stupid.
In THAT respect we are approaching a society of true equality. Almost everybody, of any class or station, from billionaires to welfare recipients, is becoming less and less mentally active and alert, less able to think through complex problems, less able to AIM FOR intellectual and spiritual growth. The consequence is an ersatz “society” which more and more embraces a mindless lowest common denominator—- not only in culture, but also in ethics, even in the very concept of what it means to achieve fully developed personhood. It is fast becoming a “society” connected only by a network of ATM machines.
It is an irony of Swiftian proportions that, less than two centuries after the introduction of a scientific concept of evolution, our generation should witness such a remorseless slide toward DEVOLUTION. We are careening toward becoming no more than another species of great ape with a knack for gadgets.
NOTICE that there is an ineluctable irony here: the more our society insists that the ONLY value is MONEY VALUE, the more the inhabitants of our society reduce their own INTRINSIC value. The nightly TV news routinely reports on the “GNP”, overlooking the fact that the actual CONTENT behind much of the GNP is unnecessary garbage.
Absolutely on-the-spot comments, I’m sad to say.
Thank you, Daniel. I appreciate the moral support of your comment, even though we don ‘t have much control over the self-destructiveness of the larger world. I like to believe that there is still hope— perhaps the promising young Congressman Joseph Kennedy III , grandson of Bobby Kennedy, will appeal to the American voter in a way that may put us back on an upward slope.
But we must hope, or we will have given up. And we have tangible hope, in the form of fighters and idealists like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Al Franken.
So we may still see positive change. The nation as a whole cannot tolerate the current depressing, corrupt scene without rebelling against it at some point. So even if we don’t believe in hope right now, we MUST hope.