Doug: Generally Speaking (The Critic As Specialist)

John: Two huge topics to jump into, both probably worth spending a whole week on by themselves. I’ll wait on answering the first till later, since it’s such a huge topic. But the second, about specialist critics vs. generalists is easier to take a bite out of.
I don’t think being a musician makes one a better music critic or being an architect makes you a better critic of buildings. It helps inform your point of view and that can be useful. But it also might not. I always thought in music school that the teaching of music theory was strangely disconnected from music itself. Sure it might be interesting to understand the rules for resolving dominant 9ths, or be able to perform Schenkerian analysis on a Mozart symphony. But it doesn’t necessarily translate into being able to hear more with more understanding or play with more musicality. Indeed, some of the biggest theory geeks I know are dreadfully unmusical; it’s as though the balance between sound and structure has been upset. Learning theory is a tool that can inform. But it might not. Most good musicians I know worked out their own ways to understand music; for many, traditional music theory is completely extraneous.
With critics, knowing the technical structure of something can be useful, and if it allows you to write as a kind of “insider” who can explain how it works in an enlightening way, that’s great. But if you get too focused on the details it can also make your perspective boringly narrow (a parallel, I think, that also applies in our earlier discussion about how whether knowing artists personally helps or hinders). But a critic does need an authentic base, and having a specialized background can certainly provide that. Unfortunately, lots of critics hide in that base too.
Being a “generalist” doesn’t necessarily mean a critic knows less; it’s more an indication of a different perspective. Unfortunately, I think the idea of the generalist critic has been greatly abused in American journalism to mean someone who doesn’t know very much. There is a great tradition in American journalism that a reporter ought to be able to jump into any beat and swim with the fishes. It’s a nice idea, but in practice, at in the arts, it more often results in dumb writing.
I think one of the big problems in the culture sections of many newspapers is editors with no particular knowledge, background or love of the arts. I like to think of culture as an ongoing conversation of ideas. If you walk into the conversation not caring (or knowing about) what’s already been said, you’re likely not going to have much to contribute.
To relate it to ArtsJournal: the key to doing the site, I think, is being able to know what stories are important or interesting and which aren’t. That’s not a definitive standard, of course. But you have to know why this story on page D11 in some obscure place is important and this other A1 story isn’t. It’s the need for a world view that makes a certain sense out of a messy landscape.
One of the big problems with the way arts are covered in this country, I think is that publications rarely think about what their world view is. Being a critic is a lot about making choices and declaring hierarchies. Too many publications make their choices in a haphazard way, and their coverage lacks perspective or point of view.
You are a generalist in the best sense of the word, I think, in that you have omnivorist tendencies and you assume a level of engagement. You write differently about dance because you have a background in opera. You write differently about classical music because you were reviewing the Stones and Judy Collins and Elvis. And no one who reads you over time can have any doubt about what informs your world view of culture. You are a critic with plenty of specialized knowledge; it’s one of the things that made your writing on the European culture beat so interesting.
Perhaps your editor was just flattering you, but in another sense, I suspect (hope?) he was voting for a kind of generalism in the best way.
Before I send this back to you, a correction (or clarification, at least) and a question. When I said in my earlier post that there was no such thing as a conflict, I meant it in the transparent sense. That is, not that people don’t have agendas – they do – but if as much effort was spent on making those agendas transparent as is now spent on giving the appearance of objectivity, the agendas ultimately wouldn’t matter. No one expects Newt Gingrich to be objective when he writes an op-ed, but his point of view might still be worth considering. A writer with too much agenda gets heavily discounted I think, and I think readers still prefer someone who’s fair rather than a partisan.
So let throw back your question to you. You started as a critic in a time of pretty dramatic social change back in the 60s. And I can imagine the debates that must have gone on around how you cover culture – particularly that loud scruffy hippie music (he writes affectionately). Now, 40 years later we’re in another time of profound cultural change where traditional notions of journalism and audiences and critics are being reinvented. Are there any parallels that link the debates now with those then? And if you were a young critic today, would you change the way you approached your craft? Would you even go into criticism today?