Doug: No Rules? Hardly

John: All well and good to say no rules. But we both know that doesn’t hold. Indeed, with each plagiarism or conflict case that comes up, the rules at American newspapers get tighter and more reactionary. My favorite over-reach was the Miami Herald’s bizarre firing of dance critic Octavio Roca a few years ago when it was discovered that he had plagiarized… wait for it… from himself. He had written about an artist a few years earlier somewhere else, then reused some of the descriptions again at the Herald. This is the kind of stupidity that makes people laugh at newspapers. Perhaps there were other issues at play in this case, but the stated reasons were absurd.
Likewise the ethics about who buys tickets to performances. The paternalistic ethics-addled Seattle Times insists that its critics should not be compromised by free tickets, and so requires its critics to buy every ticket, resulting sometimes in considerable gymnastics by the critics to get the proper paperwork in order.
I agree that junkets can be compromising. But again, if we made clear the biases and then did away with many of these rules, the transparency would be a tonic.
To return to the artist friendship issue, though. I sympathize with the shyness factor. I have felt the same, often. But then, some of the best interviews I have ever had have been when the encounter had turned into more of a conversation than a Q&A. A brief story: I once kidnapped Isaac Stern from the airport here in Seattle when the orchestra wouldn’t grant me a time. I found out his flight, showed up at the gate (I was much younger and brasher then) and told him I was his transportation to his hotel. I led him outside to my little low-riding two-seater sports car (like I said, I was younger), and off we went.
I told him who I was, and when we got to his hotel he let me come up to his suite and we spent a terrific afternoon together talking about music and politics (he was interrupted every 20 minutes or so by the phone, as he was managing his empire, and the parts of the phone conversations that I could hear were as fascinating as anything.
When I finally left about four hours later, I had a very different sense of him than if we had just done a traditional interview. He was old and not playing, shall we say at his peak, but I came to understand a lot more about the man because the encounter was not the usual thing.
I’ve written about his elsewhere, but I like a lot the English approach to covering the arts. It’s not unusual at all to see artists and arts administrators weigh in on issues or argue with the critics in print. One doesn’t discount their opinions because they run a theatre or opera house. In America it is very unusual to see artists arguing on the pages of our newspapers.
So you say no rules. That’s what we have on the internet right now. It does make the reader have to take more responsibility for vetting sources, but I think this is a good thing. I think audiences are much more sophisticated about parsing conflicts than they were 25 years ago. Most young people I know, rather than being oblivious to the manipulations of corporate America, seem aware of them and are appropriately skeptical. It doesn’t mean they reject them; just that they’re aware of them.
I guess for me it comes down to how it is you develop your aesthetic. I feel that I’m a better music critic because I sat in practice rooms for decades and went to Juilliard and had the experience of performing in lots of different situations. I have a relationship with music that’s very personal and based on intimate association. I’m quite confident in my judgments about certain things. When I talk with pianists I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of the terrain they’re walking. Does it make me a better critic? I’d say not. It’s just the context that drives my opinions. Whether you trust my judgments or not depends on how well I’ve argued my point of view. That is, being a pianist doesn’t give my opinion any greater weight. But it informs that opinion and helps me argue; whether I’m successful or not depends on how I express it.
To circle way back to the topic at hand: knowing or not knowing an artist doesn’t in itself make you a better or lesser critic. But the experience of interacting with the artist can help give insight into work. That may or may not make your writing better; it really does depend on the critic. I think publications ought to have strict rules about disclosing relationships, but once expressed, I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a conflict.