John: Arts Coverage Then and Now

Doug: I agree with most everything you say in your last posting (to the annoyance of those, like editors, who value a good dust-up over reasoned dialogue). I do think editors at daily newspapers today prize lively writing and versatile newspaperly skills over expertise in a field of art; they are probably even suspicious of expertise, at least when flaunted. This has a lot to do with the perilous position newspapers find themselves in, and their preferred, business-model- and stock-analyst-driven solution of dumbing down the (arts) coverage and appealing at all costs to the young reader. I seriously doubt most of them know or care about any kind of culture, including popular culture. So instead of smart criticism of movies or rock they go for puffy features about whoever is topping the (manipulated) charts.
When I edited Arts & Leisure from 1998 to 2002, my idea was that while naturally no article should be so obscure or technical that it shut out all but the specialist reader, that there were still clear constituencies for certain kinds of articles. Ballet fans wanted to read about ballet, not necessarily modern or flamenco or opera or movies or rock. And so forth. Thus the idea was to pick writers (we could do that, A&L being largely a forum for freelancers) who loved and cared about their fields, let them keep their own voice (as opposed to bending them to Times style or an individual editor’s notion of good writing) and make the weekly package the chorus of all those voices. Rather like artsjournal.com.
As for your question about changes, and social changes, in criticism over four decades: When I was young and trying to get into newspaper criticism, I just wanted a job. As a classical music critic, though I soon realized I loved writing about dance, too, and later rock & roll. Despite all my fancy education, I guess I’m not an intellectual in the sense that I need constantly to probe behind the reasons for how things are. I loved opera and music and dance, and wanted to go in there, hear/see the art and report on it back to the readers, aligning my reactions as closely and eloquently as possible to my perceptions of the actual performance and placing it all in (cultural historical, since that was my academic training) context. I was amused when Phillip Lopate, in his review of “Outsider” for the Dec. 24 Times Sunday Book Review, says I moved on from advocating violent revolution in my youth. I never advocated violent revolution; I was a transformation of inner consciousness kind of guy. I was describing a Living Theater performance in Berkeley and pointing out the incongruity of advocating violence to an audience that had just come from street fighting.
Debates about how you cover culture? Well, 40 years ago there wasn’t the panic today in newspapers about threats from the Internet, loss of young readers, decline of advertising and such like. High culture (and movies) dominated the agenda, partly because that was the way it was always done and partly because the publisher was a rich guy who served on local boards and he and his friends expected the opera, the symphony and the art museums to be written about.
It took a while for rock criticism, which really only got going in the underground weeklies in the mid-60’s, to penetrate the big newspapers. The Los Angeles Times, where I worked from 1970 to 72, was a pioneer with Robert Hilburn in 1970. None of the big newsweeklies covered rock. When I got to The New York Times in late 1972, rock was still farmed out to lowly regarded stringers. When I became chief rock critic in early 1974, I was still a stringer and still the juniorest classical critic. I came on staff in June of that year, as both a rock and classical critic/reporter. Curiously, in the mid-70’s, there was a bubble when the Times rock critic (i.e., me) had enormous influence. The reason was that the rest of the mainstream press and weeklies distrusted the scruffy underground. But when The New York Times, in all its august mainstream majesty, endorsed, say, Bruce Springsteen, he got on the covers of Time and Newsweek the same day. Now, everyone has a rock critic, so the “power” of the Times rock critics, however smart they truly are, is less.
I grew up with the high arts (even though I listened to the Hit Parade in the early 50’s and still own a first-edition 45 of “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel”). I regarded championing rock in the early 70’s as a way of loosening up the high arts, of bringing them (and their audiences) more into congruence with reality, with the way music actually was in (North) America at that time. And the way most people who loved music actually enjoyed it, across genres.
Today, corporate culture has so infused rock on its upper commercial levels that blandness has blighted the field. That said, the level of invention in indie rock and world music and independent film (and even, occasionally, top-10 pop and studio features) is livelier than ever. So I am all for a more comprehensive coverage of the popular arts than used to prevail in the 60’s. When Howell Raines was blundering into cultural coverage in his blessedly short reign at the NYT (thank God for Jason Blair), he kept talking about “restoring the balance” as he insisted on more and more pop coverage (when he had a hand in it, it was dictated from above and hopelessly unhip). I want to restore the balance, too, but in the other direction. Now my energies would be focused on the high arts, under siege not so much from pop culture as from know-nothing editors and publishers who think that is all they need pay attention to.
A footnote: My whines are directed mostly at the NYT. But of course that paper so dominates the field of cultural coverage in the United States — in terms of quantity, not quality in any individual case — that lessons drawn from it do not necessarily correlate to other newspapers around the country. But the same tendencies are everywhere, and need to be discussed and combated.
So, for young critics: Your passion for those arts HAS to remain paramount. Otherwise, you’re just a hack. Do you need to adjust yourself more in the direction of chirpy features and personality profiles, as opposed to serious criticism. Probably, if you want a job. Although if you can hang on writing the kind of criticism you want in whatever forum you find, that may still be a ticket to a criticism job at a newspaper; editors have a way of tiring of their own and seeking fancier folk from the outside. Maybe they secretly realize that the very policies they impose stunt the growth of young critics.
I do think there a danger today that more and more young people who might once have aspired to be journalistic critics will gravitate instead to academia or arts management or even publicity. Maybe they’ll subsidize culture on the side, by contributing to Internet blogs or forums or chat rooms. Those other, income-producing, arts-related jobs are not terrible ways to live a life. But criticism is still a pretty cool profession, if you can get a chance to do it. And be paid for it.