CRITICAL CONDITION

posted by James Reel

    Here are two related items one can find while trawling ArtsJournal.com, both relating to the wholesale sacking of arts critics at American newspapers these days, after years of more gradual and subtle dumbing down of arts coverage. First, Michael Kennedy, a Twin Cities high school teacher and sometime theater director, pleads for the place of critics in newspapers and society in general, noting along the way that what passes for criticism in Minneapolis now revolves around media ephemera and big events from big presenters:

    Yes, we have the smaller venues, but do you hear about them very much? Not really. We hear more about television shows, movies, traveling Broadway shows and what to wear to a nightclub than we do about the fine arts in the Twin Cities.
    This city is in a quiet artistic crisis. With all of our small theaters, small galleries, music groups, dance companies and literary venues, we should be getting clear, serious criticism. We should have people working full time covering all of the theaters they can seven nights a week. There are tons of art galleries that most people have never heard of. Musical groups are everywhere.
    We need the critics. Their opinions are one thing, but the fact that they can go into these small places, consider these artists and watch these performances says that the arts are a serious part of this community.
    But the critics are fading away because of corporate decisions in the newsrooms, and along with those critics go the arts.

    Now turn to the Wall Street Journal, where Greg Sandow looks at the problem from inside the newsroom, and blames those on the outside:

    Who reads classical-music reviews? There's been a decline of interest in classical music, especially among younger people. One sign of that is the aging of the classical-music audience, which (as measured by the National Endowment for the Arts and by private studies) has been going on ever since the 1950s. Do newspapers survey their readers? What if they found—just as we did at Entertainment Weekly—that not many people read their classical reviews? What if the editors themselves don't listen to classical music?
    This, I think, is where we are now, though I don't have reader studies to back me up. How should people in the classical-music business react?
    The last thing they should do, in my view, is blame the press. "Newspapers don't care about art or culture!" people cry. But I'd turn that around and ask if people in the classical-music business really understand the current state of our world. Because here's something else I learned back in the '90s when I talked to those opera-company publicists. One thing any publicist wants is advance coverage, preview articles about whatever's being publicized. Once, the opera publicists said, they'd get these automatically. But that had stopped. "You're doing 'La Traviata'?" an editor might say. "You did it three years ago. What's the story now?"
    For orchestras, this could hit even harder. "You're playing Brahms? You played Brahms last week!" Classical music can look predictable to the outside world, and (to be honest) not very interesting. Same old, same old. Great classical masterworks, played by acclaimed classical musicians.
    So the classical-music world needs to look at two things: what it offers and how it talks about what it offers. Why are we playing Brahms? What does Brahms give us that Mozart, Feist, or Bruce Springsteen can't? And how, exactly, is this week's Brahms performance different from last week's?
    Some classical-music institutions are learning to answer these questions. But as for the many that haven't—in an age when new arts groups compete for coverage and popular culture keeps getting smarter—why should they expect any press coverage at all?

    Well, Greg is largely right. Back in my daily newspaper years, I gave up on writing opera previews because they turned out to be the same articles about young American singers with the same bland stories performing the same operas that have been performed for decades. Same problem for orchestral concerts. Cookie-cutter soloists aside, there are always interesting things to learn about Beethoven and Brahms and their music, but how can arts journalists convey any of this if the performers aren’t putting the old warhorses into some sort of interesting context, rather than sleepwalking through the usual one-from-Column-A and one-from-Column-B programming format? Arts writers can’t find an interesting angle if the presentation is flat.
    But Greg overlooks something important: It doesn’t matter if a small percentage of subscribers read arts coverage, because the few who do tend to be a paper’s core readers, those who will stick with the paper, renew their subscriptions, pay attention to what they’re reading, always be reliable while the flighty single-copy buyers come and go.
    The business and, yes, sports sections—entire sections!—also appeal to minority interests, and they’re full of mysterious jargon. Yet they’re hardly being eviscerated like the arts units. Why? Because, contrary to Greg’s support of newsroom managers, today’s newspapers are run by uncultured idiots.