I don't know about Sasha and Patti and Barack vs. Hililary (I'm wearing my Obama button as I peck) and reject vs. denounce. Nor do I know whether a response to someone else's entry should be entered as a new submission or a comment. But since we are all laboring under Doug's rule of one filing a week, I'll make this a new entry.
Which is in response to Jeff Weinstein's musings about conflicts of interest. When I was younger, I was a purist. Alfred Frankenstein was the much-respected classical music and art critic of the San Francisco Chronicle; just recently, Alex Ross quoted his wonderful, insightful review of the world premiere of Terry Riley's "In C" in his book. His support fostered the extraordinary Bay Area new music scene in the 50's and 60's. I personally owed Frankenstein an affectionate debt, since when I was 15 he gave me a generous hour of his time talking about a life in music criticism, how difficult it was, how rewarding it was.
Frankenstein wrote program notes for the SF Symphony. He so bought into the orchestra's ethos that he became a fierce defender of the then-music director Enrique Jorda when everyone else was attacking him. It was very hard to separate how such a perceptive critic could defend Jorda without factoring in his relationship with the symphony.
Eventually, Frankenstein was forced out as classical critic, but not becasue the paper considered his note-writing a conflict in itself. George Szell came to town and departed after one rehearsal, pleading illness. Frankenstein, at this point apparently delusional, wrote a page 1 open letter to Szell, urging him to affirm his confidence in Jorda and the orchestra since unfounded rumors were circulating that he was somehow dissatisfied. Szell, thus provoked, wrote back that in decades of guest-conducting he had never encountered a more dire situation in a major orchestra. So Frankenstein had to quit.
In my no doubt compromised maturity, I have lightened up a little. In Britain, where there are very few staff arts critics, writing program notes and even directing concert series and festivals while continuing as a critic is common. (I at least quit the Times forfour years while I founded and ran the Lincoln Center Festival.) The British scene is very clubby, but so was Vienna's in the late 19th century, and both towns produced a lot of good music. Joe Horowitz, another critic/adminsitrator, argues that critics who cut themselves off from the real world of their chosen art form are simply contributing to their own ignorance.
For me, the issue of the appearance of conflict is almost more important than conflict itself. By and large, I will take critics at their word when they say they can retain their objectivity despite professional and social entanglements. But such ties can still look bad from the outside. And in the increasingly fragile world of print journalism, struggling for credibiity and viability, an apparent conflict can be yet another excuse to cut loose yet another critic.
Leave a comment