March 2010 Archives

Interesting piece by film critic Tony Scott in The New York Times about the future of criticism and the demise of the long-running television show, "At the Movies." Scott and Chicago Tribune movie critic Michael Phillips are the current thumbs-up-and thumbs-down fellas on the once-popular show. I hadn't realized how long it had been going: it began in the late 1970s with the late Gene Siskel and feisty-as-ever Roger Ebert. Disney, which syndicates the show, recently announced it was closing it down.

I liked how Tony ends the piece: "The future of criticism is the same as it ever was. Miserable, and full of possibility. The world is always falling down. The news is always very sad. The time is always late.

"But the fruit is always ripe."

Pretty much my feelings.

My other "favorite" part: the comments from the lovely readers, who think nothing of telling a well-reasoned and intelligent writer what a fool he is.

Ummm, would it have been too much trouble for the esteemed judges of American Idol to mention the original Chaka Khan recording of "Through The Fire" after Siobhan Magnus attempted it last night?

Magnus obviously studied Khan's version, which is a technical tour de force of daredevil ad-libs and perfectly nailed upper-stratosphere high notes. (It should be noted that the tune, the second single from Khan's breakthrough I Feel For You album, was released in 1984, well before the advent of digital pitch correction.) The judges knew the song as well, and that knowledge inevitably factored into their reactions: Simon Cowell described her treatment of the demanding ballad as "manslaughter."

I'm not saying that Idol's mission should be educating its contestants (or its audience) about what singing is. But given the overall wretchedness of this year's field, a few breadcrumbs sure couldn't hurt. And Khan is exactly the kind of singer Magnus and other boot-wearing belters could use as a role model. Check out the way Khan handles the tumultuous climax of "Through The Fire": The tune seems to practically demand that the singer let loose, and yet Khan doesn't simply open the floodgates -- instead, she carves up the melody ten different awe-inspiring ways. She's as emotionally invested as Adam Lambert has ever been about any TV appearance, and somehow manages to convey this without shrieking or shouting. Instead, she sings. What a concept.

As journalistic endeavors go, The Arts Desk is something of a conductorless orchestra. Based in London and staffed by about three dozen writers and photographers, many of them former Daily Telegraph contributors, the online publication is structured as a collective, sans editors. In the absence of hierarchy, the group put Jasper Rees forward to discuss the site. This is an edited version of our interview, which was conducted via instant message. Where messages crossed, text has been rearranged for clarity.

The Arts Desk, which calls itself "Britain's first professionally produced arts critical website," launched last September: 09/09/09. Why and how did it come about?

In December 2008 a number of freelance arts writers who work regularly for the arts pages of the Daily Telegraph in the UK received the news simultaneously, in the very same email -- we were all cc'ed -- that in 2009 the paper was halving its arts budget and that much of the work would be done by staffers and in-house writers. We didn't need to read between the lines to work out that our work was going to shrink, and with it our pay. Without wishing to blow our own trumpets, we felt that any such move would necessarily entail a drop in quality of the arts coverage on the paper.

Very British, that modesty.

You might say that, I couldn't possibly comment -- to quote a political satire about cynical Westminster life that was on TV a while

Steve Buttry, one of the more interesting thinkers in re-imagining journalism, writes to send word of a real live arts journalism job at a new online publication launching in Washington DC. He says: "We're planning on a strong A&E staff and are looking for the right person to lead our A&E effort."

Until recently Buttry was a top editor at the Cedar Rapids Gazette in Iowa. His work was featured in last fall's Arts Journalism Summit at USC. His new effort is a startup and features some impressive backers:

It's a new digital startup (new enough that we don't have a name yet) that will be launching this year, covering local news in the Washington metro area.

Jim Brady, former executive editor of washingtonpost.com, is leading this operation for Allbritton Communications, owner of Politico and several television stations, including WJLA and News Channel 8 in Washington. Jim is a leader and pioneer of digital journalism and I am delighted and honored that he has invited me to join this effort. My staff, colleagues and I will work to turn some of the ideas I presented here, especially in my Complete Community Connection and mobile-first strategy posts, into real, thriving business practices.

Also involved is Erik Wemple.

Wemple comes to Allbritton after eight years as editor of Washington City Paper...

Said Wemple: "I am greatly honored to have this opportunity in front of me. We're talking about a massive investment in local newsgathering, plus an amazing assemblage of Web talent. Our goal will be to deliver a product that lives up to the company's commitment."

Allbritton Communications Company operates eight television stations in seven broadcast markets, including Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington, DC.  Allbritton Communications also owns and operates the political newspaper and website POLITICO and POLITICO.com.

For more information, contact Erik at ewempleATgmail.com.

Once more there is a conversation in the NYtimes.com ArtsBeat blog between critics of different disciplines, in this case Charles Isherwood and Alastair Macaulay, on the subject of the Broadway dance musical "Come Fly Away," choreographed by Twyla Tharp to music of Frank Sinatra. I have been lapping it up.

Isherwood has called "Come Fly Away" a "major new work" of theater, and Macaulay has decried its dance as "intimacy perverted into exhibitionism." I am interested in the discussion that is developing over the nature of Tharp's work, for what it is and what it isn't, breakthrough or compromise, as judged from the perspective of these critics who write about related but different genres. Here's the link to the conversation, best read from the bottom up.

For the record, I saw "Come Fly Away" in one of its last previews. I found it exhilarating, and I would have been happy to tell you why over a bottle of wine after the show. But because I was a 

Last week Ivan Fischer, a noted Hungarian conductor, led the two orchestras with which he is connected--the Orchestra for the Age of Enlightenment, a period-instrument group based in London, and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which he founded--in all nine of Beethoven's symphonies. I missed the first night of the four-day event (which was part of Lincoln Center's Great Performers series) because I had to go hear Christian Tetzlaff play Tchaikovsky's violin concerto at Carnegie Hall; it is a rule of mine never to miss a Tetzlaff performance, and in this case it proved to be a very good rule. But I got to see the remaining three Beethoven concerts, two of them in the gorgeously remodeled Alice Tully Hall, and it was a stellar experience.

Alice Tully is just the right size for a period-instrument orchestra, and the performance of Beethoven's Fifth, in particular, was the kind of thrilling event that sends audiences beaming out into the streets. With his period-instrument group, Fischer went all out--that is, it was impossible for those instruments to play too loudly, and so he revved them up with all the physical gestures in his conducting repertoire. (And there are a lot of them. Fischer is the most physically active conductor I've ever seen, in a good way: he moves with the rhythmic exactitude of a good dancer, and every limb, every feature, has a wild precision all its own.)

I walked up to Canal Street a couple of weeks ago to buy a porn video and was ripped off. When I got home and opened the DVD case, instead of the advertised "Naughty Stewardesses, Part VI," there before my eyes was a disc containing a documentary film by the renown art critic, Robert Hughes, entitled "The Mona Lisa Curse." (This is my official cover story. Hughes's film, it seems, is in some kind of legal peril due to somebody from the U.K. in the film--which was shown on Channel 4 in England a year and a half ago--feeling libeled and now making threats, and I've been asked not even to hint at my surreptitious source for the DVD.)

Hughes--for those of you who've been serving on the Texas School Board for the past forty years or who write exclusively for TMZ--is the former Time magazine star who a) probably seduced more average punters (as they say in Hughes's pre-New York-home of London) into reading about serious contemporary art than anybody, ever, and b) has famously fulminated against artists, styles, impenetrable artcrit argot, and various art-world practices. One of those in the last of the latter is what he roars against in "The Mona Lisa Curse." I disagree.

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Charles Aaron reviews MGMT's 'Congratulations' (Spin)
Larry Blumenfeld on Dee Dee Bridgewater (The Wall Street Journal)
Christine Dolen on the troubled Coconut Grove Playhouse (The Miami Herald)
Christopher Hawthorne on SANAA winning the Pritzker Prize (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Greenberg" and "Hot Tub Time Machine" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Chloe" (The Washington Post)
Julia M. Klein previews the MFA's Art of the Americas Wing (The New York Times)
Julia M. Klein interviews the director of the Gardner Museum (The Wall Street Journal)
Mary Carole McCauley on opera in the supermarket aisles (The Baltimore Sun)
Laurie Muchnick reviews Mariana Pasternak's "The Best of Friends" (Bloomberg News)
Craig Seligman reviews Chang-rae Lee's novel "The Surrendered" (Bloomberg News)
Douglas Wolk on music in comics (Techland)

I don't go to the theater in Paris to experience the cutting edge. For that I look to the vast and astonishing art of the French graphic novel (known here as bande dessinée, or BD) and to the fusive music of African and Eastern European performers. Paris is an entrepôt for both those forms, but in the theater you're more likely to see a stimulating production of something that's been around the block. Greek tragedy is hot this year, along with classic American musicals.

Last month I saw A Little Night Music performed so discerningly, by an elegant cast (including Leslie Caron) and a large symphony orchestra, that it actually seemed like more than Stephen Sondheim's typical blend of Ravel and The Fantasticks. Last fall I caught the Odéon theater's rendition of Sophocles' Philoctetes, which felt like an entirely new experience. I'd seen Ron Vawter's version in New York during the AIDS epidemic, and so I remembered the play as a harrowing account of stigma. But at the Odéon it was a deeply moving study of conflict and devotion between fathers and sons. I've aged into this second interpretation, but I was still surprised. And that, for me, is the essential Parisian theatrical experience: rethinking.

Now I've seen the Odéon's latest production, a reworking of A Streetcar Named Desire directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski, a favorite on the Euro-festival circuit. The main reason why I wanted to see this play yet again was the prospect of Isabelle Huppert as Blanche DuBois. I've never liked the way Vivien Leigh played Blanche in the famous film, as an orchid on the verge of rotting. But I couldn't imagine Huppert being delicately decadent, any more than I can picture Colette as a hothouse flower.

New Englanders are pinballing between two art events this spring: the Meléndez still life show, in Boston, and an exhibit of Pat Steir's drawings, in Providence.  The Meléndez show contains a cauliflower that is a tour de force (also a couple of killer cantaloupes). Steir is known for her "waterfall" pieces, but I preferred her horizontal "wave" drawing, which is full of circular yearning. Its frantic but pleasing marks do not steal from Cy Twombly exactly; she and Cy are more like two drivers in the same make of car, giving each other a nod on the interstate.

These two shows suggest that you could assign critics according to shape. Someone could cover only spherical things. Melons in painting; round characters in fiction; orbicular altos.

Okay; kidding. But we might at least accept the idea that most arts writers, whether aware of it or not, develop themes. (You might drop in on Dave Hickey any old time and catch him extending his meditation on art and money.) The themes may be more about the writer than about a particular art form.

So on to the question Larry Blumenfeld raised in his March 12 posting. As art forms blend and collide, who is supposed to cover what?

One of my fellow bloggers at ARTicles has expressed some misgivings about the use of rude personal characterizations by myself in this space, worrying that such language could dumb down the discourse here, and, beyond that, come to cause this individual some social discomfort. While I regret this state of affairs, I have to say in my defense that I don't think my colleague really understands what I have to deal with in my little corner of the world and/or media whirl. It truly is enough to drive even a mild-mannered man to personal invective, and drink besides.

Every now and then, I read something about a brilliant new idea and the warning bells go off before I get to the end of the first sentence. Here's the latest example from the London Times. It seems the education director of the Scottish Opera has come up with a marketing scheme "groundbreaking" program to introduce children to the opera. We're not talking about walking, talking tots who might be able to sit through, say, "Peter and the Wolf,''  but rather the creeping, crawling set. The opera is staging a piece called "Baby O" for children age six- to eighteen months, and it sounds like an ordeal for parents and performers alike. No lyrics, no plot, and apparently no orchestra. Just this:

Classically trained singers will create baby-friendly noises, such as Wellington boots splashing in puddles, buzzing bees, quacking ducks and the fluttering of feathers.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!

(That was the alarm bell.)

In the wake of the disheartening death of Alex Chilton, I've been revisiting a lot of his music and also reading up on some of his achievements; and the other day I read the monograph on the Big Star album Radio City (a part of Continuum's intriguing "33 1/3" series of short books on landmark albums) by Bruce Eaton, a one-time musician who played with Chilton on a few occasions. The book is largely an oral history of the making of that album as told by the group's members and associates, and it's replete with the kind of wonky technical detail that's often catnip to me. Eaton is a sharp editor and a better-than-competent explainer, but I found him kind of tiresome when he deemed to express himself. The first part of the book is rather steeped in fake-nostalgic reveries for the old days when musicians were musicians and could actually tune and play their analog instruments and write real songs, and yes, please do get off my lawn you damn kids. And in the book's coda, Eaton goes on an extended riff about "rock snobbery." This involves a post-gig hangout with Chilton in the late '70s during which Supertramp's hit "The Logical Song" comes on the jukebox. Eaton is all ready to sneer at the thing when he sees Chilton bobbing his head to it. Once he gets over his initial shock and confusion, he processes his problem as, well, everybody else's problem. "[R]ock snobbery is an exercise in aural flagellation--a way to punish yourself because girls ignored you back in high school." Ooh, snap. "What gets lost in all this rock snobbery is a simple point: music is meant to be enjoyed." Finally: "I stopped paying attention to record reviews and pouring [sic] over new releases after that."

In Dallas, KERA public media's nearly two-year-old Art&Seek initiative combines radio, television and online cultural coverage, much of it by former print journalists -- among them reporter/producer Jerome Weeks, a 1999-2000 NAJP fellow. Anne Bothwell, the director of Art&Seek, discussed the project in an e-mail interview.

The team you lead at Art&Seek includes journalists who, like you, are former arts staffers from The Dallas Morning News, which drastically cut its newsroom -- and, consequently, its arts coverage -- in 2006. What did, or does, the absence of strong cultural coverage in the local daily paper mean for Dallas, a city of more than a million people? When Art&Seek was launched in 2008, was that an effort to fill the void?

Like so many other newspapers, the Morning News covered local arts as an almost exclusive franchise. But like so many other papers, the cutbacks in staff affected that franchise. Similar cutbacks at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram have led both papers to 'share' coverage, underscoring their dwindling, now-sometimes solitary voice in the community. As coverage waned, artists, presenting and performing organizations and other cultural institutions found it harder to get the word out about their work. Art&Seek was launched in part to fill that need.

Exposure to information about the arts makes it more likely you'll be inspired to pick up a paintbrush or join a dance class. And the theater, dance, music and visual arts we support as a community say a lot about who we are. At their best, cultural coverage and criticism provide a framework to reflect on and talk to each other about what this means. A city without robust cultural coverage is also full of folks missing many opportunities to engage with the arts -- and with each other.

Sign outside the Beerland venue in Austin during SXSW last week ...


I find it both hilarious and sort of sad to think that this was written out and taped up because, once upon a dark Texas night, some poor wanna-be or possibly struggling writer pleaded for admission to Beerland's smorgasbord-o'-the-arts by actually flashing his Analytics numbers under this bouncer's nose.

But really: if necessary, how should an aspiring, blogging critic achieve the "respect" of a toady such as the author of this sign?

My eye was caught the other day by news that a legit theater in Chicago had been renamed for the longtime local theater critic Richard Christiansen. It is not exactly unprecedented for an aisle-sitter to have a theater named for him (or her, though I don't offhand know of any examples of that). In New York alone there are theaters named for Walter Kerr and Brooks Atkinson.

I had a great arts-criticism experience recently--discovering a work of criticism that wasn't just a terrific piece of writing but opened my eyes to something I'd never really considered as an art form before. I stumbled onto Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez's fat Penguin paperback Perfumes: The A-Z Guide on a display rack at Powell's, idly opened it to a random page, cracked up laughing after two sentences, opened it to a few more random pages, saw something smart or hilarious or both on each of those pages, and realized I had to buy it.

I know nothing at all about perfume, but I know sharp critical writing when I see it. Turin and Sanchez's brief reviews of 1800+ scents (which begin with one to five stars, one to four dollar signs and a two-word description) are amusingly vicious about the ones they hate, amusingly effusive about the ones they love, and just plain amusing about the rest, and they're also so effectively informative and descriptive that I could basically get a sense of what they were talking about most of the time, despite having absolutely no grounding in their technical terms. (They do include a brief glossary in the back of the book, and some general overviews of perfume history and masculine and feminine perfumes up front.)

Before long, I was calling up friends to share my favorite bits--it felt like I was 18 and discovering Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide all over again. I gravitated toward the zingers first (on Creed's Love in Black: "Such is the sheer volume of this accord that it causes olfactory illusions, like the weird clicks one hears in an ambulance horn up close, and one ends up smelling incongruous things like cup noodles and linseed oil. Ah, I know why the ambulance is there: iris just suffered a disfiguring car crash"). But the more I read, the more I appreciated the compact precision of their writing, and the way they can load a sentence with both information and comedy: "Jean-François Laporte was, as always, far ahead of his time in 1978 when he grabbed the wrist of whoever was weighing out the candyfloss (ethylmaltol) in his new vanillic amber and forced in ten times more than anyone had ever dared."

As you might expect, they resort to non-scent comparisons a lot, in part because describing perfumes in terms of other perfumes is only funny or meaningful if the reader catches the reference. On Thierry Mugler's Angel Pivoine, for instance: "This together-at-last fragrance pits Giant Transvestite against Ditzy Blonde from Hell." On examining the review of Angel proper, it turns out that that's the giant transvestite: "Although Angel is sold as a gourmand for girls, spoken of as if it were a fudge-dipped berry in a confectioner's shop, it's all lies. Look out for Angel's Adam's apple: a handsome, resinous, woody patchouli straight out of the pipes-and-leather-slippers realm of men's fragrance, in a head-on collision with a bold blackcurrant (Neocaspirene) and a screechy white floral." I can barely even count the metaphors in that passage, but I can actually imagine the scent they're describing. That takes some doing.

I'm also glad to see that Turin and Sanchez are what some music-critic types would call "poptimists" in discussing what my own cultural biases tell me would have to be one of the most aristocratic of media: Tommy Girl, for instance, gets five stars, and Turin's review notes that "no fragrance in recent memory has suffered more for being affordable." I gather from Sanchez's introduction, "How to Connect Your Nose to Your Brain"--which is actually labeled as an "Introduction to Perfume Criticism," and describes some of the difficulties of critically assessing perfume in the first place--that there's not a lot of other perfume criticism in print, and that there is nonetheless a huge and contentious online fragrance underground. (Of course.) I don't have enough interest in perfume itself to try to track their contemporaries down--although I suspect I will probably jot down a few brand names to sniff the next time I'm at a department store. Mostly, I'm impressed with the wit and specificity of Turin and Sanchez's writing, and if in fact they're among the inventors of an entire division of criticism, I'm even more impressed.

I've never had a thoroughly worthwhile or even vaguely enjoyable reading experience on those rare occasions when I've been compelled to look at the work of Steve Almond, and his entirely inane piece in today's Boston Globe--in which he posits that "negative" music criticism maybe sorta ought to be abolished on account of the fact that it might hurt certain fans' feelings, or something--proved no exception to this rule. The sole point of interest of the piece is what it does not engage--the fact that critical practice relative to popular audience taste has been, in fact, a very hot topic among critics for some time now, ranging back to the early "anti-rockist" arguments of...well, whenever they were, and right up to and beyond Carl Wilson's 2007 consideration of Celine Dion, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey To The End Of Taste. Apparently, in Almond's philosophy--and I suppose, by extension, the Boston Globe's--none of these discussions have ever taken place. I understand that this condition mostly speaks to the fact that Almond's an uninformed moron, albeit a well-connected uninformed moron with a resourceful agent who can place uninformed and insubstantial pieces on the op-ed page of the Boston Globe. But it also speaks to many other things, such as the fact that an increasing number of self-proclaimed critics not only don't read other criticism but actually don't know what criticism is, as a form. Another, perhaps even more disturbing current it points to is the reflexive notion of criticism as a bad-faith enterprise. "Criticizing a particular band or song might make you, and some of your readers, feel smart and sophisticated," tsk-tsks Almond. (Yeah, take that, George Bernard Shaw.) In a recent review of Martin Scorsese's film Shutter Island, the much- much-smarter-than-Almond New York Times film critic A.O. Scott made an aside saying that the film's good notices, were it to get any, could be ascribed to "loyalty to Mr. Scorsese" on the part of some "otherwise hard headed critics [who] are inclined to extend [the filmmaker] the benefit of the doubt." Because clearly there's no other way anybody could find any artistic worth in this work that Scott so disdains. I don't think that Scott is necessarily entirely wrong in his speculation. But the fact that he's willing to make it at all, let alone that he's willing to make it without citing specific examples, and the imperious, above-it-all pose he strikes in making it, counts for more, in this case, than whether he's got an actual point or not. And that's troubling. 

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Hilton Als on David Cromer and "When the Rain Stops Falling" (The New Yorker)
Alicia Anstead does a spot profile of Wendy Lesser (Harvard Arts Beat)
Tony Brown on the Western Reserve Historical Society (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland)
Robert Campbell on the ugliest architecture in Boston (The Boston Globe)
Steve Dollar on Norah Jones (Time Out Chicago)
Michael Feingold on "The Scottsboro Boys" et al (The Village Voice)
Sasha Frere-Jones on Sade (The New Yorker)
Matthew Gurewitsch engages Bill Heck of "The Orphans' Home Cycle" (Pundicity)
Christopher Hawthorne on the architecture of embassies (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn (and Lewis Beale) on Hollywood's foreign-film fetish (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday on "Neil Young Trunk Show" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday on "What's the Matter With Kansas?," the film (The Washington Post)
Joe Horowitz's new blog, The Unanswered Question (ArtsJournal)
Hillel Italie on David Baldacci's "enriched" e-book (The Associated Press)
Julia M. Klein on Greg Critser's "Eternity Soup" (Obit Magazine)
Julia M. Klein on the playwright Itamar Moses (Yale Alumni Magazine)
Paul Parish on Alvin Ailey's homosexuality and his "Revelations" (Bay Area Reporter)
Claude Peck (and Rick Nelson) want to spill to the feds (Star Tribune, Minneapolis)
Ann Powers on Alex Chilton (Los Angeles Times)
Craig Seligman reviews "The Ask" by Sam Lipsyte (Bloomberg News)
Kristin Tillotson on "Breaking Bad" (Star Tribune, Minneapolis)

The creepiest arts story of the week doubles nicely as a potent argument for bringing back scripted television shows. Fascinating though it is to discover that our fellow human beings are willing to kill in the service of reality TV, the contemporary confirmation of Stanley Milgram's famous shock-box study is a little disconcerting.

"Eighty people who thought they were participating in the shooting of a pilot for a French reality series were willing to deliver potentially lethal electric shocks to a contestant who had incorrectly answered knowledge questions, according to the documentary, 'The Game of Death,'" Lisa de Moraes writes in a Washington Post column, which also notes several American reality-TV-related deaths.

As Eleanor Beardsley reports on NPR, the setup included "a beautiful and well-known hostess" and "a chanting audience," whose members did not know that "the man in the electric chair was an actor who wasn't really being shocked." Neither, of course, did the would-be contestants, whose main motivation evidently wasn't cash. "As it was only a trial, they were told they wouldn't win anything, but they were given a nominal €40 fee," the BBC explains in a story that includes this disturbing audio clip:

Two ideas came to mind yesterday at the press luncheon at the Art Institute of Chicago while awaiting the presentation on Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913--1917: Does the fact that the museum is feeding journalists again after a year of no-frills events mean that the recession is over? And, has the blockbuster finally graduated? OK, I admit that the initial response on this second point was far more cynical and along the lines of what's left with the same-olds but to parse etc... Well, there is nothing wrong with taking a deeper look at anything, particularly one's own hastily formed impressions. Stephanie D'Alessandro (co-curator of this exhibition along with MoMA's John Elderfield) mentioned Bathers by a River (1909-10, 1913, 1916-1917) as the painting in the AIC collection that inspired this exhibition. The museum acquired it in 1953, a year before Matisse's death. The artist wrote to thank the museum for getting the piece and said that he considered Bathers one of the five most pivotal paintings in his career. D'Alessandro, in a sense, set out to discover why he felt this way and, along with Elderfield, saw that it had everything to do with how the artist arrived at his art, or what he called his "methods of modern construction." It is a method that relied on reworking, often radically, his paintings. In his remarks, director James Cuno said that the 120 paintings in this show (heavy with international loans) were "surgically determined, incessantly sought and ferociously negotiated." In the gallery, I asked D'Alessandro if she managed to get everything on her wish list and she said that she would have loved to have a particular painting that is in the Hermitage collection, but it's a picture that was so reworked it is now extremely fragile. "Given all the work we have done in the area of conservation, we were not going to challenge them," she said. They've managed to tell the story quite well without it. The show runs until June 20, then opens at MoMA July 18.

One of the increasingly infrequent events in the life of a critic who's been around for a while is having his socks knocked off. I'm not talking about a superb performance at the Metropolitan Opera, or a jolting new interpretation of a classic (e.g., David Cromer's de-sentimentalized little-theater production of Our Town), but, well, a whole that's joyfully different. Now, I operate professionally in the art world, where the specter of future history (i.e., the legend of Vincent van Gogh selling only two pictures during his lifetime telling us that a] only posterity can accurately judge, and b] whoever's hot this month, or even this season, is beside the point) hangs heavily over exhibitions and reviews. My socks haven't suddenly departed my tootsies on a round of the galleries in quite a while. Any instantaneous loss of hosiery is much more likely to occur in a precinct of the arts outside my immediate expertise.

Enter Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

I've not been a Netflixer because I simply don't have the time. But our daughter gave my wife and me a subscription and, my wife being the furthest thing from a moviegoer (she prefers reading about the ancient Greeks and going to an occasional play), it fell to me to round up some selections for the queue. If we're going to watch together, the film has to be something other than The Bourne Ultimatum (the first thing I ordered and enjoyed by myself) or, as Laurie puts it, "another one of your English downers." So I called my son, a musician in L.A., and he recommended The Lives of Others (very good), Little Children (sent back unseen), and Hedwig. I could hear a little shakiness in Paul's voice about the last one; he was afraid I'd think it was a pile of glam-rock crap and sort of sold it to me, insincerely, as camp.

Now, I'd heard a little about Hedwig, first as a downtown stage musical that was talked about in the arts & entertainment quarters of Newsweek when I was still there, and then as a movie, where it got some brief, favorable mentions by the magazine's astute film critic, David Ansen--in whose debt I forever remain for telling me to go see a Chinese movie called Yi-Yi. But "transsexual" and "rock music" were about all I knew about Hedwig when, all alone for the test run, I slipped it into the DVD player.

From London comes sad news: the death of Charlie Gillett, author of The Sound of the City, the first serious history of rock and roll and after all these years still one of the best. Arriving more or less simultaneously with Nik Cohn's then-entitled Rock From the Beginning and sponsored in America by long-ago Commentary editor Harris Dienstfrey and his short-lived Outerbridge & Dienstfrey house, The Sound of the City was everything Cohn's book was not: sober, researched, deeply respectful of rock and roll's rhythm and blues roots. I still like Cohn's flash and in fact have long taught his Elvis chapter, though this year I began to weary of re-reading it. But Gillett's book--work on which began while he was doing graduate work at Columbia, making Gillett the first academic in the field unless Charles Keil counts (which he does)--had an abiding soulfulness that respected the flash of the artists and bizzers he studied and categorized, usually by city, the idea being that rock and roll was what happened when rural music met urban culture. That idea abides too--it's the story of mbaqanga among many other "world" musics, and it's not surprising that as he got older Gillett became a champion of musics from around the world, most prominently as a radio presenter but also as a CD compiler.

Charlie was a lovely guy. I first met him when he flew into NYC on a Brinsley Schwarz junket in 1971 and ran into him occasionally afterward, but not so often that my wife and I could count on staying at his house in South London when I visited doing a Clash story in 1978. We did, though, charmed by his wife and kids and intrigued with his electric water boiler, our method of preparing morning tea for many years now. There was also a Rock Against Racism do at Clapham Common and a single on Oval, the label he ran with his dentist, by Pete Fowler: "One Heart, One Love" b/w "The Miner's Strike." I ended up writing a piece about it as well as one about the Clash, and even volunteered to get the record into shops over here. They were taken on consignment. I did a lousy job of following up. I long ago made my apologies, which Charlie accepted with his customary grace.

I'd heard that Charlie was ailing several years ago, but didn't know he'd had a stroke more recently. He died of a heart attack outside his home. Bless Da Capo, the second, greatly expanded edition of The Sound of the City was republished in 1995 and is still in print. A radio man at heart, Charlie favored variety in his world-music comps (Otro Mundo, the most recent is called), while as an album reviewer at heart I always preferred flow, so those never did it for me. But there were also two-CD r&b comps with the Sound of the City brand on them, and there Memphis and especially New Orleans provided a flow of their own. Hard to find now, they're a good way to remember Charlie. But his rather great book is even better.

A year ago, Julie Lasky left the world of glossy design magazines to edit a new, nonprofit, online publication called Change Observer. Dedicated to covering design as social innovation, it's funded by a Rockefeller Foundation grant and launched last July as one of three "channels" of Design Observer. The move marks a significant shift for Lasky, the former editor-in-chief of Interiors and, most recently, I.D., which folded late last year. A 1995-96 NAJP fellow, she spoke by phone about her new venture. This is an edited version of the interview.

In the popular perception, design is associated with luxury, not necessity, let alone politics and social innovation. But Change Observer is explicitly focused on "design strategies aimed globally at improving health, education, housing, and the environment" -- which seems very different from what you were doing at I.D. and Interiors. So is that part of the appeal to you as an editor?

Well, I think that one of the problems, as you say, is it is the public's perception that design is associated with luxury. But, you know, I never thought of design as just simply being an activity to produce consumer objects, and I think both Interiors and I.D. reflected that. So, for instance, we did an entire package of stories related to China, just before the Beijing Olympics, but those stories really went into how do you fashion a vocabulary for what design is bringing to China, and the new developments of design in business in China. Or there was a journal about an industrial designer, trying to navigate his way through the whole system of having things produced, with all the qualms about production in China. So, you know, I don't feel like I ever really stepped away from a mission. I just kind of got a little bit more focused.

The first panel on the future of film criticism that I ever attended was in October of 2007, at the lovely Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, MA. I was a member of the panel, called "Beyond Thumbs Up: A Critical Look At Film Criticism," and quite a nice panel it was, including such luminaries as Philip Lopate, David Sterritt, Ty Burr, Stephanie Zacherak, Scott Foundas, Owen Gleiberman, Richard Porton, Cynthia Lucia, and oh, yes, the insouciant and delightful Armond White. At the time I was the chief critic for the Premiere website, formerly Premiere magazine. 

I found much to love in this column in the UK Guardian, an abridged version of a lecture New Yorker critic Alex Ross delivered to the Royal Philharmonic Society last week. Ross discusses the troubling solemnity of contemporary classical music and offers a lively anecdotal survey of the genre's troubling history of applause.

He outlines exactly why I have always felt so uncomfortable in the concert hall. Granted, I'm a pop-rock guy. I'm used to clapping (cheering, whistling, passing out) when the music stops or when the solo rocks. Not knowing most symphonies by heart, I'm never certain whether this is the end of the whole thing (OK, clap here) or just the end of the second part (hands in your lap, young man). Nor am I entirely comfortable with such strict rules on my behavior. The people on stage are making a racket wresting angels and demons from their souls -- I'm supposed to tell mine to shush?

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Hilton Als on Martin McDonagh's "A Behanding in Spokane" (The New Yorker)
Alicia Anstead on "Alice in Wonderland" ("The Callie Crossley Show," WGBH, Boston)
Robert Christgau's March Consumer Guide (msn.com)
Robert Christgau on Lil Wayne (Barnes & Noble Review)
Christine Dolen talks with Lin-Manuel Miranda (The Miami Herald)
Matthew Gurewitsch considers orchestras' fixation on youth (The New York Times)
Matthew Gurewitsch on "Hamlet" and French grand opera (Pundicity/Opera News)
Christopher Hawthorne on Chris Mottalini and Paul Rudolph (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on the overhaul of "How to Train Your Dragon" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Green Zone" and "A Prophet" (The Washington Post)
Hillel Italie on the National Book Critics Circle Award winners (The Associated Press)
Michael Kimmelman on Caravaggio's moment (The New York Times)
Tom Moon on Elis Regina (NPR)
Ann Powers on the indie bent of this season's "American Idol" (Los Angeles Times)
Kristin Tillotson on Lady Gaga (Star Tribune, Minneapolis)
Jerome Weeks on a "filmanthropy" project (KERA, Dallas)
Douglas Wolk reviews several new comic strip collections (The New York Times)

This is part of a series on people and organizations that make it possible for artists' work to be made and presented.

It was 9:30 at night when Robert Lyons ducked out of rehearsal at the Ohio Theatre, on Wooster Street in New York's Soho, to get some coffee. He's a big guy, 6 feet 4 inches tall, so walking unaccompanied to the deli should not have been a problem. But it was the late 1980s, and Soho then wasn't what Soho has become; for one thing, there were still delis to go to. There was no Barneys Co-Op on the next block, no Trump hotel-condominium sales office just up the cobblestoned street. There wasn't the pervasive sense of safety.

So when he returned a few minutes later with his coffee and saw four guys with broomsticks walking by, his impulse was to close the door to the Ohio and stand in front of it, as if he were protecting the theater. "And they just circled around me, and they wanted my money," Lyons recalled yesterday, sitting at a café table in the theater's lobby as the rain came down outside. "They all kind of hit me at the same time, and then somebody down the street yelled, and then they all ran, so they didn't even get my wallet. But my chin split open, and so blood was pouring down." At 50, he still has the scar.

My earlier post regarding arts news on the front page was, I believe, a bit misconstrued--I'm no purist when it comes to writing or reading about the arts (in fact, most of my own work on music during the past few years might reasonably be considered political stuff). Yet I'll not belabor the points I was trying to make back then.

I will however take note of arts news on the front page again (below the fold), in today's New York Times. It's a piece about the Lincoln Center Festival's presentation of "The Demons" this July. Since my wife is the fest's general manager (thus, I never actually write about the festival), this was much the dinner table talk at my home. And since this site's own John Rockwell was founding director of the festival (during a short hiatus from his long career at the Times), I figured the piece raised at least his eyebrows.

Patrick Healy's article is interesting not just for its placement, but for its approach to what is ostensibly an arts-marketing "hot ticket in town" story: Healy quotes at length folks who have purchased tickets (sort of like in those Broadway TV ads, only this time before the show has been seen, and with admittedly more substantive comments) and gets into the sticky business of box office politics (how many tickets go to institutional patrons and to press). I'm curious to know how all this struck our crowd.

While some of us are basking in an all-William-Kentridge-all-the-time moment, the matter of who and/or what killed Caravaggio demands our contemplation as well. Granted, this is a 400-year-old mystery, yet it made a strong bid for renewed attention this week, notably with Stacy Meichtry's terrific Wall Street Journal piece on Silvano Vinceti, the Italian TV host who's leading the charge to dig up as many graves as necessary in order to find the artist's ancient bones. (Footnote: "Mr. Vinceti recently announced plans to unearth Leonardo da Vinci. His goal: debunk claims that the Mona Lisa is a self-portrait of the painter and, if possible, prove he was a vegetarian--a hunch Mr. Vinceti has had for years." So: Get your shovels ready for that.)

As Michael Day reports in The Independent, "researchers from the universities of Ravenna and Bologna have prepared DNA tests on the corpses in a Tuscan crypt that many believe contains [Caravaggio's] remains. They have already narrowed their investigation down to nine corpses, which have been sent to Ravenna for carbon-dating."

Reuters' Marie-Louise Gumuchian duly visits the Italian town of Caravaggio, where "a team of Italian anthropologists" went this week to conduct DNA "tests with possible descendents -- some of them carrying derivations of the family name. As Caravaggio died childless the team looked for the painter's closest blood descendents in search of a match."

Meanwhile, in The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman largely ignores the quest for the artist's remains in favor of discussing his work -- including the argument that "Caravaggio has gradually, if unevenly, overtaken Michelangelo."

"It's a two-hour version with no intermission, and it's very action-packed," said Mr. Burdman, who's directing the play. Audiences will be able to get in on the action to some extent by following the show as it moves around the center. "Wear comfortable shoes," Mr. Burdman said. "We've got seven flights of stairs." NYT 3/5/2010

This New York Times excerpt is from a story about a New York Classical Theater production of "Hamlet" directed by the company's artistic director Stephen Burdman. The show is in rehearsal for its opening in April at the World Financial Center, a sprawling space in Lower Manhattan. But the excerpt also tells us a little something about the increasing power of audience participation in live theater - in its process and performance. It's the age of the video games and reality TV, after all, and we want live theater to be engaging not only of our minds but of our bodies, too. We want to be stakeholders in the narrative. Theatergoers and even passersby who witness a sword fight between two Danes downtown should not be alarmed. It's just art. And on the night of the show, you can fully expect to use those comfortable shoes to "get in on the action."

Live theater is now a performance event for everyone!

In Cambridge, Mass., where I live, American Repertory Theater's artistic director Diane Paulus has put muscle into audience participation. Last year, she re-staged her crowd-inclusive "Donkey Show"; it's now running indefinitely in the theater's annex space where nearly nightly crowds turn out to dance alongside the "Midsummer Night's Dream"-cum-Studio 54 disco cast. One addict apparently has seen the show 30 times. (I've been three times.)

Ooh, I do like this (by David Cote in the Guardian online, as posted on Artsjournal):

We critics, reviewers, consumer reporters - call us what you will - are the dung beetles of culture. We consume excrement, enriching the soil and protecting livestock from bacterial infection in the process. We are intrinsic to the theatre ecology. Eliminate us at your peril.

Me, I have a somewhat more elevated image of the critic's role -- something to do with celebrating art in all its diversity, having a vision of what art really is (as opposed to what pedants claim it to be) and what it might become, helping others share my enthusiasms, and such. But lively writing is lively writing, and Cote wrote lively.

I am told that Time magazine used to call the paragraph conveying a story's news peg "the billboard graf," or sometimes the "why am I at this party" graf. So in this first posting, in the spirit of billboard grafs, I will follow Larry Blumenfeld's lead, and try to explain why I am here.

For a number of reasons, I've spent the last year immersed in education reporting, so it's nice to be back here thinking and talking about the arts. These two worlds intersect in critical ways, as today's kids are tomorrow's artists. I don't know about you, but my best school daze memories have nothing to do with the rote drills or the bubble tests. Chemistry? Feh. I only remember the teacher screaming at me when I picked up a pile of lye pellets because I thought they were pretty. But I do remember field trips to Lincoln Center, where we worked backstage with a director I would later interview. Physics is fuzzy, but I fondly recall finger painting in kindergarten and writing angst-ridden poetry in a class led by a teacher who didn't make fun of my adolescent musings.

I was reminded of this the other night during the Oscars when Michael Ciacchino won for his original score for "Up." He skipped the usual shout-outs to agents and higher powers and, instead, went right back to the beginning.

I was nine and I asked my dad, "Can I have your movie camera? That old, wind-up 8 millimeter camera that was in your drawer?" And he goes, "Sure, take it." And I took it and I started making movies with it and I started being as creative as I could, and never once in my life did my parents ever say, "What you're doing is a waste of time." Never. And I grew up, I had teachers, I had colleagues, I had people that I worked with all through my life who always told me what you're doing is not a waste of time. So that was normal to me that it was OK to do that. I know there are kids out there that don't have that support system so if you're out there and you're listening, listen to me: If you want to be creative, get out there and do it. It's not a waste of time. Do it. OK?

Not long ago, you were one of the most prolific freelance book critics in the United States. Now, after a stint as Granta's American editor, you've left New York for London, where you have the top spot on Granta's masthead. Being a freelance critic for (mostly) American newspapers and being the editor of a British literary magazine demand very different skill sets, maybe not so much intellectually as organizationally and socially. How have you made the transition?

That's right -- you could say the Americans and the English are divided by a common language. And not just the words. But I've quite enjoyed it. Granta's history has always been hybrid: an English literary magazine, resurrected by Americans, embraced by the English, and populated by writers from Ingo Schulze to Milan Kundera with of course generous contributions by the profoundly talented British and American novelists who have grown up with us. I think those moments of cultural friction are actually what give the magazine its distinct feel and texture. Managing that and making it into art, rather than something disjointed, is a much bigger challenge than figuring out when it's my turn to buy the round at a pub.

When a publication lays off a batch of key employees, the editor has to say something in an attempt to soothe the staffers who remain. Still, as reassurances go, "Today's changes won't be noticed by readers" is unlikely to pass muster. That's what editor Tim Gray told the survivors at troubled Variety yesterday after he laid off chief film critic Todd McCarthy, chief theater critic David Rooney, film critic Derek Elley and "features editor/indie film reporter Sharon Swart, along with several copy and design desk employees," according to TheWrap.

Even if the three critics take Gray up on his offer to let them continue as freelancers, there's no question that readers will notice the difference. Using what has become boilerplate language for media industry budget cutters, Gray told survivors in a memo, "Our goal is the same: To maintain, or improve, our quality coverage." A laudable ambition, but firing people is a thoroughly unrealistic way of attempting to reach it, as editors and publishers well know. What's remarkable is that, as long as they're dealing in fantasy, they don't come up with better talking points.

The issue is not solely one of skilled, experienced critics being cut loose -- though McCarthy, a 31-year veteran of Variety, speaks eloquently to that in an interview with Sharon Waxman. There's also the matter of what happens behind the scenes. Newspapers never have had fact-checkers as such, but good editors and copy editors serve that function, and they've saved many a writer's butt from inaccuracies, inadvertently libelous statements, and general sloppiness. Of course, it helps immensely when those editors know the writers, and therefore know what to look out for. With fewer editors, and freelancers rather than staff writers, the holes in the safety net get larger, and the publication suffers. That can get expensive. For a current case study from a related industry, see publishing's "The Last Train From Hiroshima" debacle.

The version of The Tempest that is now playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music -- part of the Anglo-American "Bridge Project" directed by Sam Mendes -- has an excellent Prospero, and that is just about the only reason it is tolerable.

Given the general cluelessness of the acting, with line readings that are either unintelligible or downright silly, I suspect that Stephen Dillane arrived at his interpretation of his role with little or no directorial help. He has chosen to portray Prospero as a kind of world-weary, supernaturally inclined Beckett tramp, alternating between prolonged periods of reflectiveness and brief sudden rages. His delivery of Shakespeare's marvelous words is at once rueful and forceful, and his diction can be understood on every line, even when he whispers. It is a joy to hear him step forward with that final speech in which he asks to be freed from his imprisonment by the audience's applause; it is always a joy to hear this speech, if it is finely delivered, and in this case the request seems even more pointed than usual.

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Charles Aaron on the death of Barry Hannah (Spin)
Laura Bleiberg reviews the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre (Los Angeles Times)
Larry Blumenfeld on Robin D. G. Kelley's "Thelonious Monk" (ListenGood)
Robert Campbell on an urban paradox embodied (The Boston Globe)
Robert Christgau on Dessa's "A Badly Broken Code" (msn.com)
Laura Collins-Hughes on Gina Welch's "In the Land of Believers" (Los Angeles Times)
Lily Tung Crystal on Asian-American actors in the Bay Area (American Theatre)
Francis Davis on Dee Dee Bridgewater and Stephanie Nakasian (The Village Voice)
Sasha Frere-Jones on Bill Withers (The New Yorker)
Matthew Gurewitsch goes nose to Nose with William Kentridge (The New York Times)
Matthew Gurewitsch reviews a Karajan documentary (Pundicity, courtesy Opera News)
Christopher Hawthorne on the death of Raimund Abraham (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on documentaries and the Oscar effect (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday on Tim Burton and Johnny Depp's collaboration (The Washington Post)
Marty Hughley profiles Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Bill Rauch (The Oregonian)
Marty Hughley on the revival of ARTicles (The Oregonian)
Ann Powers reviews Jimi Hendrix's "Valleys of Neptune" (Los Angeles Times)
Craig Seligman on St. Clair McKelway (The New York Times)
Laura Sydell on unsigned musicians flocking to ASCAP (NPR)
Laura Sydell on Spotify's impending U.S. launch (NPR)
Werner Trieschmann on Rogue Wave (Nashville Scene)
Jerome Weeks interviews Lou Reed about his landscape photography (KERA, Dallas)
Jerome Weeks talks theater with Mike Daisey (KERA, Dallas)

I have had the good fortune to be invited three years in a row to the Festival of Authors, put on by the grass-roots organization, Literary Women of Long Beach, CA. Envision this: 730 women in a football-field-size ballroom at the Long Beach Convention Center, listening to women authors talking about the intersections of their writing and personal lives.

It is reassuring, and somewhat amazing, that this is a difficult and prized ticket to get your hands on; an Oscar after-party is probably easier to sneak into. I arrived "early" at 8 a.m. Saturday to make sure I could get a table for my party of eight, and despaired when I saw there were hundreds ahead of me. Luck was with me, this time, and I managed to score a table.

It's always a long day. Happily, this year's authors had differing styles and wonderful stories to relate. The four headliners were: Joan Silber ("The Size of the World"), who started with her bookworm childhood (a common theme) and her writing process; Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison ("An Unquiet Mind" and "Nothing Was the Same"), a memoirist and psychiatrist who often addressed her bi-polar disorder; Jane Hamilton ("A Map of the World" and "Laura Rider's Masterpiece"), whose talk - "Is life tragic or comic?" - was a clothesline on which to hang hilarious tales about fighting Wal-mart, a sex show on HBO, and other absurdities; and Jincy Willett ("The Writing Class"), who read the opening chapter of her work-in-progress. The large group split into three for lectures by first-time novelists Jennifer Cody Epstein, Padma Viswanathan and Debra Dean. Book were sold in a separate room. Lunch was chicken salad, rolls and a chocolate-covered strawberry confection.

This is the first in a series on people and organizations that make it possible for artists' work to be made and presented.

If there were such a thing as an ideal moment for a small, experimental arts group to find itself in temporary digs, trying to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for a new home and stabilize its finances, the Great Recession probably wouldn't be it. Nonetheless, that was the unlucky timing of San Francisco visual arts organization Southern Exposure, which had decamped in 2006 from its longtime space, expecting to return after a seismic upgrade.

Instead, a series of delays foiled that plan, leaving it a nomad in the depths of the downturn, in a famously expensive city. But SoEx has been rooted in that city since 1974, and vulnerability did not turn into defeat. This past October, it finally moved into its new home: a sleek, 4,000-square-foot rented space in a gritty, industrial zone of the Mission District, kitty-corner from a pipe organ factory. The inaugural exhibition of commissioned work addressed a topic that must have been much on Southern Exposure's collective mind during those wandering years: "scenarios related to an uncertain and ever-shifting future."

I used to make lots and lots of very small collages that had in them--in addition to paint, bits of plain colored paper, and image fragments--words and parts of words. Many of the words came in vertical strips of artists' first names that I cut out from the hundreds of announcements for group exhibitions I received at Newsweek. The collages with visible, or partly visible, strips of names I called, as a series, "Brotherhood of Artists." Although I can't remember exactly when that series title popped into my head, the niceties of it were soon apparent to me (albeit, alas, probably to only me): artists grouped under a union-like banner, like the "Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers" or some such; there being little real sentiment of "brotherhood" among artists (although, for a while, "sisterhood" did pretty well); and just the beautiful sound of the phrase itself. And since I made so many of them over the years--there are probably between six and seven hundred packed into boxes, of which the "Brotherhood" series constitutes maybe a quarter--the roman numerals for each one soon got enjoyably ridiculous. ("Canyon III" is one thing, but "Brotherhood of Artists CLXVIII" is quite risibly another.)

Quantitative second place among the collage titles goes to "I Have No Credentials." Again, I can't quite remember when and how it reared its homely little head, but just a couple of years ago, long after I'd quit making the lil' buggers, I had one of those late-night, fatigue-driven (I don't drink) pseudo-epiphanies that disrupt your cognitive life for a few days, maybe a week, then usually fade away. This one hasn't, not entirely, and here it is: There are only two human intellectual enterprises objectively and universally worthwhile--physics (i.e., figuring out how the world, the universe, is put together and how it works), and medicine (i.e., keeping people alive and functioning); everything else--the arts, religion, philosophy, etc.--is more or less bullshit. Stunningly elaborate and wonderfully distracting and palliative bullshit at times, but still bullshit.

The reason why this dubious insight (present here only for me to describe, not to argue as a debate proposition) has stayed with me is because, even at the bullshit end of the spectrum of human endeavors, I appear to myself to be more devoid of "credentials" than the usual denizen of the arts. Like Arthur Miller's traveling salesmen, I'm out there riding on a smile (though with me it's usually a frown) and a shoeshine...and little else.

It would be priggish to ignore the run-up to the Oscars as the week's big arts story -- though it's safe to say none of us needs to read another piece comparing "Avatar" and "The Hurt Locker." It is, after all, a packed field this year.

So packed, what with the 10 nominees for best picture, that the Kodak Theatre is getting uncomfortably crowded, at least in terms of the number of people jostling for orchestra seats. In a story about Oscar-ceremony ticket demand, Variety raises the specter of nominated producers being seated in the parterre. Horrors: the back of the house!

The Wall Street Journal does the math and concludes that a best-picture statue for "The Hurt Locker" would smash a record held by Woody Allen since 1978: lowest-grossing winner "in modern history -- and maybe ever." Women & Hollywood, meanwhile, contemplates what it means if Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman to win best director, and what it means if she doesn't.

The New York Times poses the question, "Do the Oscars Undermine Artistry?," while the Associated Press notes the corn industry's very different concern: that a best-documentary win for "Food, Inc." could damage its reputation.

Also, a bit of fun: The Los Angeles Times suggests chocolate dresses as a good look for the red carpet, and TheWrap offers a story and slideshow on a pair of human-size, "mysterious 'skeleton-Oscar' statues" that appeared Thursday morning in Los Angeles, one near the Hollywood sign.

Already there's worry here that the assembled writers and critics are going to do too much griping, out loud, about the state of arts journalism. It's a legitimate concern. Thankfully, others out there in the big world are thinking about some of the "issues." This very week, coincidentally (or maybe not!?, let's ask George Bernard Shaw's ghost), the comic known as Get Fuzzy has been mulling what "expertise" means as it relates to reviewing.

Click here for Monday's strip.

It's so seldom that I get the chance to quote the FBI that I'm just going to go ahead and do it:

Art and cultural property crime -- which includes theft, fraud, looting, and trafficking across state and international lines -- is a looming criminal enterprise with estimated losses running as high as $6 billion annually.

That, you might have guessed, comes from the FBI web page devoted to its Art Theft Program, which describes its "dedicated Art Crime Team of 13 Special Agents" and its "National Stolen Art File." Sure, the Gardner heist story is a crime story -- but it's also an arts story. The two frequently intersect.

I read the Boston Globe art-heist story with great interest and thanks, Laura, for posting it. But is this really an example of arts news making the front page? Or is it a really good crime (and forensic-science) story by a really good investigative reporter that happens to take place in an art museum. I mean it's a great story, well told, and I don't want to dampen either the fun or the serious business of it (those paintings are important and worth a lot of money). But let's say a survey was done of how often arts coverage made it to the front page of a major daily? Would you want this one counted? When I was reporting in New Orleans, I noticed that when a trombonist got arrested during a parade, he rated coverage. Same musician, leading a parade to his CD release party at a local club? Not news. I'm not trying to twist editorial logic: The news section is for news, the front page for big or truly fascinating news. But arts news is about arts, right?

Arts news leads The Boston Globe today:

This is the first in a weekly series of interviews with editors.

Sharon Waxman made her name as a journalist in the print world. The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times and New York Times have carried her byline. She is also the author of "Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World," about illicit antiquities, and of "Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System," about the 1990s generation of auteurs. Now Waxman is editor in chief of TheWrap.com, which launched in January 2009 and covers the entertainment business. You've known editors like Waxman: high-energy, hardworking, forward-moving. She's not only editor at TheWrap. She's also a reporter and the CEO. I caught her between a celebrity funeral and a Los Angeles dinner party, at the height of Oscar season. As they say in her town: It was all good. And I got to edit her this time -- that is, what follows is an edited version of our phone conversation.

When you decided to make the leap from reporter to editor, what was that like?

Becoming an editor absolutely seemed like a natural thing to do at this stage in my life because it's very hard for young journalists to find a place to learn about how to be a journalist and to have someone who can teach them the things they know. And I'm in a stage where I would like to give over what I know. I'm also concerned about the fact that, as newsrooms disintegrate, there are very few places for people to learn the basics of journalism, to make mistakes and to have someone help them avoid some mistakes that can become career killers.

In answer to John's query, I offer the following, from an NAJPer responding to the return of ARTicles:

It would be nice to read commentary that isn't endlessly referential to other bloggy things. I'm already overwhelmed with all the insider feuds burning up Twitter and Facebook. And endless commiseration about the collapse of journalism. I'm so over it, already. I feel like it's all become a giant navel-gazing festival. Hope Version 2.0 transcends all that!

I agree with the NAJPer about everything he's hoping ARTicles won't be -- even though we're still figuring out quite what it will be. Broadening our subject matter, so that it includes both arts journalism and the arts, is key.

Well, we're back, and to judge from the March 1 postings, we're a lively crew, full of beans. Plus a gentle facilitateuse in Laura, who will ride herd without digging in her spurs (love those metaphors).

Buried a bit in Larry Blumenfeld's post yesterday is a complaint that will be familiar to too many journalists: A piece he'd written for a newspaper appeared on its website under someone else's byline, and when he pointed out the error, he was met with a disturbingly cavalier, we'll-see-if-we-can-fix-that response.

• 59 percent of those surveyed said that either there was no copy editing whatsoever online (11 percent), or that copy editing is less rigorous than in the print edition.
• 40 percent said that when Web editors, as opposed to print editors, are in charge of content decisions, fact-checking is less rigorous (17 percent said there was no fact-checking online when Web editors made the content decisions).

Way back smack dab in the middle of the last century, Americans still liked their popular literature to have, if not gravitas, at least some pretentious heft and coffee-table profundity. In 1950, the year before J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye was published, the best-selling novel in America was Stephen Fermoyle's The Cardinal, a fictionalized life of Francis Cardinal Spellman, who was then in the middle of his 30-year run as Archbishop of New York. In the year that Catcher was published to mixed reviews and quite moderate sales, numbers one and two on the best-seller list were a couple of sweeping military dramas, From Here to Eternity by James Jones and The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk. During the year after the publication of Salinger's brief, sardonic account of an adolescent's awakening to the complications and hypocrisies of life in the nasty real world--ingeniously and impeccably told in the voice of said adolescent, Holden Caulfield--the most popular novel in America was Thomas B. Costain's epic of early Christianity, The Silver Chalice. It was followed on the charts at number three by John Steinbeck's East of Eden and, in sixth place, by Edna Ferber's giant Giant. A big country deserved big novels.

But a funny thing happened on the way to where we are now: All those basso profundo tomes about Powerful People, Important Events, and Significant Themes--each duly made into a Major Motion Picture--fell far behind Catcher's aggregate sales (eventually about 65 million copies), and even farther behind the Salinger novel's lasting effect on American culture. The reasons for the latter, I think, are mainly two. First, there's always a fresh generation of 16-year-olds who experience--whether right at sixteen or a few years later--that gobstopping shock of recognition when Holden's finds life to be crammed so nauseatingly full of "phonies." Second, The Catcher in the Rye turned out to be one of the first little surfboards on a wave of phenomena--let's call them collectively "Pop"--that quickly turned into a bluebird, then an eagre, and finally the tsunami that broke over everything from books to movies to TV to paintings in museums and left us with The Hills, the Twilight novels, and the "Easy Fun" paintings of Jeff Koons.

There are many words for gypsies, most of them spoken with a snarl in much of Europe. But no city is more willing than Paris to honor the most traditional market niche for the Rom. You can see them on the metro, mining for euros with an accordion or a guitar, an amplifier on a wheelie providing a rhythm track. They're called upon to entertain at fairs and fests, and there's a vital jazz scene here that goes by the name manouche. That's a Belgian word for gypsy, as well as the nickname of that country's most famous Rom, the greatest genius of European jazz, Django Reinhardt.

Give a Parisian promoter an excuse and he'll put on a festival honoring Django, and this year--the centennial of his birth--has produced all sorts of commemorations. But only one musician practices jazz manouche as taught to him by his celebrated grandfather, and this year he's in especially great demand. Last weekend I caught David Reinhardt and his trio at a tubular boite in the club district around Châtelet. I expected to hear the propulsive fluency branded by Django and imitated by many jazz guitarists since. What I got instead was a surprise.

Last thing I need in my life is another online platform for the musings in my head that I generally don't find the time to post in even my existing online platform. But when I lost Bob Christgau as my editor at the Voice I remember thinking--saying to him, actually, maybe-I'd write for you again on toilet paper in a dimly lit room. Well, Bob asked me to join the ARTicles community, which is a great deal more esteemed than two-ply-tissue and pretty well-lit, technologically speaking (yet the pay's pretty much the same).

The point is that what freelance writers like me like is a professionally mediated context that reflects well on our words and the presence of editors, or at least just writers and hopefully readers, that care about how those words are used and what ethics support them before we even get into what's good art.

So I'm in.

Reading Wendy Lesser's post in reference to Alex Ross's New Yorker piece on alternative spaces, I'm prompted to point out that even the spaces indelibly enshrined as the mainstream of this or that often started out as "alternative" ones. I was reminded of that last week when the Village Vanguard--the acoustically charmed, pie-slice shaped, iconic jazz club--celebrated its 75^th anniversary. A short film by Deborah Gordon, daughter of founding owner Max and present doyenne Lorraine, focused on the joint's roots: established by literary types; placed on the map by a group of unknowns called the Revuers (actress-comedian Judy Holliday and the songwriting duo of Betty Comden and Adolphe Green); and home to performances by Lenny Bruce, "Professor" Irwin Corey, Miriam Makeba, Pete Seeger, Harry Belafonte, among others, early on. (At the party, Corey, who's 95, was as insightfully incoherent as a half-century ago; in the film, we got see Lenny Bruce as interviewed by Nat Hentoff, circa 1960s).

As a recent Alex Ross piece in The New Yorker pointed out, alternative venues like Le Poisson Rouge are changing not only how people listen to classical music, but also who listens to it. If you venture out to one of these smallish nightclub-like places, you will see many more young people than at a standard concert hall, and they will be animated and friendly and filled with enthusiasm for the performances. Part of the liveliness is due to the fact that admission at such venues is only about $15 -- slightly more than a movie ticket -- but part of it is also attributable to the comfort and fun of the locations.

Le Poisson Rouge is a larger and more successful enterprise than most, and thus it can attract name musicians, but there are wonderful little equivalents tucked into most big and quite a few smaller cities in this country. In San Francisco, one of my favorites is the Red Poppy Art House in the Mission District, which often features performances by a group called Cultural Revolution. (If you are bemused by the radical connotations of these names, it is only because you are not from the Bay Area, where we have long since become oblivious to such things. For instance, when my stepson, who went to the Malcolm X Middle School in Berkeley, performed in Patience and Ruddigore there, I never even noticed how odd the phrase "Malcolm X Gilbert & Sullivan Program" sounded until I heard the laughter of East Coast friends.)

I have only been to the Red Poppy twice, but each time it was a delight. Last year I heard the Cultural Revolution quartet perform a late Beethoven string quartet as well as a very new quartet by someone named Gabriela Smith, who turned out to be a seventeen-year-old El Cerrito girl capable of producing work that would hold up against the young Shostakovich. (I was so smitten by her First String Quartet that I have been following her career ever since: she is now a student at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and I imagine you'll all be hearing about her eventually.)

Laura's news from Dallas is terrible, disgusting--what "products"? But I have a side comment, one that I've sidled up to in this venue before in my role as popcult booster-philosopher. In my view, arts journalism and sports journalism are part of the same larger entity, cultural journalism. Both comment on human activities that include a crucial aesthetic dimension their practitioners are well aware of. When I decided I wanted to write journalism, sportswriting was my first plan--inspired by Red Smith and especially the great boxing critic A.J. Liebling. Who was also a press critic, meaning he belonged to two clans I see as parts of cultural journalism. David Carr, welcome aboard.

The Brisbane, Australia-generated and usually -based Go-Betweens were often slotted as a critics' band. This means that throughout their two-stage career--the first phase 1978-1990, then a decade of solo work with occasional reunions by principals Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, then a surprisingly, even unprecedentedly vital reunion period that launched with the 2000 album The Friends of Rachel Worth and ended with McLennan's sudden cardiac-arrest death at 48 on May 6, 2006--their reception by music journalists seemed to skeptics out of proportion with their medium-level though sustaining record sales and gig crowds. And indeed, it's not as if their music jumps out at you--you register its calm before its melodicism sinks in, and you'd call the thoughtful, sometimes slightly gnomic lyrics subtle before you'd call them witty, which in their dry way they often are.

But as Forster--whose best solo album, The Evangelist, surfaced two years after McLennan's death--now points out, the Go-Betweens were a critics band in another way. Ever since coming together as undergraduate aesthetes, they were mad dissectors of movies, fiction, and anything else that struck their fancy, and McLennan, a subscriber to The New York Review of Books at the time he died, did in fact publish film criticism when the band was young. So when a new Australian magazine called The Monthly asked Forster to be its music critic in 2005, he decided to give it a shot. If they didn't like his first piece, its subject the first Antony and the Johnsons album, well, nothing ventured nothing gained.

This week's links to NAJP members' work: 

MJ Andersen on Doris Day (The Providence Journal)
Robert Campbell on razing ugly buildings (The Boston Globe)
Christine Dolen on Sarah Kane's "Blasted" (The Miami Herald)
Steve Dollar on Alec Ounsworth's "Mo Beauty" (Time Out Chicago)
Sasha Frere-Jones on the South African band Die Antwoord (The New Yorker)
Randy Gragg on being an accidental foodie (Portland Monthly)
Christopher Hawthorne on the new U.S. embassy in London (Los Angeles Times)
Will Hermes on Joanna Newsom (NPR's "All Things Considered")
Jan Herman on "Who was Sinclair Beiles?" (Straight Up)
John Horn (et al) on "The Hurt Locker" and the military (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday on Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer" (The Washington Post)
Julia M. Klein on Costa Rica's Pre-Columbian Gold Museum (The Wall Street Journal)
Julie Lasky on tweeting the TED Conference (Change Observer)
Elizabeth Maupin on leaving her paper after 26 years (Orlando Sentinel)
Laurie Muchnick on "The Bag Lady Papers" (Bloomberg News)
Peter Plagens on the decline of the art-world interrogation (Newsweek)
Ann Powers on Joanna Newsom's "Have One on Me" (Los Angeles Times)
Jerome Weeks on "Andy Warhol: The Last Decade" (KERA, Dallas)
Douglas Wolk interviewing Kevin O'Neill (The Comics Journal)
Douglas Wolk on Grant Morrison's "Batman and Robin" (Techland)

After a hiatus to rethink and regroup, ARTicles is back today with an expanded coterie of bloggers: Sasha Anawalt, MJ Andersen, Alicia Anstead, Laura Bleiberg, Larry Blumenfeld, Jeanne Carstensen, Robert Christgau, Laura Collins-Hughes, Thomas Conner, Lily Tung Crystal, Richard Goldstein, Patti Hartigan, Glenn Kenny, Wendy Lesser, Joe Levy, Ruth Lopez, Nancy Malitz, Douglas McLennan, Tom Moon, Abe Peck, Peter Plagens, John Rockwell, Patrick J. Smith, Werner Trieschmann, Lesley Valdes and Douglas Wolk.

You can expect a thought-provoking conversation and a very good read from writers whose interests and perspectives span the spectrum of arts journalism. Added to the mix will be some regular features, including interviews with editors and with facilitators in the arts: the people who make it possible for the art to be made. We'll also have a Monday roundup of links to pieces by NAJP members and a Friday roundup of links to coverage of a hot topic in arts journalism.

Heartfelt thanks to Eric Banks, who chairs the National Book Critics Circle's blogging committee, for his extraordinary generosity in helping us to figure out a new game plan. We've taken much inspiration -- and swiped a few ideas outright -- from the NBCC's excellent blog, Critical Mass.

The revamped ARTicles is going to be a lively place. We hope you'll join the conversation.