ARTicles

Variety Boots Chief Critics (Yes, Readers Will Notice)

2010-03-09T17:44:51Z

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.

In a Teapot

2010-03-08T13:59:36Z

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.
]]> The Tempest as recapitulating the period of exploration and colonization, and they want to make it clear that Prospero is the imperialist settler and Caliban the native), but it is a grave error. Listening to the white cast members hurl insults like "monster" and "this thing of darkness" at Caliban, or hearing them allude to his "race" as a reason for his misbehavior, we cringe in a very different way from how Shakespeare meant us to cringe. Even in the text, Prospero is so cruel to Caliban that we automatically feel sympathetic toward this unsightly and barbaric son-of-a-witch; but to cast him as African-American puts a thumb in the scale and distorts completely the reason for (as well as the natural ambivalence of) our sympathy.

It may have been a good idea to make Ariel a man, and Christian Camargo, with his delicate yet distinctly masculine features, fits the role nicely -- I have never seen it played that way before, and it gives a new twist to Prospero's and Ariel's relationship. But it was a mistake to costume the broad-shouldered, chisel-featured Camargo in a dress at one point: shades of Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot. This cannot have been what Sam Mendes intended. But who can tell what he intended? With its Euro-trash music (why can't the English, who have produced some of the best contemporary classical music, create good musical accompaniment for their Shakespeare productions?), its ineffectual slapstick in the "comic" parts, and its generally over-choreographed group scenes, this Tempest is a mess. I am not sorry to have seen it, because of Dillane, but you needn't be sorry if you missed it.

Collected Stories

2010-03-08T08:00:01Z

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)

Ladies who write and read

2010-03-07T23:31:44Z

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.

]]> Everyone takes home separate truths. The struggle of writing, and then the difficulty of receiving some monetary reward for it, was a sub-theme, even when it was not explicitly stated. Winnowing through real life to create fiction, was another.

For 13 years, Silber could not get a book published. "You want your writing to contain the best of you," she said. I appreciated her concluding nugget that "it does actually pay to knock yourself out."

Willett's writing "career" (her quotation marks, not mine) had stalled until David Sedaris began speaking glowingly of her short fiction and reading from it on his own book tours. "I have been read from at Carnegie Hall," she said proudly. Thanks to the Sedaris stamp of approval, her publisher reissued her collected stories "Jenny and the Jaws of Life," and promised to give it the marketing push they hadn't the first time around in 1987.

Two friends started Literary Women in 1982, in reaction to the reading list at the local high school. Out of 96 recommended authors, only four were women back then. (I can't tell you what the ratio is today, and I wish that there was a separate day for Literary Women in the local schools. As I eyeballed the room yesterday, it appeared that the majority of the attendees were older than 40.) In my current cynical state, I imagine the list has improved only slightly; hopefully I'm wrong. All the more reason, however, to enjoy the camaraderie of Literary Women. Next year's Festival of Authors is March 12.

Wandering Through the Downturn (and Finding a Home)

2010-03-06T22:24:57Z

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."

]]> Maybe it's because the organization's drama had a happy ending, complete with secured 15-year lease, but SoEx Executive Director Courtney Fink says its peripatetic period helped it to clarify its objectives while expanding creatively and programmatically -- and she insists that isn't just spin. "In my mind, you know, 32 years in one space, it becomes hard to kind of break out of certain types of things that you're doing," she says. "Many people, they were actually concerned that beyond that space our identity wouldn't translate."

The anxiety was understandable. As Fink points out, Southern Exposure is known for "unruly events that involve hundreds of artists," and its original Mission District home -- a 3,000-square-foot space with 30-foot ceilings and an entire wall of windows -- had been perfect for hosting those. But cramming into an 800-square-foot storefront, the first of two temporary homes, just made SoEx spend more time outdoors. It shifted from gallery presentation to working in the context of urban and public spaces, a niche occupied by lots of Bay Area artists without many local institutions to support them.

In 2007, it also ventured into arts funding when the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts chose it to launch its Regional Regranting Program. So far, Southern Exposure has disbursed $155,000 among 50 local arts groups and projects, and the Warhol Foundation has expanded the initiative to two more cities: Houston and Kansas City, Mo.

Making it through those nomadic years changed "who's a part of Southern Exposure," Fink says, simply because the organization had to work in new places and rely on various partners in order to realize that work. The upshot was a higher profile, locally and nationally, and an enlarged audience base.

In its expansive new space, Southern Exposure is able once again to gather artists together and to show their work in its two galleries. The architecture of the space, designed by Richard Johnson, makes the youth education area highly visible, a choice that facilitates the intersection of artists with high schoolers from the neighborhood.

"Certainly the challenge right now," Fink says, "is to figure out how to incorporate some of the programming that we used to do with, sort of, some of the newer ways that we've been working, and have them kind of exist side by side or integrate them."

Another challenge, for Southern Exposure as for so many nonprofits, is money. SoEx fell $50,000 short of the $700,000 goal in its fund-raising campaign last year -- in part, Fink says, because supporters who had promised donations found themselves suddenly in no position to give.

Its current operating budget, $550,000, is the largest it's ever had, and its full-time staff of five is a SoEx record, too. But Fink believes this fund-raising climate, in which foundations and governments are still giving less to the arts, is "the hardest one yet." That her organization recently hit up its biggest donors for its campaign only adds to the difficulty.

"I still feel like we're on the back end of the wave, the nonprofit sector," she says. "I'm writing more grants than ever -- more than ever -- to try to make up the same amount of money."

On the other hand, there's the Monster Drawing Rally. SoEx's biggest event of the year, it's a fund-raiser at which 120 artists take one-hour shifts drawing pictures that are immediately hung on the wall with a $60 price tag. So many artists wanted to participate in the tenth annual rally, which took place last night, that not all of them could be accommodated -- "and that's probably a good problem to have," Fink says.

The Monster Drawing Rally, like much that Southern Exposure does, is in the tradition of artist-driven alternative art spaces all over the country. Yet, as Fink notes, the meaning of "alternative" is forever in flux: What fits the definition today may find the mainstream tomorrow.

"I'm just really interested in the alternative art-space movement and where it started, what role it serves, where it is now, like how we fit into that," she says. "I'm extremely focused on reading arts journalism and art stories and trying to figure out how a space like ours can continue to remain alternative, quote-unquote, when those practices have become typical even in large institutions and museums, and asking ourselves the question, 'If that's the case, then what's next, and how can we remain relevant?' And I don't have an answer to the question, but it's something that I would say we need to always be asking ourselves, probably."

Photos courtesy Southern Exposure

Top: Works by Ant Farm, Lordy Rodriguez, Renée Gertler, Jay Nelson, Whitney Lynn and Christine Wong Yap in 'Bellwether,' the inaugural exhibition in Southern Exposure's new space.
Center: Last year's Monster Drawing Rally.
Above: The Southern Exposure staff, and one intern, on the day they moved into their new building. Executive Director Courtney Fink is third from right.

I Have No Credentials

2010-03-06T19:53:43Z

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.

]]> Let's start with degrees. Mine are in art, not science. And my highest is an M.F.A., which required all of two years and a show of paintings (accompanied by a pro forma written statement, and "defended" in a kaffeeklatsch on folding chairs at the exhibition). None of this three or four years of advanced rigorous classwork, reading competence in three languages, two or three more years writing a huge dissertation, followed by an exhausting defense of it for me.

Beyond long division and a few simple equations, I'm innumerate, having never taken a class more advanced than second-semester plane geometry in high school. This is also a matter of cowardice because, on the tenth-grade "Iowa Test of Educational Development" that we all took back then, I landed in the 98.5 percentile in math. Never taking calculus or trigonometry resulted from being afraid and lazy. Now, when I read those popular-science books about the origin of the universe or the nature of black holes, I have to skip the pages with the funny-looking symbols on them. I remind myself of Chevy Chase's imitation of Gerald Ford, in the Presidential debates, being asked a long, statistic-intense question about unemployment, replying, "You promised there'd be no math."

I don't speak a foreign language fluently. My two linguistic markers of cosmopolitanism are bad French (at which I am barely good enough to say le mauvais francais), and rudimentary, more-than-a-half-century-old high school Spanish that I'm trying, at an age when the brain no longer learns an unfamiliar language very well, to resuscitate with my iPod, Univision, and short conversations with the guys at the garage. This debility has, however, one salutary political effect: humility. It's hard to stay self-congratulatory when I know that everybody in the queue at the immigration offices near where I live are a lot better at speaking two--or more--languages than I am. As I walk by I often think, "Let them in, kick me out."

I can neither read music nor play an instrument. For somebody who purports to be a critic in the arts--let alone a critic of the arts--this is well-nigh unfathomable, maybe even unforgiveable. (My son in L.A. is a musician, a singer-songwriter; where he gets it from is beyond me. Perhaps this stuff skips generations; my father played some schoolboy trombone and wrote a few reviews for Downbeat.) I mean, what right do I have to say anything in print about music, even the slightest allusion to something as musically straightforward and simple as Creedence Clearwater's "Who'll Stop the Rain," when I can't even tell you what friggin' key they're playing in? (I can tell major from minor, and I read somewhere that Cole Porter said that Jewish = minor key, but that's about it.) The only cushion for me in this is that so much commentary on music never comments on the music in the music. When I lived in Los Angeles I used to read Robert Hilburn in the Times and, while he almost always quoted lyrics (as poetry, but that's another issue), he almost never said anything about keys or time signatures. And when I used to listen to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts while painting in the studio (knowing neither the specs of the music nor the meaning of the words, I'd just yet the opera wash over me), I noticed that the questions on the intermission's "Opera Quiz" always concerned trivia about the libretto or performers' biographies, but never technical stuff about music.

Finally, I am below D-minus weak in those areas that traditionally marked one as learned. (Didn't Judge Learned Hand say that men were once "learned," then they were "educated" and "now they are trained"?) I never studied Latin (or, heaven help me, ancient Greek), I know near-zilch about the Bible (though in my childhood the family Bible was one earned by me for perfect Sunday school attendance, first through fifth grades), and I can quote but a few scattered lines of Shakespeare, and those with the utmost inaccuracy.

Even in my own specialty (I'll cut my tongue out before I start saying "artistic practice"), I operate with few definable skills. In college, I was a whiz of a figure drawer (see, "Prud'hon, Pierre-Paul--imitation of") and learned to mix oil paints with reasonable competence. Sculpture--all that welding and cantilevering--and ceramics (kick wheels! firing cones! glazes!) were one-and-done for me. Ever since, I've painted with easy-to-use water-base paints in bastardized combos that, for all I know, may someday spontaneously combust. I still stretch and gesso my own canvases (something just about any doofus can do), but lack of a woodshop bids me have the strainers made by a local carpenter and delivered. And those collages with which I opened this confession? Scissors, white glue, a matte knife (known more pungently as a "case cutter" when I worked in a supermarket in college) and a metal straight edge. Again, any doofus...

There's no clever kicker to this post, save to say that occasionally the feeling of being a credential-less poseur is exhilarating in a "Talented Mr. Ripley" sort of way. Mostly, though, it's a low buzz of subliminal shame. If I had it to do over again, I don't think I'd want to be an actual subatomic-particle physicist or a bona fide neurosurgeon. But I sure would like to be an abstract painter and art critic who's fluently bilingual, can comprehend the pages with the funny little symbols on them in the popular science books, is able to rattle off soliloquies by Shakespeare and quote from the Latin poems of Milton, and relaxes in the studio by plucking out a Rodrigo concerto on his Cordoba C10 Guitar.

Hot Topic: That Tall, Golden Man

2010-03-05T18:55:50Z

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.

Get Fuzzy Love

2010-03-05T15:17:31Z

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.

]]> Further variations on the theme have continued all week -- check out Thursday's skewering of the varied numerical rating systems used by reviewers of movies, restaurants, etc. Get Fuzzy says plenty about our line of work, the myriad ways criticism can seem capricious or meanspirited or random, and on and on.

That, it could be argued, was enough "service journalism" for a four-panel strip. But that's not all: Naturally comics.com provides a way to rate the work. So, in one of those delicious ironies that make the Internet such a happy place, we have an endlessly repeating feedback loop: Click to rate cartoonist Darby Conley's commentaries on rating systems and Internet "opinion." Let your voice be heard! By all means, opine! Help make these comics more relevant to your life!

When Arts News Is Hard News

2010-03-05T04:09:09Z

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.]]> It's arts news when Italy puts a former curator from California on trial for looting antiquities. It's arts news when a famous music festival's ex-director is under investigation for embezzlement. It's arts news when a onetime big-name Broadway producer is sentenced to prison for fraud.

Arts news that's hard news isn't necessarily about crime, of course, but neither is the spectrum of arts journalism limited to criticism, feature stories and interviews. A lot of arts news demands real reporting, and more of it ought to end up on Page 1. When arts journalists disown legitimate hard news about the arts as being arts news, they feed a misperception of the weight of what we do. Reporting on the arts is serious business.

So, Larry, is the latest development in the Gardner case arts news? Absolutely.

artful thieves

2010-03-05T02:51:48Z

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?

How Often Does This Happen?

2010-03-04T14:31:22Z

Arts news leads The Boston Globe today:

Stephen Kurkjian's story about the FBI resubmitting evidence in the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist for DNA analysis is here.

Editor Interview: Sharon Waxman, TheWrap

2010-03-03T08:00:01Z

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.

]]> Where else do you think they can learn that? For instance, I think about Harvard's Nieman Foundation narrative conference going on hiatus. That was an event journalists could attend by the hundreds. Where can they go now?

I don't have the answer to that. The only thing I have to say is what we do isn't rocket science. It basically takes a good moral center. You've got to be pretty smart. People figured out how to be journalists before there were newsrooms. And I think that's happening. Still, at the same time, there is something that is lost. We're very much in a transitional period. The way things are now is not the way things will always be. We're in transition. We don't know where we're going to end up. There's a lot of hand-wringing going on, which is legitimate, but I don't think we have to presume that the end is what we're seeing.

Do you think we can hang our hat on new media?

That's what I've done. I made my bet. That's the future. Or it's not the future; it's the present. Those people who don't adapt will not be doing journalism.

Is arts journalism having to find its way in an even harder terrain?

As the editor of TheWrap I very consciously built a news organization around a subject that had an endemic advertising category. I don't think that's the same for the opera, the ballet, the orchestra. I've been a culture writer, an arts writer, a political writer, a foreign correspondent, and I've written about Hollywood. Hollywood falls in between. It's culture. And very occasionally it's art. But most of the time it's a business. I'm not trying to be negative, just realistic: At the moment, as somebody who set out to start a news organization where I wanted to prove there is a business model that would support high-quality journalism and original content that wasn't just aggregated, my premise has been to find the category of information where you're giving people news and analysis which is essential for them to do their business. That could, of course, be true for the fine arts just as it is true for popular culture, but there's not the same ad base to support it. TheWrap, as we grow, is meant to be the business of movies, the business of television, then the business of music, the business of games, the business of new media -- all of those things related to what we broadly refer to as entertainment. Right now, we focus on one hub: mainly movies and television and a little bit of music. Is it potentially possible to appeal to the people who are in the business of fine arts? Yes. But I think it's a hard place to start.

Are we in a climate in this country where the arts are starting to build a momentum because they provide 5.7 million jobs a year and also because people are looking toward the arts to humanize business?

That's a very good argument for the arts that I hadn't thought of. But that's the argument I made for why people should invest in TheWrap because this business provides as many jobs as sports and provides as much of the connective tissue of society in terms of how we communicate and how we perceive ourselves.

Where do the arts fit into your world now?

I just wrote a book about museum culture. I went to Dubai last year and wrote a cover story for ARTnews magazine. I'm very much an arts writer as part of my life. I lived in Paris for six years and wrote about every blockbuster art exhibit that opened. I have a great interest in that and in seeing that sustained.

I feel like there's a big "but" there.

The "but" is: How big of a news organization can you support as a business and as a commercial enterprise? That's the "but." That's the question. Maybe we'll decide that arts journalism is a luxury. Because, by the way, as we're thinking of the future of journalism, we have to prioritize. What's the most important thing to save? Clearly, covering our government has to be the most important thing: holding politicians accountable, informing society. But in terms of the categories that are challenging to find advertisers in an ad-supported model, what you have to do is find the core audience that cares about this content, get it to them in the way they want to read it in a timely manner. That's the same for lovers of opera or lovers of football. But how do you find the kinds of content those people will pay for? If you combine that with an advertising model, then you've got something.

What's successful about TheWrap? How's it going?

It's going really well. It's incredibly exciting. It's definitely the biggest adventure of my life -- and I've been lucky to have lots of adventures. You get to use all the skills you have acquired as a journalist, as a reporter, and apply them to creating something that basically hasn't existed before. To be able to expand my learning at this stage in my life is really, really fun. And it's really, really hard. Creating something from scratch is extremely hard. Anyhow, I'm not going to dwell on the hard part. It's frigging hard. We get it. I asked for it. Nobody told me to do it. The great part is when you see your audience build. Our credibility with this organization was immediate. That's unbelievable. It takes how many years to build a brand like The New York Times? Today we have the incredible gift that we can create a brand almost instantaneously because the barriers to entry are only: "Can you get the news out, and can it be right?" We've been breaking stories from the first day we've existed, and we've broken bigger and bigger stories through the year. Our audience has grown to a million unique visitors a month. We have robust advertising. But what I'm really most proud of this year is that I've managed to build a really top-quality editorial team of people who share my vision, and who are in it to do what I'm here to do. It's so cool to see people adopt your vision and expand it and make it better. That's this team of 13 people who exponentially add to the success I am trying to build because you can't build it by yourself.

(Photo courtesy Sharon Waxman)

Shifting Course

2010-03-02T22:35:54Z

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.

Wot is ARTicles, anyhow?

2010-03-02T19:37:08Z

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).

What we are, whether this will be an assortment of comments or a conversation, will evolve in time. From the outset, there were differences of emphasis among the original ARTicles bloggers. Most of us saw the site as a place to comment ABOUT arts journalism, and especially the issues surrounding the senescence of print and the rude birth of Internet journalism. Others, especially those without a regular blog of their own, put more stress on the actual practice of arts journalism, writing directly about the arts, though Bob Christgau did tie in an arts-journalistic angle most (if not all) of the time.

The March 1 postings, especially those by Wendy Lesser, Larry Blumenfeld and Richard Goldstein, seem to me to have shifted the balance more to the arts and away from arts journalism per se. Which is not a bad thing, though as I say, maybe themes and conversations will sort themselves out from the initial conceptual white noise.

Whatever works, since arts journalism as traditionally practiced is not working. If ARTicles becomes a site readers turn to for good writing about artistic events the writers have encountered, with no further comment on how the arts-journalistic profession has responded to those events, fine. Me, I hope to keep more of my focus on the secondary art of arts journalism, and to save whatever I may write about the arts themselves for my Rockwell Matters blog -- when and if I revive that.

The key is to have this conversation, and I'm proud that we have been able to attract such a bustling crew of new contributors. Let's keep the momentum going!

Eh, Who Has Time To Get It Right Anymore?

2010-03-02T17:39:50Z

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.

In the Columbia Journalism Review, Victor Navasky's report on a CJR survey of magazines offers even more reason for writers and readers to keep that bottle of ibuprofen handy. Documenting with hard numbers the pervasiveness of sloppy editing practices online, it also plumbs some of the causes. A sample:

• 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).

As Navasky writes, "And that's taking respondents at their word!"