Recently by Jeff Weinstein

Hi Bob, the world of restaurant reviewing -- a nice corner of cultural journalism -- happens to be retreating from its established ethical guidelines. Some bloggers are writing about the free spreads at previews; anonymity is down the drain (the critic at the N.Y. Daily News is proud that readers and those in the industry can now relate to her), and so on. It's becoming a junket universe -- and not the custard -- yet again.

Well, I too was at the aforementioned Slow Journalism panel, passing the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism "helper" baton to John. Though I think the Slow label lends itself too easily to bad jokes, I agree with Doug's idea that many of the principles of the Slow Food movement may be applied to journalism in general -- and arts journalism especially. Sure, large traditional companies are overworking already hammered critics, reporters, and editors in the name of online presence. (Two blog posts a week! Audio slideshow! Flip it!) But I don't blame the Internet itself for that. And a digital pluralism of voices doesn't necessarily undermine quality, which is the fear some of us old fogeys have.

 

By the way, newsprint folks, has the Newspaper Guild just rolled over and died? Actually, it did years ago, when the union refused to understand the importance of freelancers and how they/we would be employed (as it were) to undermine staff jobs. At least the U.A.W. raises a flag for its members as government billions change hands.

 

I would like to focus, though, on a statement someone in our business made, a very smart person on the digital side of the Internet divide. Working so closely and constantly with images, this introspective journalist claimed, has made it more difficult to write.

 

Aren't images enough? Some blogs, for example, do marvelous things with them, with or without captions. narrative or not. Still, the troubled journalist was worried that the writing part of his imagination needed exercise, needed time to wade into deeper water.

 

An art critic for more than four decades told me that at one of his jobs, he wasn't allowed to choose the images (the photo editor did, usually of artist-friends). So the critic learned to write in an "I am a camera" manner, squeezing description, evaluation, and occasionally that extra "why is this important?" thought into the few hundred words he had. Would he rather have had photos galore to play with, as he does on his blog now? "Both words and photos," he told me. "As long as I have enough time."

I'm preparing to yak at some cultural colleagues (in a classroom context) about credibility and ethics in our new age of immediate journalism and have come to an unexpected, though tentative, conclusion:

 

That critics, as opposed to reporters, are unavoidably "unethical" by the very nature of our jobs because opinion, however transparent or fact-based, doesn't fit the usual J-school ethical guidelines. Remember the high-school definitions of ethics and morals? Something of their squishy difference seems to applies to how we measure "right and wrong" for reporters and critics.

 

I've always wondered why big-boy editors tend to mistrust and sometimes disdain their own feature departments, and this may be one of the reasons: "All sides" reporting and singular opinion seem inimical. Any editor who's worked with a reporter-critic who's fearful to write that something is good or bad knows just what I mean.

 

Sure, a whole batch of the usual ethical guidelines apply to both types of work, and most apply equally in the blog fog and out. (Here's where I will recount about how one new, multiplatform company I worked for asked me to cross the editorial/advertising line and another traditional one did not.) But the replacement of the longtime classical music critic at the Plain Dealer, Donald Rosenberg, ostensibly because of his lack of critical sympathy with the relatively young Cleveland Orchestra conductor Franz Welser-Möst, brings up ethical issues related only to critics. (Wanna read a really good blog post about negative criticism? Here's Ann Powers on her own review of diva Tina Turner.)

 

So, do any of you critics or editors have any thoughts 1) on whether digital multiplatforming (and the overwork it entails) has changed ethics and credibility, or 2) do critics require a different set of rules to play by? Love to know.

 

 

 

 

As more an arts editor than a writer, I am curious why we're not seeing arts coverage that more fully reflects the present economic . . . slump, crisis, crash. It's as if the reviews and features I'm reading were written a year or a decade ago.

Where's the effect of the market drop and resulting semidemipanic on institutional portfolios and philanthropic support; on sales, of artwork or tickets, in big places and small; on content, which is a powerful topic for critics of all kinds that's rarely touched? (There's a whole school of art crit that actually turns up its collective nose whenever the word content is uttered.)

Do critics and arts reporters think that their editors imagine their coverage and commentary as a relief from the world, instead of a crucial part of it? My answer: yup, especially the editors who decide what moves and what sits. I'd be glad to read anyone's thoughts.

And a quick note about something my ARTicles colleague John Rockwell just filed below. He writes that reading the Sunday NYT made him "nostalgic for the good old days, meaning the days when there was more I wanted to read in the paper and less commercial pop-culture dross (by which I am careful to make a distinction from real criticism about real pop culture)."

Me, I read quite a lot of commercial "dross" about that other culture, the high-rent stuff, too. It's plenty commercial, with lots of bucks involved, especially in museums. Just thought I'd mention.

Actually, I've never bought into the high-low distinction, from a critical POV, anyway.

 

I've been teaching arts journalism for the first time. Let me offer a small antidote to the sadness in our field -- as jobs shrivel, as doubt takes root -- in the form of a first impression that could seem naive to teachers with years behind them.

My office was filled yesterday as students, one after another, showed me work in progress. They asked for help with interviews and research, hoping to give some convincing form to their passions for opera, quilting, roller derbies, "green" weddings, sustainable design. I'm lucky, because they have no trouble understanding that with the right approach, weddings and roller derbies may share the same tent as Messiaen or Conceptual art.

I met these curious young women and men just a few weeks ago, and I know little about them. But very soon I saw that we all have the same queer urge to condense ourselves into words, into stories. Although they slouch and tease and pretend otherwise, they're yearning, absolutely yearning, to be read.

Writers with this kind of compelling need will demand readers -- create them if necessary. Of course I'm worried that my students' more traditional newspaper and magazine dreams will elude them. But after yesterday, I had a hunch that most would set their ambition on any number of promising platforms -- just as long as they could write.  

Critic Elizabeth Zimmer has just posted the news on artsjournal.com that critic Deborah Jowitt, who for four decades covered dance at the Village Voice, was fired from her staff position -- although she's welcome, apparently, to continue writing as a cheaper freelancer. Quite a collection of critics, those Voicers who've been canned ...

I've just started to teach arts journalism to a wonderful class -- sure, give me a few weeks, but I go in optimistic. But then a colleague asked me the question anyone in this business would, should, ask: Why teach a skill for jobs that are drying up?

Tuesday night (March 25), I was handed a solid answer, one that I must admit I already knew. I went with my very dear friend, a Tony-voting theater critic for a major metropolitan newspaper, to the St. James Theater for a critic's-night preview of Gypsy, with Patti LuPone as you-know-who. Opening night is Thursday, so even though I am straining to tell you what I thought of it, I can't.

Yet I bet you want to know, may even be dying to know, which is why, as long as curtains go up, critics will always have work.

My friend, let's call him Brooks, because of a series of editorial circumstances was under absolutely no obligation to review. So the evening was a streetcar-man's holiday, which seemed to make him happy; he even had a glass of wine with his pretheater burger, something I'd never seen him do.

We remained sitting, silent, as lights came up after the first act. Then Brooks hit his fist on the arm of the infant-size seat: "I don't care, I'm going to write about this, whether or not they print it." I could see on his face that he was thinking of scribbling some retroactive notes and already rehearsing his lede.

What would induce a member of any audience to swap an evening of guaranteed leisure and potential enjoyment for a stretch of strenuous observation and then hours of immersion into the sweat-making cauldron of writing? Marx -- remember him, Karl with a K? -- ages ago provided the cliché: unalienated labor, work that's not work but irresistible love. Brooks had no choice. The words (and music!) on stage demanded company, and continuation, for themselves, and he was there.

As you can see, the same thing happened to me.

New information from Lily Tung at end.

My partner the art critic got an e-mail this morning from a China-based group called Hipic, which, after reading about it, would probably be pronounced HIP-ic, not HIGH-pic. Here's the who-we-are:

"Hipic" is an independent artistic project centered on pictures initiated by Yang Zhenzhong, Xu Zhen, Huang Kui and other artists, who established the "Hipic team." "Hipic" collects and displays flood of pictures from all over the world using internet as a platform. "Hipic" central system, www.hipic.org, diffuses pictures on various visual poles, including public screens, TV monitors, computer, mobile screens, and other mediums, which undoubtedly became part of everyone"s life.

You may or may not find these visual disseminators worthy of interest; Hipic just had a "soft" opening in ShanghART gallery in Beijing and says it will hang its screens in four more.

But in order to join the Hipic site, here's what you have to read and click (spelling is corrected):

 

I asked my partner if this could be a parody, because artists can be witty and satirical even (especially?) when at risk. And risk there is: a show in Shanghai by artist Zhang Huan was closed by local government officials just before it opened.

This welcome addition is from blogger Lily Tung:

I covered art in Shanghai for several U.S. and Hong Kong publications from 1994-1999, and I know two of the three artists. I can say with near certainty that the user agreement is a parody. Yang Zhengzhong especially creates tongue-in-cheek work. I laughed when I read it,
thinking to myself, "That is so THEM."

In addition, most websites in China don't require users to sign an agreement. That fact also leads me to believe Hipic is making a joke.

The beautiful result is that the artists still look to be following government rules, and officials will buy it because they won't understand the subtle irony.

Actors can wait tables. Theater critics can bus tables, maybe wash dishes. But what can art critics do?

About a month ago, artsjournal.com blogger Tyler Green posted a three-part interview with one of the Village Voice's freelance art critics, Christian Viveros-Faune (quite a good critic, too), in which Green asked him if he thought his connection to two commercial contemporary-art fairs, as executive director of one and "organizer" of another, was a conflict of interest. The critic's response, intemperate certainly, was basically yes, but because conflict of interest is inevitable, virtually built into the position, it didn't matter.

He was dropped from the Voice freelance stable a few days later -- not the same as being fired, because he was never on staff. (An unusual part of the Voice union contract does give health coverage to freelancers who earn enough money and file enough pieces during a fixed period, or at least it did when I worked there.)

But the important issue here is not one particular critic's decision about how to make a living. Unless cultural critics are full-time employees of the place for which we write, or have a plush and dependably regular freelance gig, we must find other work. I was a weekly restaurant critic for the Voice for more than 15 years, yet I needed to edit (the Voice's art and architecture criticism as it happens, and other stuff as well) and write plenty of pieces in plenty of fields in order to survive. Sure, many of my delicious meals were paid for, but I still had to keep myself in Pepto-Bismol.

I'd be surprised if more than half a dozen art critics in New York, even now the center of the multibillion-dollar art universe, eke a living only through their writing.

So the specter of "inevitable" conflict of interest must arise. Teaching and editing are pretty safe. But what about writing art-show catalogues, performance and CD program notes, or giving gallery talks? You're taking money from the very hand a reader expects you to bite.

Yet it doesn't seem reasonable for a paper or mag to demand from its freelancers a complete divorcement. Some places (like the Voice) have allowed compromise: wait two or three years to review a show in a gallery that's given you work because, if the workplace won't pay you enough to live, it shouldn't count on fealty.

Any thoughts?

I'll ask Peter Schjeldahl over there for my check.

Hi all. I do understand Doug's astonishment (in the post below) that, during a moment when cyberways are saturated with words and pictures, anyone would need a reading or viewing "bribe" -- in the form of a Euro per book-hour or free-film DVD. But who is the "anyone"? Anyone who teaches knows that access to information is never uniform or consistent. There is no single media "we." And it's not just about income or background. Anyone know an art-history professor who has never read a newspaper art review? I am acquainted with quite a few.

And as for bribes, arts writers "bribe" readers with every colorful, grabbing lede we write. Which is just what we should be doing, no?