Recently by John Rockwell

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.

...with its "tradtional emphasis on the review" are quotations from the pen (we want to keep this traditional) of Doug McLennan, writing in his ArtsJournal blog diacritical as linked from another entry of his in this blog. Both entries serve to help announce an ambitious confab, part live and part virtual, that will emanate from USC on Oct. 2 and be devoted to new business models for online arts journalism. The day-long gathering is sponsored by USC and the National Arts Journalism Program, underwritten by various foundations, and has been put together primarily by Doug (who also serves as acting director of NAJP, acting because there's no money involved) and Sasha Anawalt of USC.

The NAJP used to be devoted to the betterment of "traditional arts journalism" until NAJP lost its funding and TAJ started its bumpy journey south. As most of you know, a new board for the now unfunded NAJP was elected following a Pew-sponsored reunion in Philadelphia a few years ago. We (there are seven of us, nicely diverse; I'm chair and Bob Christgau is vice-chair) meet in teleconferences every month or so, and have chipped in with advice (not consent, which is not ours to give) on the conference at USC. But Doug is the driving force, conceptually, and he is a pioneer and prophet for online arts journalism.

His entries on the conference, and on the overall health of arts journalism, interested me on several counts. Above all his passing comments on traditional, meaning print, arts journalism. For him, "the traditional emphasis on the review as the primary form is suicide." He adds that traditonal arts journlism didn't cover "some kinds of culture" very well, singling out dance as an example. (Me, I'd attribute that to latent homophobia among arts edtitors, but what do I know?) For Doug, print journalism remained stuck on the traditional arts and "the old model of experts preaching to 'the masses,'" which "had tenuous hold of an audience long before the internet came along."

I do not react with visceral hostility to such ideas, as I would were they offered by overtly philistine editors, but I would add some caveats. One is that my experience as an arts journalist was largely at the New York Times, which was and remains exceptional. Second, a thoughtful review and preaching down to the masses are not synonymous.

The best critics are complicit with their readers, not snobbishly superior to them. The principal form of blogging on the arts is still the proffering of opinion, sometimes informed, sometimes irresponsible, but opinion (a review or review-ish commentary) nonetheless. People like to write their opinions and other people, depending on the writer, like to read them. Mostly, if you are any kind of informed reader, this has to do with seeking out a countervailing opinion to one you already hold. It's a conversation, even if the reader traditionally could not engage the critic in an electronic conversation, and the critic would not have had the time to respond to all those readers, anyhow.

(Parenthetically, it drives me nuts when outlets like CNN, struggling to emulate or co-opt the internet, waste time soliciting viewers' opinions and then reading out the lucky winners on the air. Who CARES what Joe from Omaha thinks about health care? But maybe I'm just a preaching snob.)

I like to read movie reviews after I've seen a film; movie critics just can't help themselves when it comes to giving away the plot. So after I saw Kathryn Bigelow's "Hurt Locker," I read A.O. (Tony) Scott's Times review. I don't always agree with Scott; who would want to agree with anyone all the time? But he's about the best writer-critic out there, and I happened to agree with him completely on "The Hurt Locker," right down to his terrific final sentence. I wasn't being preached to; I was having my own opinion confirmed, amplified out into the wider world.

Most arts editors desperate to modernize "traditional arts journalism" are hostile to the review, especially the review of something that is finished by the time the reader reads it; their basic instinct is towards consumer service. They want to re-invent arts journalism with more interactivity, more boosterish features, more listings, more attention to, as Doug put it, "participatory community culture." But reading the opinion of someone whose sensibility you've come over the years to admire is not "suicidal"; it remains the core of arts coverage no matter what the medium.

But which arts? If traditional arts journalism has failed to keep up with realities of which arts people today actually practice and enjoy, the failing has less to do with internet vs. print than with the qualifications of those who control the coverage. The upper editors are usually indifferent to the arts or crudely populist, willing to whittle arts space on any pretext. The arts editors themselves, mostly transfers from the sports pages or the dining section on their way (they hope) upwards in the editiorial hierarchy, are just the kind of ignorant, hectic editors Doug describes.

"Running a good freelance section requires editors who have the time and talent to know what's going on in the culture of their community," Doug writes. But that's very hard. It's hard when arts coverage is still dominated by staff critics, who may know their beats but who are of varying quality and may be wedded to their old ways. It's especially hard when the paper in question cares little about the arts and relies on uninformed reviews of the local symphony (on whose board the publisher sits) and random wire copy for its feature stories.

Blogs are cool. There are no space limitations and, for better and for worse, no editors. Doug is certainly correct that we need new business models to help support internet arts journalism, and to pay writers for contributing to it. My main caveats, however, are that many of the problems that afflicted print journalism (overworked, underinformed editors, an unimaginative conception of what culture really is today) apply equally to print and the internet, and that readers still like to read informed opinion. An internet revolution that devotes itself excessively to community and participation may be more democratic, and maybe more finanically viable, but it may also be sadly less compelling.

I agree with Laura Collins-Hughes's fierce protest below against writing for nothing, be it on blogs or for publications that might once have paid their writers at least a pittance but now don't feel the need to bother. Capitalism is a wonderful system on the way up, but it's painful on the way down. Maybe we need desperation and fear as well as greed in order to innovate and produce, though me, I've not yet given up on democratic socialism with controlled capitalist elements. But there is no question that recessions (or worse? maybe not) serve the Bosses' interests. They let them bust unions, knock back wages and encourage professionals to give it all up for free.

That said, there are other reasons to blog other than to attract attention to yourself and hence to get paying jobs. Laura knows that full well, I assume, since she blogs copiously, on her own blog and here. In my case, though I have a lot less money now than I had a year ago, I think I have enough (barring a real meltdown). I blog because I've spent my life responding to the arts in prose and can't get out of the habit. I suppose it encourages press agents to give me press tickets, too, or at least provides them an excuse to put me on the press list, which they might have been inclined to do anyway, so wonderful are they and I.

Aside from writing with self-advertisement the only reward, against which Laura protests, it would be unfortunate to turn over (arts) journalism to people who are retired or independently wealthy or just compulsive, willing to spend hours at the computer after a full day's work elsewhere.

I, for one, do not miss the power of the NY Times and am not out to call attention to myself in order to get paying work. I'm content with my modest number of interested readers dotted picturesquely (as seen on Sitemeter) around the globe. Sometimes I do respond to an offer to submit a freelance article because the subject interests me, and maybe some offers come from those reminded of my existence by my blog.

But mostly I'd rather just blog away, unconcerned with the consequences. After all, freedom is just another word for avoiding anyone else telling you what to do.

As a former rock critic for the NY Times, I covered the Jackson 5 and the Jacksons and Michael Jackson, so part of me felt that I should weigh in with SOMETHING about his death on my blog, Rockwell Matters. But I didn't. I was excited by his greatest LP's and videos and singing and dancing as much as the next person. At his greatest he was great, maybe the last great pop personality to come close to uniting the culture, around the world.

Even at his peak, though, there was a patina of show-biz artificiality about him and his persona. Call us naive, but those raised on 60's rock clung to the notion of "sincerity" in our pop voices, and there was no way, ever, of telling whether Michael Jackson was sincere. The distinction had something to do with white folk-rock morphing into rock & roll vs. the black show-biz revue tradition, but Jackson pushed artificiality to its outer limits. He was a carefully self-constructed artifact, a brilliant artifact at his best. Maybe the whole notion of sincerity and naturalness that infused so much 60's pop culture and art was an anomaly. Maybe constructing an artifact is the one true art. But Jackson never moved me, and the descent of his career and life into weirdness was painful.

So I wrote nothing. But now, for this ARTicles blog, which is about the relation of journalism to the arts, a brief word on the media overkill surrounding Jackson's death. On television, on the radio, in the tabloids, it was impossible to escape it. People say the ayatollahs and Mark Sanford were lucky to have been knocked out of the news by Jackson overkill. But we here in America (and the Western world) aren't so lucky.

The whole orgy of crocodile tears was and is sick and exploitive, and the nerve of the tabloids (mine are the NY Post and the NY Daily News) to attack the Jackson family for being mercenary (which I'm sure they are) one day after running maudlin special Jackson Sunday supplements, all to capitalize on the same death the family is trying to cash in on, is disgusting. Not since the death and canonization of Elvis have so many tried to make so much money with so much cynicism.

We live in a strange, tacky, cheezy world, a world in which popular culture is equated with greed with no one batting an eye. A long way from the idealism of the 60's. If that, too, was ever real.

The appointment of Rocco Landesman (not yet confirmed) as head of the National Endowment for the Arts has been widely praised, and I agree; Landesman is a smart, appealing character. $50 million for the arts was added to the stimulus package, and right nows it looks like the NEA's budget will be increased. The administration requested $161 million ($6 million up from the current level), and the House Appropriations Subcommittee has thrown a figure of $170 onto the table.

Whatever the final amount, however, it will still represent tokenism. Positive tokenism is better than negative tokenism, if there is such a thing. But after all the flurry of excitement (at least in some parochial arts quarters) about Quincy Jones's proposal for a cabinet-level Secretary of the Arts, and the high-profile arts evenings at the White House, it hardly looks like Obama is putting much political muscle behind a serious increase in the Federal government's involvement in the arts. Especially when you consider the minuscule level of a $155 NEA million budget, itself up from the recent past.

Yes, we have the tax-deductible contributions (which have declined in the recession and which Obama suggested might be trimmed back) that are supposed to compensate for shrunken national public support, even as the states eliminate or zero out their own state arts councils. Yes, even though our system gives disproportionate influence to rich people, the actuality of national culture bureaucrats controlling every aspect of the arts from top to bottom, as in France, has its downside. Maybe, as some have perhaps naively hoped, Landesman only accepted the NEA job in return for a promise of a significant budgetary increase down the line.

Still, Obama has not exactly made the arts a priority, even if he did have an arts component in his platform. Lord knows he has a lot on his plate. Maybe serious attention to the arts will have to wait until the economy recovers or until a lame-duck second term. But so far, it seems to be arts business as usual in Washington, which is precious little business at all.

A lot of people out there are seeking, like Diogenes, for viable business models for journalistic ventures being squeezed by the crisis in print journalism. An article today in the New York Times (the PRINT edition, page B3) offers one possible wrinkle on the nonprofit model. The article reports that the Associated Press has agreed to distribute articles by four nonprofit groups devoted to investigative reporting.

The precedent goes like this: If a similar foundation or patron decided to foster arts journalism, the A.P. might be another way to get the results out to the public. Naturally, questions need to be asked: A.P. distriubtion might work for reporting or criticism on issues of national importance. But what about local reviews and reporting? Would the A.P. choose to distribute a hard-hitting inquiry into a scandal at a mid-sized mid-western symphony orchestra? Do readers in Seattle care about a review of a new play in Louisville?

Still, aside from facilitating the distribution of properly funded, properly paid arts journalism into print and onto the Internet, this A.P. outlet model for investigative reporting might well be expandable to arts journalism. It wouldn't offer a competitive alternative to the various plans afoot for local blends of arts boosterism, listings, criticism and reporting. But it could help expand the impact of initially nonprofit-driven arts journalism out into the brave new world of eager arts writers and arts readers.

A book in not an article, let alone an ARTicle, but both books and newspaper articles offer ideas and artistry in print, and both publishing and newspapering are troubled industries, on the verge of a most uncertain future on the Internet.

Elisabeth Sifton is a veteran publisher under whose auspices a lot of good books have appeared. She has an article in the June 8 Nation called The Long Goodbye? Much of it is a chronicle of the publishing business in this country over the last few decades, with its few heroes and many mistakes of strategy and taste.

Towards the end she tears into Google for its presumption that it can and should obtain the rights to all book content for free. She mocks "the fatuous surprise of Google's Sergey Brin discovering that 'There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site.'" Brin's "'debased lingo" sees books only as "'viable information retrieval systems,' information being the only cultural signifier he recognizes, evidently....For billionaires like Brin, accessing the giant river of book 'content' onto which they can glue paid advertising is simply a giant new way to make more money, and they are single-minded about that."

Even now, newspaper publishers like Rupert Murdoch are struggling to come up with ways to get people to pay for web content that they've grown used to getting for free. Internet publishers like Doug McLennan argue passionately that making print content available for free on the web is valuable free publicity for the print publishers.

One could also argue that Google's aggressive stance toward amassing publishing rights is not, or not just, pure greed but the only efficient way to cut through vested interests and reach the extraordinary goal of the world library on the Internet. The historian Robert Darnton, who now runs the Harvard libraries, has offered some nuanced analysis of this whole nexus of issues in several articles in the New York Review of Books.

So maybe things aren't all bleak, with philistine geeks subverting the purity of scholarship and literature. Still, Sifton's cri de coeur offers a thought-provoking alternate view to the one preached by the Brave New World futurists everywhere among us.

That's a phrase from Lawerence Wright's informative article in the June 1 New Yorker (the one with the cover painted on an iPhone) about Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire who loaned the New York Times $250 million at 14 percent interest. What Wright describes, in passing, as an anomaly was the market position of newspapers from the 1970's into the 90's, which just happens to coincide wiht the bulk of my own journalistic career. According to Wright, that was a golden age, economically. The business became lucrative, fancy office towers were built, and "reporters were paid a reasonable wage, which was also unprecedented."

I'm sure publishers' associations have already amassed statistics on these matters. But if what Wright says is true, then the laments about the current perilous staste of newspaper employment may need modifcation. Maybe being a newspaperperson, as on the Internet today, is inherently a dicey proposition when it comes to buying a home and raising a family. We tend to think of the present as a great fall from a lofty height that previously defined the lot of the reporter/critic stretching back into time. But maybe newspaper employment has rarely been secure, and the current instability, not to say desperation, is the historical norm. Scary, maybe exaggerated, but thought-provoking.