Recently by John Rockwell

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 trhat 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 Site Map) 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.

Watching the travails of print journalism, and spending time with Doug McLennan (which I do because of our shared involvement with the National Arts Journalism Program, my contributing all too rarely to a blog on his ArtsJournalism site and because he's a friend), one spends a lot of time pondering the future of arts writing on the Internet. A worthy subject for pondering, to be sure. But with all due respect to Marshall McLuhan, sometimes the message does, or should, trump the medium.

By that I mean that it's easy to overlook what one traditionally considered with arts journalism, and what the old, once lavishly funded NAJP used to do: foster the actual quality of the criticism and reporting of the arts. (In fairness, Doug still does that, too, especially with the various NEA institutes for theater critcism and that of the other arts.) It's tempting now to question the place of the seemingly burgeoning arts-journalism programs, mostly Masters programs, at our leading universities. They can't all be just places to park recent college grads who don't know what to do with themselves and who don't want to go to film school and whose parents have money.

What these programs do, aside from maybe helping aspiring journalists make contacts, is hone basic skills. Good writers may have an innate gift. But that gift can be polished. Knowing about the field you aspire to criticize; getting the facts right; learning how to dig for facts when their possessor doesn't want to divulge them; writing on deadline -- all these are craft skills. Instruction (or, for a lot of us, on-the-job practice) can count for a lot, no matter whether the end result appears in print or on line.

So while we fret about the loss of formerly well-paying jobs and consider alternate business models, it's salutary just occasionally to remember that good criticism and good arts reporting need to be sustained, too, and to have a little faith that the need for those skills will seem so self-evident to society that ways will have to be found to support them.

Speaking of retro, qualified kudos to City Arts NYC (or however you spell it; the logo is too fancy to tell), a new monthly arts publication, its third (May) issue now out. Essentially a repository of arts writers who filled the back pages (and often, some of the front page) of the recently terminated New York Sun, City Arts offers articles, essays, reviews and listings. The Sun, a neo-con rag sustained against all economic good sense by right-wing supporters who wanted a New York vanity outlet, specialized in the high arts, lots of it, which suited its political stance (pro standards and classics and purity, anti messy populism and transgressive innovation). Some of its writers were pretty good, some not so hot (and some also in the New Criterion and, now, the New York Post). But one had to admire (from way across the ideological divide) any publication, no matter how quixotically, that devoted so much attention to the arts. And now City Arts is trying to carry on the crusade.

It will be interesting to see if they can keep it going. It's published by Manhattan Media, which also puts out the New York Press and a clutch of neighborhood tabloids. I haven't seen the Press for awhile, but it used to be cranky-rightwing-libertarian, though with more of a pop slant in its arts coverage. Whether Manhattan Media or City Arts makes money or has any reasonable hope of making money or is once again propped up by a political agenda, I know not. It has a web site (www.cityartsny.info), but that echoes the print version. So this seems another exercise in retro business models and old-fashioned arts coverage. Can it plant the flag for its kind of fustian "universal" quality in an era so obsessed with hipness and progressiveness and the Internet? We shall see.

Everyone seems to agree that the old print-newspaper business model is broken. But no one can figure out a new, Internet business model that will generate enough money to pay critics and reporters and editors to carry on the vital business of digging up the news and leading the cultural discussion. The Internet is free and some of the most successful sites, political and cultural and otherwise (including ArtsJournal.com), are based on their ability to link to extant newspaper and magazine sites cost-free. When some of those sites have attempted to charge readers for content, their traffic drops precipitously (remember "Times Select," the New York Times's failed attempt to get readers to pay to read their columnists and such?).

But some day soon someone will suddenly and unexpectedly figure out a way to make the Internet pay. As Frank Rich points out today, nobody thought pay-per-view television would work, until it did. Maybe advertisers will rally around some aggregated platform of Internet publications and blogs. Maybe the public radio and television model will gain traction, with loyal readers willing to pay for the privilege of high-level coverage.

As a retiree, I can afford to observe these developments with detached fascination (at least as long as the Times sustains its pension fund). There will be news and there will be arts journalism and criticism. But what form it will take is pretty exciting to contemplate, however grim the situation may seem now. And when the solution does come, everyone will accept it and wonder why they didn't foresee the advent of something so simple and obvious sooner.

No filings to ARTicles or Rockwell Matters for weeks and now these two today. Maybe I'll put some product into the RM pipeline before I decamp for Europe next week. Like Bob Christgau but in a different way, I've been busy.

Anyhow, during a recent National Arts Journalism Program board conference call, it occurred to me that the traditional career pattern for arts journalists in London provides an odd, inadvertent model for the situation of suddenly cut-loose arts journalists in the United States today.

In the U.S., despite all the freelancing and blogging afoot now, the standard model for an aspiring young arts journalist has been to win a staff position on a leading newspaper or magazine. Attaining such a position provided the promise of a steady, even lifetime job, health benefits and a pension. Mortages could be paid and children sent to college.

Now, that's all slipping away, and journalists who've spent a lifetime working on staff find themselves freelancers or worse (worse being no outlets at all). And yet in Britain (which means in London more than "in New York" is in any way synonymous with "in the United States), staff arts writing jobs have long been rare. I can remember my shock when a decade ago Andrew Clarke, the classical critic for the Financial Times, told me he was the only staff music critic in town. And he was the arts editor, too, which probably got him his job.

For decades English critics, even famous critics, have cobbled together all manner of disparate assignments to make a living. Yes, they may be the grandly prestigious music critic of the Times or the Guardian. But they also write program notes and freelance magazine articles and scholarly essays or teach or consult to arts organizations or edit magazines or even present concerts and festivals. Shades of Joe Horowitz or Greg Sandow here.

This can lead to the kinds of conflict of interest that might shock the old-time U.S. staffer, secure in his position to disdain muddying the waters between art and commentary. The London model also encourages the sort of genteel gentlemen critic who has immunity from real life and popular culture by virtue of an independent income.

But whatever the ethical and practical advantages and disadvantages of both systems, the American one is broken. American arts writers are now putting together mosaic careers, in print and on line and in the classroom, that mirror the British tradition. So our brave new post-newspaper world may not be so new, after all. And to judge from the generally high quality of British criticism, our upheaval hardly means the death of intelligent arts commentary in this country. Or of some sort of viable way to make writing about the arts into a viable profession.