Recently by John Rockwell

Laura Collins-Hughes had an interesting posting recently asking if anyone had been pressured by his/her editors to be positive about some local institution (cf. the Cleveland Orchestra vs. Don Rosenberg).

I can't recall any such incident, but self-censorship is as repressive, maybe, as censorship. At The New York Times, everyone is painfully aware of the paper's all-powerful role in New York/national culture. Any editor would bridle at the thought that he might be pressured from even further up the food chain to ease up on some particular institution, and indeed the Times has run reporting (and certainly criticism) unfavorable to many of them.

Yet there is a prevailing ethos that we carry a big stick and should wield it lightly. I agree with that, but Gray Lady gentility can easily slip into avoidance. When the previous publisher was chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at least some of the Culture staff automatically gave that institution more play in the listings or felt nervous about sidewiping remarks against it ("gratuitous" sideswiping remarks, they might have said).

Me, I disliked meanness or unfairness, so in that sense (and many others, like the use of "Mr.," which I always loved, even to the point of deliberate parody, as in Mr. Pop or Mr. Loaf), I fit right into the Times mold. What got me was not the pressure to be positive but, sometimes, especially in the dreaded Howell Raines years, to be negative.

I remember a piece I wrote about Joni Mitchell's CD of orchestrally accompanied versions of some of her finest songs. I hated it: I thought it was pompous and leaden. But an editor came up to me eagerly after he'd read what I turned in and pushed me to expand it and sharpen it. Being negative, in his eyes, was equivalent to being sharp and controversial; it would boost buzz and readership. In other words, go easy on the institutions but hard on the artists.

I am embarrassed to admit that I went along with his suggestion, and the piece ran as a wildly over-played full-page blast against an artist whom I had long admired (with the inevitable caveats). A few months later (why so long, Joni?), Mitchell called me up out of the blue and expressed her outrage. I thought she was way over the top, as well as tactically foolish. But I respected her for making the call, too, and felt even worse that I had gone along with cheap journalism.

Sunny von Bulow's death has triggered various disconnected memories. The night after I heard the news (on the Internet; it was in the papers the next day) I ran into Alexandra Isles, the actress and now acclaimed documentary filmmaker, who had played a key role in the Bulow trials and whom I once knew and liked and whom I hadn't seen for years. That reminded me of my one encounter with Claus von Bulow (whom Jeremy Irons nailed in the film "Reversal of Fortune"; asked how perverse he/Bulow really was, Irons replied, "You have no idea," in a line reading that has become classic Hollywood).

Ten or fifteen years ago I was on the train/bus from Victoria Station to Glyndebourne, and a friend introduced me to von Bulow, with whom I then had a long conversation. (The friend kept calling him Hans, the cuckolded conductor who championed Wagner and gave up Cosima to him, which finally prompted a gentle correction from Claus.)

I found him saturnine but charming in his way. In her ArtsJournal blog, Drama Queen, Wendy Rosenfield has jokingly suggested parallels between von Bulow and Ben Brantley, since von Bulow has been writing theater and other arts reviews in London. His father was a theater critic and playwright, as well.

Anyhow, von Bulow said he wrote his reviews for a Catholic monthly, I think it was. He added without encouragement from me that he enjoyed stressing the kinky sex angles in the plays he saw. I asked him if that posed any problems with the priest who edited the journal.

"Oh, no," he replied, or words to that effect. "He thinks that letting me get away with that proves how progressive Catholicism has become."

Every week New York magazine divides a page into four quarters, filled with snarky squibs of text and bite-sized photos referring to cultural events or persons or trends as chosen by the page's hipper-than-thou editors. The further left you go, the range moves from "brilliant" to "despicable." From top to bottom, it's highbrow to lower brow.

This week, in the lower right corner of the upper left quadrant (meaning tending toward the despicable and pretty close to low from high), is the item: "Journalists pontificating endlessly about the future of journalism."

For "journalists," read "arts journalists," especially in this blog. We tend to navel-gaze, and there is lot to fret about. But excessive self-involvement is not likely to win sympathy or jobs or foundation grants.

Taking advice from the wit and wisdom of this page of New York magazine is a little like planning your future based on a fortune cookie. But we do have an inclination to whine, and the occasional corrective is always salutary. 

The first old saw, as discussed in this fine blog, was whether critics should accept complimentary tickets. When I was in my first job, at the Oakland Tribune in 1969, my first Sunday think piece suggested that the entire practice of accepting freebies, be they tickets or books or LP's, was corrupt, and that the critic's employer should buy all that swag as necessary. The Tribune killed my piece.

Yes, in an ideal moral universe, freebies would be disallowed. But especially in today's tortured economy, get real: if the critic and his/her newspaper/online publication/blog site can get 'em, they'll take 'em.

Sometimes practices become so firmly established that the potential for conflict of interest, or even the dreaded appearance of a conflict of interest, pretty much fades away. At least until some cultural organization, in a swivet because of a negative review, attempts to bar a critic from its sacred precincts. Then the controversy flares up all over again.

My own old saw is blurbs. Not the complaints of critics that arts organizations unfairly rip a phrase from context ("Not in your wildest imagination could 'Turkey Shoot' be considered a great film" becomes... well, you get the idea).

My complaint is with reviewers whose hyperbolic verbiage is regularly deployed in ads to hype product, in particular films. This is not the same as the fly-by-night credits accorded raves from authors and organizations no one has ever heard of, and who may well be interns in the production companies' PR or marketing departments.

No, I am thinking of real critics, and particularly right now of Peter Travers of Rolling Stone. I have never met Travers. He may be a beacon of honesty, an insightful critic and an all-around great fellow. But his raves routinely adorn movies of varying quality, so much so that a reader begins to distrust his imprimatur and to start wondering about his incessant enthusiasm.

Just today we have an ad in the NY Times (and a hundred other papers, no doubt) for "Milk." Now, this is a film (which I haven't yet seen) that has been widely praised. But the ad confines itself to Travers's gush of excitement": "A TOTAL TRIUMPH!" in huge type. Then, in slightly smaller but still biggish type: "Brimming with humor and heart. If there's a better movie around this year, I haven't seen it." Then, in slightly more modest type, worshipful praise for most everyone involved in the film: Sean Penn "gives the performance of the year." Emile Hirsch is "sensational." Josh Brolin is "simply astounding." By this standard James Franco ("warmly funny"), Alison Pill ("excellent") and Diego Luna ("excels") must really tank. And so it goes. Finally, in big type again, "An American Classic!"

Did Travers actually use those exclamation points? If not, he and Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone should sue. But they won't: It's free advertising for them as well as for the gushed-over film du jour.

I'm all for constructive, supportive criticism. Critics should love the art form they review; otherwise it's just a job, and a tiresome one at that. But for his own reputation, the critic has to show some discrimination and, to my taste, rein in both the vitriol and the giddiness. Otherwise they become mere fodder for the quote machine, and Travers has, I'm afraid, become just that.

Since we agreed to talk back and forth outside of comment mode, I'll answer Laura's quibble below here. I meant the pressures to write ever faster on the Internet run counter to the stated intentions of the Slow Journalism movement, and that that tension might have been highlighted on the panel. Yes, I was writing quickly and on the dreaded Internet, but I'm not sure how you can read what I wrote as me saying all Internet journalism is dishonorable.

I'm out in Los Angeles, being a senior fellow in the last week of the three-week USC Annenberg/Getty arts journalism program. Yesterday (my first morning) was a panel on the subject of "slow journalism," a recently coined term emulating the slow food movement.

The panel was assembled by Doug McLennan of this Artsjournal site and Sasha Anawalt, who runs the USC program. Aside from Doug, the panelists were Peter Sellars; Josh Viertel, who runs Slow Food U.S.A.; Naka Nathaniel, who has done Internet journalism for the NY Times and the IHT and who is now in LA because his wife runs the LA Times online operation; and Mister Jalopy, a Los Angeles avatar of gizmos made form recycled materials.

For me, fighting jet lag, the panel was full of good ideas and lively discussion (egomania vs. acceptance of responsibility inherent in a byline) but crippled by incoherence. In particular, as Doug (beating his own drum, but still...) remarked in passing, the subject of the panel was really the Internet, which in terms of journalistic slowness is very much a two-edged sword.

Yes, it allows infinite space, freedom from editorial or corporate control and time to report/bloviate on subjects slighted or ignored by the dreaded MSM (mainstream media, for those of you who still remember the recent presidential campaign).

But very much on the other hand, it puts new pressure on writers to slap their stories out to the public as fast as possible, and forget about serious reporting. As worst, it can mean the wild dissemination of pure rumor. The pressure for speed can come from corporate bosses when a newspaper has encouraged/forced its writers to blog, or from the internally felt competition among unsupervised bloggers.

Either way, it is very much the opposite of the honorable, salutary, quaint or Luddite aspirations of the slow folk.

So the day after the election there was not a newspaper to be found in my neighborhood. Or anywhere in town, it turned out. So I went up to the New York Times on a slightly earlier than usual mail run (no wonder not-for-profits make no profit; they never stop sending out press releases, even to dead people -- my father, who died in 1999, still gets releases sent from San Francisco to my home -- or people who have been retired way more than my two years).

There were no NYT's to be found at the NYT, although I ran into John Geddes, the no. 2 editor in charge of all things involving production and mechanics, and he cheerfully told me they were printing 50,000 more for street sales. I finally did find one on a table, already pawed through but complete, and, to use a delicate term, ripped it off.

When I got down to the street, there was a line of people stretching all the way from Eighth Avenue back towards Seventh, waiting for trucks to arrive. When one did, a load was hurled onto the sidewalk and a guy sold them for upwards of $10 a pop. The scene was shown on television and replicated all over the country.

What this suggests is that in our age of dawning Internet superiority, people still value print, at least for commemorative purposes. First man on the moon, Kennedy shot, their own children born, Obama elected; people want the front pages to frame on their walls. I heard people in the line saying, sure, I could look at it on the Internet, but...

And yet, as a nice coda, an online art journal has completed the circle, making a fabulous-looking, quilt-like grid of more than 200 Nov. 5 front pages from all over the world. As a whole, it's art. But move your cursor to any one little stamp-sized page and it balloons up to legibility. So now you can collect your print page ones online!

Here's the link. But it keeps going dead. If it doesn't work, go to artdaily.org and look/search for obama:

http://artdaily.org/obama2/index.asp

 

 

 

Well, as I sit here in a state of archetypal leftie terror and paranoia, awaiting the election returns, my thoughts naturally turn to presidential arts policies. Obama has one; McCain has none. Several of the planks in Obama's arts platform (McCain has no such platform, either) are good, especially increased support for the NEA amd cultural diplomacy. Others are almost as good: the perhaps obligatory bow to arts education, loosening restrictions on foreign talent coming here, health care and "tax fairness" for artists. Even the New-Deal-nostalgic "artists corps."

Cynicism rears its head: most presidents, including Kennedy and Clinton, turn over arts policy, which usually means ceremonial appearances at White House galas and Kennedy Center awards shows, to the First Lady. And where the money will come for all Obama's initiatives, who knows, if we're truly on the edge of a steep recession. But a lot of this is relatively low cost or inspirational.

Inspiration counts, just like words count (as in Obama's -- and Deval Patrick's -- proper rebuff to Republican complaints that he was all verbal style and no substance). But what would really make for a creative arts renaissance in this country (and this world) would be an upsurge of artistic innovation from below, from artists themselves. If Obama could set a tone for that (McCain surely could and would not, unless it were to encourage revolutionary reaction), THEN we'd maybe have a real artistic revival, also known as the Return of the Sixties.

And since Obama's entire political philosophy involves inspiring revival -- in politics, in the economy, in energy policy -- from the ground up, not the top trickling down, his election would provide the better stimulus for an American arts renaissance. Whether this would in turn trigger a renaissance in American arts journalism, we would have to wait and see...  

A link to my Rockwell Matters blog and an entry on two movies, preceded by some pontifications about film criticism.

A few days ago my wife and I were in Dayton, Ohio, working for Obama, and she told me a story. She met a black woman who told her she was for McCain. Not that some other black people aren't for McCain, too, but Linda asked Why? The answer was that the woman had shaken his hand on a rope line eight years ago and formed (in her mind) a bond.

Which led me to thinking arts-journalistically, of course. Critics are routinely asked to do interviews. We meet artists; we chat them up; sometimes we actually like them. Having met them, they become something more to us than a distant artist performing up there on a stage. We don't have to become their fans, obsessively following their every move, but deep down we may still root for them.

So back to the old argument about how much critics should socially involve themselves with artists and the (musical or whatever) community -- interviews being understood as a preliminary, vestigial stage of social involvement. Insider critics (like Joe Horowitz) argue that critics cut themselves off from the art they're supposed to know and love by denying social contact. Outsider, or"objective," critics contend that an unbiased view of a performance, untainted by personal sympathy, is worth any loss of insider knowledge.

Me, I waffle. I used to be more stictly an outsider, but the exigencies of a professional career plus a mellowing (eroding?) of my stern standards have led me to see both sides of the argument. No one can be purely objective, yet excessive palling around, with artists or terrorists, is not so good, either.

Of course, in arts journalism today, where newspapers are asking their remaining staff to multi-task and freelancers are hustling any way they can, such niceties as a pure critic's avoiding interviews are a quaint reminder of the past. So the next time you're on a ropeline with Osvaldo Golijov, go ahead and press the flesh. He's a very nice guy; I know from personal experience.