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March 20, 2007
TT: Collectors' items
The art world is buzzing about this story from The Stranger, Seattle's alternative newspaper. (CultureGrrl wrote about it here.) It seems that Matthew Kangas, Seattle’s best-known art critic, has a good-sized collection consisting mainly of pieces given to him by local artists—at his request:Last week, nine artists went on record with The Stranger saying that Kangas did ask directly for art or implied he should be given art before or after he wrote reviews of their work. In a phone interview, Kangas denied ever having done so. He does have a collection of art, he said, and artists have given him much of it….
After Kangas's 1995 review of Alice Wheeler's photography show at Vox Populi was published in Art in America, he called her, she said. "It was like, 'Okay, the review's out, when can I come over to pick out some art? We also need to go to lunch and we're going to Palomino and you're buying,'" she said. "I thought it was what I had to do." She gave him two pictures and spent $75 on lunch, she said. "My rent was $285 at the time, so it was a lot of money. I like Matthew; I just think that some of what he does is manipulative and BS."
It is, of course, well known that Clement Greenberg, on whom Kangas appears to have modeled himself, accepted gifts of art from many of the artists about whom he wrote, and that he later sold an unknown number of them to pay his bills. (Seven years after his death, his second wife sold the residue of his collection to the Portland Museum of Art, which reportedly paid $2,000,000 for it.) But I know of no evidence that Greenberg shook down any of the artists in question, or anything remotely like it.
No less interesting is the second half of the piece, which describes the conflict-of-interest policies that Art in America, Sculpture, the New York Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the Seattle Times impose on their culture staffers:
Daily newspapers are far stricter than industry magazines when it comes to conflict-of-interest standards. At the Seattle Times, a portion of the ethics guidelines pertains to collecting but doesn't address it directly: "No staff member may cover, edit, package, or supervise regular coverage of an industry, company, venture, or person in which the staff member, spouse, or domestic partner has any investment, or immediate family members have significant investment, financial or business ties. Such ties pose the appearance of a conflict of interest and may harm the Times and staff member's reputations."…
The written rule at the New York Times includes a similar clause to one in the Seattle Times guidebook, with the added: "An arts writer or editor who owns art of exhibition quality (and thus has a financial stake in the reputation of the artist) may inspire questions about the impartiality of his or her critical judgments or editing decisions. Thus members of the culture staff who collect valuable objects in the visual arts (paintings, photographs, sculpture, crafts, and the like) must annually submit a list of their acquisitions and sales to the associate managing editor for news administration."
New York Times culture editor Sam Sifton said the rule is mostly for writers who come to their beats already owning objects; he said he would be uncomfortable with a critic assembling a collection. He compared the situation to a stock-market writer investing in securities. Gifts are a further problem, he said. The New York Times has a newsroom-wide injunction against gifts over $25 in value.
All this was of great personal interest to me. It's no secret that I collect art, but I only know two artists, neither of whom is represented in my collection, and I would never think of asking either one for a piece of art. The very idea shocks me—which may simply mean that I’m naïve.
It never occurred to me, for instance, that there was anything wrong with my mentioning Milton Avery in a "Sightings" column about art galleries that I published last year in The Wall Street Journal, especially since Avery is (A) dead and (B) an indisputably major artist whose reputation is unlikely to be affected by anything I might happen to write about him. After the column ran, though, one of my editors pointed out that my ownership of an Avery drypoint might be construed as a conflict of interest, and suggested that I henceforth make a point of not writing for the Journal about any artist whose work I own. The Teachout Museum is a small-time affair, monetarily speaking, but I took his point, and since then I’ve been careful to follow his advice.
Needless to say, I don’t write about the visual arts as a working critic, merely as a passionately interested observer of the art scene, the same way I now write about dance. (I used to be a working dance critic, but not any longer.) Theater is different: I’m the drama critic of a national newspaper, and I’m well aware of what it would mean if I were to review a close friend in its pages. On the other hand, I’m not a “theater person” in the common sense of the phrase, and I don’t have any close friends whose work I would ever have occasion to review in the Journal.
Is that a good thing? Not really. As I wrote last year, “A critic who holds himself at arm's length from the artistic community whose activities he covers is a eunuch in the harem.” Nor do I hold myself at arm’s length from the world of music, of which I have been a part my whole life long. If I write well about music, it’s partly because I am a musician, from which it naturally follows that I know other musicians. Not surprisingly, some of them are among my closest friends, and I sometimes write about them—though not as a critic. Reviewing your friends is a good way to lose them. I plug the work of friends on this blog when I like it. Otherwise I stand tactfully mute.
Would I be a better drama critic if I also had friends who were well-known actors, directors, or playwrights? Very possibly, but the fact remains that I don't, a deficiency which at least has the advantage of simplifying my professional relationship with The Wall Street Journal. Since I don’t move in theatrical circles or write profiles of people who do, I doubt I’ll be grappling with that problem any time soon. Should it come up in the future, I’ll do my best to behave appropriately.
All of which reminds me of the First Rule of Criticism, which I shared with my students at Rutgers/Newark back in the days when I was teaching a class in journalistic criticism: Never sleep with anybody you write about. I never have—but, then, I've never been asked.
Posted March 20, 2007 12:00 PM
