This comparison (Unnamed Brioda Reviewer v. Holland) gets at the heart of what art criticism is for. Thank you!

I am wondering, though, if the reviewer's goal is to explain work to a less-educated public. This creates a paternalistic relationship between reader and reviewer that can create exactly the overly jargonated blah-dee-blah you describe above.

What is a reviewer's goal? I would argue that Holland's down-to-earth writing is a function of his desire to share his experience and find meaning in what he experiences. Good criticism is a conversation about a work of art's meaning and relevance to the larger culture.

I have never understood the paranoid fear of blogging on the part of many print journalists. Much of what bloggers do is link to and comment on newspaper articles. If anything, we are actually delaying the death of print journalism rather than hastening it. That being said, we arts bloggers have a few advantages over our print colleagues.

We can set the tone, without worrying that an editor will gut our writing because it is too highbrow or over-opinionated. (God forbid someone should refer to a novel by Thomas Mann in a classical music concert review in a newspaper.) The bloggers I enjoy reading the most are specialists in their fields, who are interesting to read precisely *because* they do not have journalism degrees. They have degrees in the areas that they cover.

I dispute the labels some have applied to bloggers here ("amateurs," "non-professional," and even "the unwashed"), all of which may apply in some cases, only because the opposition of dilettante and professional is absurd in this situation. If we apply the term strictly, many American classical music critics -- the area where I spend most of my time at Ionarts -- would be the dilettantes, people without degrees or experience in music, let alone advanced degrees in musicology. This is particularly pronounced when one compares American critics to their European counterparts.

Let me make clear that I personally do not believe that one has to have a doctoral degree in musicology to write intelligently about music (in fact, in many cases, it is an impediment) any more than a degree in journalism is necessary. If I had to choose between the two, however, I would probably rather read the former than the latter.

Yes, many blogs are specialized and do not have the same breadth of coverage as a newspaper's Arts section (or, more likely, Living or Style section). At Ionarts, we now have three regular critics who cover classical music, and one critic each for art, ballet, and film. After blogging for a year or so, I started to think that the best end of this endeavor would be incorporation into a newspaper or other major media outlet. I still think that would be a great idea, but no one has called yet.