Incremental Arts. Incremental Arts Journalism?

I agree with your main claim about the importance of longer narratives in journalism and, I think, it is the responsibility of arts practitioners to create these narratives not journalists.

Competitive sports, in its very nature, provides the story arc, politicians have teams of strategists, communications experts and media relations experts competing to create the story arc, and just about every other mature industry does this as well.

It is the responsibility of arts practitioners to create the longer narratives and that requires much more than pitching a story and hoping the reporter will go create it. It means creating the story through viral campaigns, mobilizing grass root supporters to talk about it, and programming events that are already a part of a larger narrative. A media person is much more likely to report a story than create one.

It, of course, depends on each market but, in my experience, the institutional model you identify is an accurate portrayal of the arts world: institutions big and small that create one-off events in isolation with little effort to create a larger narrative beyond the ever present siren song of "more funding, please." If this impression is false, it is the job of arts practitioners and our media people to change it.

So, yes the arts aren't being covered like those other guys and, on my view, this is because, for the most part, we aren't giving journalists the stories those others guys are giving them. Absolutely, bigger narratives would help the arts community get covered but it is our job and responsibility to create those narratives -- not the media.

I would argue that arts coverage DOES feed into major narratives, and unfortunately not in a good way. Often when public art is covered by mainstream journalism it contributes to the overarching "look what cr*p they're spending taxpayer money on NOW" narrative, especially popular these days. Sometimes it contributes to the "famous outsider edges out equally-qualified local person" narrative, and sometimes--rarely--it contributes to the "how best should we invest in our community to make it stronger" narrative.

The task for arts journalists is to reframe those narratives in such a way as to create general interest in art, not for its scandal-making qualities, but for its intellectual future. Not an easy task.

This is a really great post, but a problem is that traditional media, particularly newspapers, aren't set up to think broadly about issues, even if media outlets have some cultural analysis that is broader than specifically covering an opening.

In DC, it seems as if Jacqueline Trescott covers the Smithsonian and other museums (NGA, Corcoran, Phillips) as a beat for the Washington Post.

I wouldn't claim that I see the kind of broader viewpoint that you are espousing for.

Here are a couple things I've blogged about, relevant to your entry, but wrt DC issues:

-- on cultural policy in DC, from the standpoint of local cultural heritage assets: http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2007/01/cultural-resources-planning-in-dc-in.html

-- and on narrative/interpretation within the national museums located in DC:

http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2008/11/dancing-with-one-that-brung-ya-and.html

-- and on the focus on institutional delivery of art rather than on production of art, and the dearth of challenging art within DC:

http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2008/08/dc-stodgy-button-downed-or-weird.html

Disclosure: my girlfriend works for the Smithsonian, and worked for Ned Rifkin when his unit release an "external review committee" evaluation of the art units, which the art units opposed vociferously.

It strikes me that with the demise of newspapers - narrative reporting, like what you describe, is less compelling. Blogs typically do this already - instead of simply attributing a quote, an online reporter can link to the original article / video etc. Those threads are followed by the reader who is interested in the larger theme. Editors don't need to formulate "big pictures", the readers can self-direct them.

Unfortunately, the changes that newsrooms are making in cultural reporting is typically to cut the cultural reporting entirely.

You express a consoling idea. Of course, the rub is that long-form journalism takes time--research, leg-work, reflection, writing--and nobody will pay writers to do this, especially at this moment in journalism's history.

Great thoughts, Doug,

Interesting to consider how, as bursts of commentary about the arts get shorter and shorter (feature to article to blog to tweet), we can observe and engage the big arcs or emergent patterns they reveal.

Tags have some promise for this across platforms, I suppose. But more to your point, a really good modern-day journalist or critic will be able to pull the threads from the full range of media, and spin them together in compelling ways.

My mentor at journalism school used to call these big tropes "public narratives," and it could be fascinating to watch news coverage develop over time, each daily item adding to the (often unstated) big story. When you looked at them with this broad view, it was easy to spot the kind of mistaken assumptions or inferences that even the reporters themselves were too close to the event to see. Often the people who understood them best were political operatives like Karl Rove, who could manipulate the press and readers/viewers by playing on these unstated ideas about, say, "big government," or "moral decline" etc. Probably one of the clearest examples now simmering is the immigration debate. In the arts a decade or two ago, it was the NEA/Mapplethorpe etc controversy.

When I taught journalism at the university, this concept proved really useful for students' understanding of media inclinations. Your list of today's arts related public narratives is a good one, and I'd add the question of elitism/populism in arts, the ongoing evolution of multimedia/technology in arts, the perennial question of funding (especially arts education), public art and architecture ... so many others. It would be really useful if the media had arts reporters who viewed their role as more than just reviewers/previewers and more as beat writers who were sensitive to these overarching public narratives.