August 2007 Archives

This week has yielded a number of reports and opinions about the direction of daily newspapering, even a prediction of what the industry will look like in a mere 13 years.

Over at Editor & Publisher, the industry organ, this report shows that financial predictions for the industry were far worse than expected. Fitch Ratings anticipated a bad year for classifieds, but not as bad as it has been, expecially for publically-traded newspapers. The report cited four major chains in particular: Gannet, Tribune, McClatchy and Dow Jones.

July results from publicly traded newspaper companies, in particular, "are obviously cause for concern," Fitch says.

Is anyone really surprised?

Meanwhile, one of the papers owned by McClatchy, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, got a big fuck-you this week when a new web-based publication in the Twin Cities announced that it had hired more than 20 veteran journalists, some of whom had taken buy-outs from the Star-Tribune.

Oh, and two of the 20-plus reporters and editors are Pulitzer Prize winners. One of those is John Camp, aka John Sandford, author of the "Prey" mystery novel series. The name of the publication is MinnPost (minnpost.com). It has about a million dollars in start up money. It plans to launch later this year. By the way, it's a nonprofit. Shareholders need not apply.

A bold step somebody needed to take.

While newspapers have taken a beating since the first of the year, so has literary criticism. Morris Dickstein recounts the book ban, so to speak, in this optimistic blog post over at the National Book Critics Circle blog, called "Critical Mass." The damage includes:

1. Teresa Weaver got the axe as book review editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

2. The Associated Press closed its book review desk

3. The Raleigh News-Observer eliminated the post of full-time book review editor

4. And cutbacks at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and, most dramatic of all, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, which ceased being a stand-alone Sunday section and was folded into the Ideas section

Fortunately, for people who like to read about books, there's this development in New Haven, Conn., where a intrepid bunch of writers is sick of books getting the knife. They've started (and hope by the slimmest of threads) to continue a publication called The New Haven Review of Books. It was started by the former editor of that city's alternative weekly newspaper, Mark Oppenheimer, a contributor to the Huffington Post. He said they were inspired by the decline of newspaper coverage of books, but also a renewed interested in -- wait for it --

Localism.

This model won't replace the big-city, big-time book reviews; we still need them. And unless some angel comes along to fund another issue, this may be the last you hear of the New Haven Review of Books. But we're in an age of renewed attention to localism and regionalism, and book reviews -- like farmers' markets, or even local currencies -- can do their part.

A resurgence of localism and a renewed push for grassroots literary criticism (or arts journalism or fill in the blank with whatever aesthetic, philosophical, intellectual pursuit -- in a public forum -- of your choice) is a kind of analysis-based journalism of the kind recommended by Mitchell Stephens in that terrific piece for the Columbia Journalism Review in January. I keep referring to it, but it's good stuff. He writes:

The extra value our quality news organizations can and must regularly add is analysis: thoughtful, incisive attempts to divine the significance of events -- insights, not just information [my emphasis]. What is required -- if journalism is to move beyond selling cheap, widely available, staler-than-your-muffin news -- is, to choose a not very journalistic-sounding word, wisdom.

It seems almost spooky that we get similar thinking from this piece by Dave Morgan, the chairman of Tacoda, a marketing firm specializing in something called "behavioral targeting." He goes out on a limb to envision what the newspaper industry will look like in 2020, less than 13 years from now. I don't know what "behavioral targeting" is, but Morgan is on the cutting edge. Here's an edited down version of Morgan's prediction.

What does this say for critics and journalists? I've added emphasis to highlight points we've addressed here in Flyover.

• All media will be digital. There may still be some analog components in the supply chains of media companies, but analog will be a very small part of the business. There have been great advances in the development of digital, paper-like materials that are readable and can connect to digital networks; most important, I believe that the eco-consciousness that we are beginning to see is here to stay.

• Consumer attention will continue to fragment. Our news and information products won't be large, comprehensive and "averaged" for mass consumption as they are today in a newspaper*. Consumers will get best-of-breed information services from many different providers.

• There will be many, many different digital media devices. Many of these devices will be portable; all will be networked. And most devices will permit users to communicate and create, not just consume.**

• Media brands will matter -- but old brands will matter less. Consider how fast Yahoo and Google were able to build well-known, trusted brands.

• News and information applications and services will be more important than underlying data and news. Discovering, editing, synthesizing, analyzing news and information and advertising is what will attract and retain consumers.*** Sending someone to a city council meeting for three hours to file a four-paragraph recitation of events will be worthless in 2020.

• Competition will be fierce, particularly in large metro markers. In a world where digital distribution is low to start and cheap to expand, the barriers to entry that have benefited newspapers for many decades won't exist in 2020. The competition in the local news, information and advertising business will be fierce.

• There will be lots of winners. Consumers will be the big winners. They will get more, better, more diverse and much more accurate news, information and advertising than they receive today. Advertisers will also win. They will pay much less to reach their target consumers, with more relevant messages and offers than they can provide through today's analog media channels.

• Newspaper companies are very likely not to be winners. The characteristics of the companies that will win in 2020 are very different than the characteristics of newspaper companies today.

Footnotes:
* Web 2.0: good for the arts, good for journalism
** Adjusting to an active audience
*** Analytic journalism

I'm going to depart from both of the two planned entries that I have in partial draft for today's post.

Instead of talking about weightier issues, I'm going to tell you about a party I went to last night. And if you'll bear with me, you'll see that it's not totally off subject for Flyover as the party had to do with both art and journalism.

The soiree took place at the historic Gem Theatre in downtown Detroit, in a beautiful section of the city near the new field for the Lions. More than 200 people packed into the cabaret-seating style theater enjoying a cocktail reception, a show, and then a dessert reception.

The show was the Oscar Wilde Award Night, sponsored and produced by a Detroit weekly, Between the Lines, to recognize excellence in local professional theater. The newspaper puts on an excellent party and representatives from the theater community from Detroit, Ann Arbor, Jackson, and Lansing turn out to celebrate.

The three reviewers from the newspaper reviewed 96 productions from 31 different professional companies. When announcing the nominations, Don Calamia, staff arts critic wrote:

For despite the second worst economy in the nation that seemingly kept a noticeable number of paying customers out of the seats and a governor who reneged on several million dollars of previously promised grant money, not one theater that Curtain Calls reviewed over the past few seasons shut its doors for financial reasons - despite numerous rumors to the contrary.

Instead, the Williamston Theatre set up shop in a sleepy little town near Lansing, and Who Wants Cake? snuck into Fabulous Ferndale with The Ringwald, a renovated home all its own. And StarBright Presents Dinner Theatre doubled its venues, one in southern Oakland County and another in northern Macomb County.

Call them crazy - and you wouldn't be the first - but these brave souls reflect the attitude of ALL Michigan thespians who believe the mitten state is a great place to live, work and raise a family - despite some major obstacles. So they stay and struggle - oftentimes for little money and even less recognition.

The staff at this newspaper understand their community and the environment it works in. More than one person expressed genuine surprise at receiving an award because, as they said, they didn't know anyone knew them. There was an amazement and gratitude that someone saw them and recognized their work.

For any in the journalism world who might wonder whether the arts community has noticed the cutback in arts coverage, let me share a moment with you. The master of ceremonies asked the newspaper's publishers to come to the stage to give out the publisher's award of excellence. Before the two women arrived at the lectern, the audience was on its feet, giving them a standing ovation. They recognized the commitment this newspaper has made to its art coverage and were eager to express their appreciation for it.

Earlier in the evening when I was talking to those same publishers about how thorough their arts coverage is, one of them said, "We're gay, we have to cover theater." A nearby actor came back with, "No, you don't have to, that's why it's great that you do."

Between the Lines is a newspaper that recognizes how vibrant the theater community is and how much coverage matters. Earlier this year, Calamia went to the publishers and said, "We need to do more." This from the critic who reviewed more than 70 shows, outstripping the two Detroit dailies and every other newspaper in that town. The publishers agreed with him. So they're soon launching Encore Michigan, a Website that will contain daily updates with new reviews every Monday morning.

Between the Lines is a shining beacon lighting the way to what is possible for newspapers to do. They demonstrate how to be part of the community while providing outstanding arts coverage. They understand their role in the ecosystem. While the artists may not always like what they say, they're grateful that someone is out there talking about their art, letting them know that they were heard, and telling others what is happening.

Howdy folks, long time since I chimed in here. It's been a crazy month in and out of Montana for me. The first week of the month found me heading off to a family reunion in Kentucky, where I indulged in old ham and fried catfish, caught some bluegill, and generally lazed around by a lake. I returned to discover my adopted state on fire. Friends were evacuated from their homes, Missoula was smothered in a dense pillow of smoke, my four-month old baby was grumpy from breathing the lousy air, and half my co-workers were on vacation, leaving me with double my normal workload. Crazy times.

Fortunately, some things didn't fall apart in my absence, notably Flyover, which has seemed on fire in its own way, what with spirited discussions of generational issues and interesting analysis of intellectual hoity-toityness and so on. I feel almost intimidated to wade back in.

So I thought I'd share a personal experience that I thought some here might appreciate. A couple of weeks ago, at a neighborhood barbecue, I had one of those surprising conversations that only happen once in awhile -- where out of the blue, in an unexpected place, you bond with someone over an insight.

It began with my neighbor complaining about what he perceived as a dearth of great political music today. Gone are the days, he argued, when bands like U2 and the Beatles and Neil Young (his personal favorite) unleashed battle cries for the politically motivated and musically engaged youth, cries that rallied masses of people out of complacency and into political action.

I pointed out that such music is still being made, by well-known bands ranging from Michael Franti & Spearhead to John Mellencamp to Eminem.

"But it just doesn't seem like that music is really making a difference," he complained. "It's not what everybody is listening to."

"But," I pointed out, "it's only really been during the 20th century that 'everybody' could listen to one particular song and use it as a form of cultural currency. That was as much a result of the concentration of media power and the entertainment industry as it was about the importance of that music. What you're seeing is just a return to the natural state of culture, where not everybody listens to the same thing because tastes are increasingly localized and dispersed. The only difference is that, today, 'local' means something different."

Our conversation veered farther afield, but I will stop there because I'm curious: Am I the only person who believes that we'll never see another mass cultural phenomenon like the Beatles or the Stones? In a world where music by my band is theoretically as easy to access as music by 50 Cent or the greatest recording ever of Mahler's Second Symphony, and where the influence and presumed authority of a handful of critics at the New York Times and Rolling Stone is being undermined by tens of thousands of bloggers, isn't it now a given that tribalism and taste dispersion is the new cultural paradigm?

And if so, how should that affect what we do as journalists and critics?

The following exchange is with Stephen Durbin, a sharp-eyed nature photographer whose work, to my unsophisticated eye, is in the Ansel Adams vein (that right, Stephen?). Anyway, he lives in Bozeman, Mont. We started this give-and-take about my post Monday, which argued that literary and aesthetic intellectuals are being replaced by scientists as public intellectuals and that perhaps the reason for that is our inability to argue on solid ground, i.e., we're for the most part trapped in, as my historian friend called it, "a whirlpool of relativist goo." The bottom-line for Stephen that agreeing on solid principles would be fine, but it's not necessary. What matters is the power of the arguments we make.

Stephen Durbin, Aug. 27, 2007
One thing that scientists learn early on is how slippery the notion of "truth" is. Look no further than the current debate on Edge (an excellent citation on your part) regarding global warming. They also learn that the duality "objective truth" vs. "one [truth] being just as 'good' as the other" is a false one; we must look at the arguments. So I'll subscribe to your points 1, 2, and 4, but please don't shoot yourself in the foot by harping on 3. That's just asking for another brand of orthodoxy like the one Gary rightly complains of.

Stoehr, Aug. 27, 2007
I think you might misunderstand what I mean by "objective truth," Steve, or perhaps I haven't made myself very clear. You're right in that global warming is a topic of debate and the "truth" of the issue will be fleshed out according to the quality, character and power of the arguments.

I'm not talking about controversy, however; I'm talking about external reality, like gravity, as Sokal said in his piece for Lingua Franca, explaining why he submitted a parody to Social Text. His complaint was that the editors of that journal did not question his assertion that gravity was a social contruction. How can gravity be a social construction? Yet the editors swallowed it whole. And how can gravity, or our concept of gravity, possibly have political implications? It's gravity for Chissake!

I entered graduate school only a couple of years after the so-called Sokal Affair. I was told Sokal didn't prove anything about lax intellectual rigor among postmodern theorists. Instead, I was told he actually proved the postmodernists right.

The "orthodoxy" you say I'm asking for is the kind that uses some common sense, but the orthodoxy of postmodernism -- and any other school of thought, for that matter, that flies in the face of the completely obvious -- can make the argument -- a logical and erroneous argument -- that the world is flat.

The "orthodoxy" I'm advocating is one that's basic and fundamental: Let's agree on what external reality is (i.e., that gravity is a force with established scientific causes), let's get away from the relative, subjective kind of thinking that's paralyzed the intellectual left from taking action for so long, as Gary P. notes above, and let's engage the public again about things that matter. --J.S.

Stephen Durbin, Aug. 28, 2007
If you want to see a truly "religious" argument, try asking some physicists what exactly gravity is (don't even think of asking why there is gravity). I agree there are things that are reasonable for us all to accept about gravity, but I believe that: 1) even the question of which things is very hard to understand for a non-physicist; 2) even if we all agreed, that wouldn't get us very far towards engaging with the public about things that matter. The problem is not that we don't all agree on the same version of "external reality," but that some apparently fly to the opposite extreme that all positions are equal (or think their audience does). I don't believe in either extreme, but in the power of argument. By all means, let someone argue that the world is flat. If we can't counter that with a more convincing argument, then we're also out of touch -- or lack courage. I think you're right that there is sometimes a reluctance to make those arguments we believe in for fear of offending. That may not always be wrong, but it can certainly go too far.

The AP reports today that a new web-based newspaper run by a non-profit organization has enlisted more than 20 veteran reporters in the Minnesota area who had taken buy-outs from one of the main dailies, The Star-Tribune. Two of the writers are Pulitzer Prize winners. The "newspaper" will launch later this year on Minnpost.com.

Once again, innovation springs forth from the American Outback. And the one thing I like most is that the publication will specialize in news and insight articles, a sign that the website is going in the direction suggested by Mitchell Stephens in the Columbia Journalism Review earlier this year in a piece advocating something he calls "analytic journalism."

As Stephens writes:

The extra value our quality news organizations can and must regularly add is analysis: thoughtful, incisive attempts to divine the significance of events -- insights, not just information. What is required -- if journalism is to move beyond selling cheap, widely available, staler-than-your-muffin news -- is, to choose a not very journalistic-sounding word, wisdom.

Here's more historical precedent: In the days when dailies monopolized breaking news, slower journals -- weeklies like The Nation, The New Republic, Time -- stepped back from breaking news and sold smart analysis. Now it is the dailies, and even the evening news shows, that are slow. Now it is time for them to take that step back.

Elsewhere, Stephens writes of an American newspaper committed to deploying this strategy: The Times Herald-Record, in Middletown, N.Y.

Stephens continues:

No one is suggesting that reporters pontificate, spout, hazard a guess, or "tell" when it is indeed 'too soon to tell.' No one is suggesting that they indulge in unsupported, shoot-from-the-hip tirades.

"It's not like talk radio," explains one of the champions of analytic journalism, Mike Levine, the former executive editor of the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, New York. Levine died earlier this year. "But it's not traditional American journalism either."

Update: This post seems to be getting a lot of clicks thanks to being linked to Minnpost.com. So I thought I should take advantage of the attention to point out that innovations of the kind taking shape in Minnesota may be one of the trends we'll see in the coming years in newspapers.

I don't mean, however, that newspapers will go digital (I think that's inevitable, at least in part) or that they will be better run as non-profits (I think this is debatable, to be determined). What I mean is that innovation won't come from the coasts where Big Media is so big and so cumbersome and so lumbering as to be unable to adapt nimbly to change.

That means innovation will come from the Land We Love here in Flyover -- the cities and towns between the coasts, between the megalopolises of New York and Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. This is where newspapers are smaller and nimbler.

Also, the stakes are much higher, because the status quo is much more fiercely protected in small towns. The problem for Flyover newspapers is maintaining the status quo, in my view, won't keep readers. MinnPost is just one example of smart people coming together who see something is wrong in their world and who want to change it for the better.

They can't do it through traditional means, because the traditional means, in the case of MinnPost's new newsroom staff, asked some of the more than 20 veteran journalists -- including two Pulitzer winners -- to bow out gracefully. Thanks for your time, here's your gold watch and here's your buy-out from the Star Tribune and the Saint Paul Pioneer Press. See ya.

There's still a lot of important work to be done and Joel Kramer, editor on MinnPost, knows it and has the acumen to persuade others of the need for tough, fair and probing journalism. That's how he raised raised more than $1 million in startup funds from four local families who clearly believe in the cause. And that's how he persuaded top talent to lend a hand.

My feeling is that this trend will continue for another reason.

That reason is brain drain.

As the industry continues to cut jobs, resources and transform into newsrooms antagonistic to creative, determined and intellegent journalists (I'm thinking of the recent comments by a Wall Street Journal reporter in reaction to Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the paper; he said he and others wouldn't stay at a WSJ-cum-Fox News), people, the best and brightest, will leave.

Where will they go? People will settle into other lives and careers no doubt. They'll head for foundations, univeresities and nonprofits. What's likely is that there will be an opportunity here for someone with resources, vision and the ability to lead, organize and motivate.

MinnPost is doing that. So is the New Haven Review of Books and the New Haven Independent, projects started by people sick of the way news and literary heritage are being covered by mainstream media. Neither claims to be a replacement for mainstream journalism, but both should be watched and learned from, because they are a sign of what's happening.

Part of what's happening is that people are simply turning away from Big Media. I don't think newspapers will go the way of the CD and suffer from the perception of being nearly without value. But people are turning away and have been turning away for about 20 years.

That's why there are so many "alternative" weeklies. Even though many are now owned by a national company (New Times), they are still a viable alternative to a city's dominant daily. And they viable, even vital, because of what they have always done: followed the course explained by Mitchell Stephens in the CJR by practicing interpretive or analytic journalism.

And let's not forget about the blogs. As Lisa Harris notes in the comment below, that's where a lot of the future is going to be, recapturing the spirit of a proud American tradition.

I'm going to attempt another of those free-wheeling posts in which I try to make some connections among articles, ideas and writers I've been reading lately. What I hope to accomplish is the beginning of a proposal, a modest call for attention, to establish a new movement for intellectuals, those who think and feel something is not right in world of art, literature and creativity.

A menu of possible assertions:
1. Intellectuals need to talk less with each other and more to everyone else
2. Scientists have taken the traditional place of the public intellectual
3. Intellectuals need to re-establish the self-evident reality of objective truth
4. As newspapers recede, and the traditional hubs of intellectual activity recede with them, a new grassroots movement of intellectuals is needed to take its place.

Act 1: Theoretical bullshit
I'll start with something that I've returned to often (here and here and here, for instance): the disconcerting intellectual phenomenon that asserts that there is no such thing as objective reality, that epistemology is subjective, that facts are conditional.

I suppose I keep writing about it because without an fundamental agreement about what truth is -- and for that matter, what constitutes deception, equivocation, obfuscation, bullshit and outright lies -- how can we as critics, as mere human beings, accomplish much that is constructive, meaningful and significant?

Please don't get me wrong. I lean left, not right. I'm not trying to defend the high walls of Western Civilization. In fact, I argue that intellectuals need to re-establish the self-evident reality of objective truth as someone once ensconced in the Ivory Tower.

During my time at the University of Cincinnati, I became indoctrinated by literary critical theory. I came to believe in the postmodern condition of American culture. I believed in my ability to "read" anything like a "text," even non-semantic things like fashion, architecture and medical procedures. I suspected Enlightenment ideals like Reason and Truth were vestiges of imperial European colonization. Every subject -- whether porn, pulp fiction, romance novels, comic books -- all boiled down cynically to struggles for political and social power.

While I am grateful for postmodernism as a strategy for dismantling, or deconstructing, formerly entrenched ways of thinking, it's no humanist philosophy. There's little concern for people in it; there's little concern for morality in it. While postmodernist readings of, say, advertisements for Marlboro cigarettes (which I smoked) made "logical" sense, I felt that at its heart, postmodernism was a game of rhetoric, an argument over words and their struggle for meaning.

I left class many, many times feeling a kind of existential disorientation, a kind of out-of-body experience caught between a world constructed by language and a language that's always indeterminate. Hence, the world was indeterminate, like an illusion. If the world is indeterminate, possessing no ontological center independent of human consciousness, authoritative truth matters very little. Instead of one truth, there were many truths, with one being just as "good" as the other.

This kind of thinking is not exclusive to universities, or to people interested in and sensitive to intellectual inquiry. This postmodern relativism has trickled down to popular culture as well. Consider the book "Thank You For Smoking," Christopher Buckley's brilliant 1995 parody of Big Tobacco's downfall. The main character, Nick Naylor, is a master of postmodern relativism. No matter how much he was guilty of the sins of spin, by the judgment-free rules of postmodernism (it's a descriptive strategy, not proscriptive), his truth is as valid as any other, even if it's destructive bullshit.

And even if this kind of thinking is becoming passé in academe, which it is, it's influence lingers beyond the hallowed halls. Consider this response to our dearly departed Molly Ivins, who had offered one last cautionary tale about letting the amateur efforts of bloggers be confused with the professional, gritty and pain-in-the-ass tenacity of beat reporters. This reader was responding to Ivins' suggestion that bloggers try their hand at reporting a highway accident, just to see how difficult, challenging and rewarding determining the truth can be.

"If there is no objective truth, but only subjective truth (hence your five-car pile-up analogy) -- then what difference does it make if someone was a reporter or not? I am able to state subjective truth at a moment's notice -- it's always true for me!"

Act 2: The sins of our intellectuals
I don't think that it's overstating the case when I say that this kind of thinking is the result of academics and other intellectuals abandoning objective truth. And this attitude doesn't stop with fiction and the cranky comments of a Molly Ivins fan.

Harry G. Frankfurt, the moral philosopher formerly at Princeton, said the attitude is ubiquitous among a great many writers, artists and intellectuals in his 2005 treatise titled "On Truth," a follow-up to his bestselling book, "On Bullshit." In it, he said that "we live in a time when, strange to say, many quite cultivated individuals consider truth to be unworthy of any particular respect. ... this attitude -- or, indeed, a more extreme version of it -- has become disturbingly widespread even within what might naively have been thought to be a more reliable class of people."

He continued:

"Numerous unabashed skeptics and cynics about the importance of truth ... have been found among best-selling and prize-winning authors, among writers for leading newspapers, and among hitherto respected historians, biographers, memoirists, theorists of literature, novelists -- and even among philosophers ...

And:

"These shameless antagonists of common sense -- members of a certain emblematic subgroup call themselves 'postmodernists' -- rebelliously and self-righteously deny that truth has any genuinely objective reality at all. They therefore go on to deny that truth is worthy of any obligatory deference or respect. ... the postmodernists' view is that in the end the assignment of those entitlements is just up for grabs. It is simply a matter, as they say, of how you look at it."

In other words, it seems the intellectuals have failed us.

How can we talk about issues, debate points of view, engage in any kind of public conversation if there is no agreement on reality independent of human whim, desire, interest, folly, fear and ignorance? The intellectuals are suppose to talk about our country's important issues. Instead, for the past 30 years, they've turned inward, addressed themselves, left the pulpit to the pundits and undermined our ability to talk coherently, objectively and constructively about the things that matter most.

The failure of the intellectuals, some say, has lead to America's cultural and political decline. Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, noted in a widely read speech to graduates at Stanford University in June that such decline has occurred even as our economy has flourished and renewed itself since the '60s.

" ... surely artists and intellectuals are partly to blame. Most American artists, intellectuals, and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture."

Gioia continued:

"This mutual estrangement has had enormous cultural, social, and political consequences. America needs its artists and intellectuals, and they need to reestablish their rightful place in the general culture. If we could reopen the conversation between our best minds and the broader public, the results would not only transform society but also artistic and intellectual life."

In 1963, the novelist and chemist C.P. Snow wrote a book that provided a vision of just the kind of intellectual transformation that Gioia talks about. It was called "The Two Cultures: A Second Look," a follow-up to his 1959 book "The Two Cultures." In the first book, Snow talked about the division between literary intellectuals and scientists, how each didn't understand the other. In the second book, he envisioned a middle way, a "third culture" that was a consensus in which intellectuals talked with scientists, scientists to intellectuals, feeding the expertise and creativity of each other.

But that never happened.

Act 3: Being replaced by scientists
"The traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost."

Those are the words of John Brockman, author, impresario and book agent for Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, writing on his website, Edge. Note such words as "reactionary," "nonempirical," "the real world gets lost."

In 1996, Alan Sokal did something that illustrated just how far the real world had gotten lost in the hyper-jargon of literary theory. A physicist at New York University, Sokal submitted a paper to Social Text, an academic journal devoted to the discussion of postmodern literary theory. In it, he argued that quantum gravity is a social construction with profound political implications.

In other words, it was utter nonsense. I'm not really sure I've paraphrased the paper well. But it doesn't matter, because the point is that Social Context thought he was serious, lending credence to suspicions that such things as honesty and truth don't matter. As Sokal wrote in an article in Lingua Franca explaining his "experiment":

In the first paragraph I deride "the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook": that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in "eternal"' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the "objective'" procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

Why did Sokal do this? To make a point:

... What concerns me is the proliferation, not just of nonsense and sloppy thinking per se, but of a particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective realities, or (when challenged) admits their existence but downplays their practical relevance. At its best, a journal like Social Text raises important questions that no scientist should ignore -- questions, for example, about how corporate and government funding influence scientific work. Unfortunately, epistemic relativism does little to further the discussion of these matters.

In short, my concern over the spread of subjectivist thinking is both intellectual and political. Intellectually, the problem with such doctrines is that they are false (when not simply meaningless). There is a real world; its properties are not merely social constructions; facts and evidence do matter. What sane person would contend otherwise? And yet, much contemporary academic theorizing consists precisely of attempts to blur these obvious truths -- the utter absurdity of it all being concealed through obscure and pretentious language.

Social Text's acceptance of my article exemplifies the intellectual arrogance of Theory -- meaning postmodernist literary theory -- carried to its logical extreme. No wonder they didn't bother to consult a physicist. If all is discourse and "text,'' then knowledge of the real world is superfluous; even physics becomes just another branch of Cultural Studies. If, moreover, all is rhetoric and "language games,'" then internal logical consistency is superfluous too: a patina of theoretical sophistication serves equally well. Incomprehensibility becomes a virtue; allusions, metaphors and puns substitute for evidence and logic. My own article is, if anything, an extremely modest example of this well-established genre.

Postmodernism had already been under attack by right-wing jeremiahs like Alan Bloom in "The Closing of the American Mind." What Sokal's experiment showed, however, was that postmodernism is not just a tool for exposing the power structures of the status quo, to be naturally attacked by defenders of that power, but also, at its core, a poor and perhaps even harmful foundation for intellectual inquiry.

While the editors of Social Context, including the luminous scholar Andrew Ross, author of the near-impenetrable tome, "No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture," were busy accepting a hoax as serious scholarship, John Brockman was getting to work communicating with real people about things that really matter.

According to this piece in the London Guardian titled "The new age of ignorance," Brockman has done more than anyone to break down C.P. Snow's divide. But instead of encouraging literary intellectuals to communicate with scientists and then in turn communicate what they find to an engaged, educated reading public, Brockman has devised a "Third Culture" that doesn't need any help thanks.

"'The Third Culture' consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are," he writes on his website, Edge.

He continued:

The role of the intellectual includes communicating. Intellectuals are not just people who know things but people who shape the thoughts of their generation. An intellectual is a synthesizer, a publicist, a communicator. In his 1987 book "The Last Intellectuals," the cultural historian Russell Jacoby bemoaned the passing of a generation of public thinkers and their replacement by bloodless academicians. He was right, but also wrong. The third-culture thinkers are the new public intellectuals.

In short, the scientists don't need the intellectuals anymore.

They're doing it themselves.

The Guardian article also notes that Ian McEwan is one of the few novelists to contribute to the Edge's ongoing debates and that he suggests the project is not so far removed from the "old Enlightenment dream of a unified body of knowledge, when biologists and economists draw on each other's concepts and molecular biologists stray into the poorly defended territory of chemists and physicists."

Why can't literary and aesthetic intellectuals talk like this anymore?

Act 4: The new intellectuals
Brockman, via the Edge and the Edge Reality Club, a kind of scientist's salon, is doing wonders for advancing the national conversation about science and scientific thinking. There are more magazines devoted science than ever more, more hunger for science and more books about science, even some that advance atheism.

But what about the literary and aesthetic intellectuals? What about them? They are around, but their influence seems to be shrinking even more drastically thanks to shrinking exposure given to them by Big Media, especially newspapers.

Book sections have traditionally been the forum for such conversations and we all know where these are going: newspapers in LA, Chicago, Minneapolis, Raleigh and Atlanta have all either sacked their books editors, reduced their book pages, consolidated them or even moved them from their historical place on Sundays.

Newspapers, in short, are not going to cut it. So what to do?

Perhaps an answer can be found in a new grassroots publication in Connecticut. Called the New Haven Review of Books, the publication is the result of numerous writers in that city who believe someone has to pick up where the newspapers have left off.

As Mark Oppenheimer, a former editor of the New Haven Advocate and author of "Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture," writes, these are times that require innovative thinking by innovative people who live just about everywhere, not just in LA and New York.

In an age of shrinking book-review holes in newspapers, we're going to have to find new ways to get the word out about great books. Some of those ways will be local, and small in scale. We may never publish another issue of the New Haven Review (our motto is "Published Annually at Most"), but by just publishing once, we've made a statement in support of literary culture. Wouldn't it be cool if other small- and medium-sized towns -- Austin, Des Moines, Albany, etc. -- decided they wanted local book reviews, too? [italics mine] Maybe such reviews would feature local writers doing the reviewing, the way ours does, or maybe they would feature reviews of books by local authors. Either way, they would be reminders that major urban publications do not have to be the sole instruments for book reviewing.

And that leads us to the second statement that even one issue of a small, local book review makes: there are writers everywhere. Just here in New Haven and the surrounding towns we managed to round up Alice Mattison, Bruce Shapiro, Debby Applegate, Deirdre Bair, Jim Sleeper, Amy Bloom, and a couple dozen other greats. Many of us have never even met one another. We don't have a literary "scene" in this modest city; there is no cocktail-party circuit. But there are writers.

This model won't replace the big-city, big-time book reviews; we still need them. And unless some angel comes along to fund another issue, this may be the last you hear of the New Haven Review of Books. But we're in an age of renewed attention to localism and regionalism, and book reviews -- like farmers' markets, or even local currencies -- can do their part.

Localism and regionalism: Where to find the new literary and aesthetic intellectuals.

Update: I wanted to add quickly a short list of websites of writers and thinkers and people who care about life beyond themselves happening around the blogosphere. Blogging, like the New Haven Review of Books, is an obvious source of a new intellectual rising up. Some of those include:

Crooked Timber
Quick Study
Culture Wars (in the UK)
Spiked (in the UK)
TPFCafe

Here's an item that's near and dear to our hearts here in Flyoverland.

Because newspapers are largely owned by national conglomerates who fail to give communities what they really need, and because these same newspapers are gutting their news staffs and moreover trashing their coverage of books, literary culture and intellectual heritage, we now have this: a scrappy book review from Small Town USA.

Called the New Haven Review of Books, the thinking of Mark Oppenheimer, a contributor to the Huffington Post, is that if we can't get what we want from the dominant newspapers, we do it ourselves. Also, New Haven happens to be home to a stable of terrific writers. Oppenheimer asked them to write reviews, essay and reflections free of charge just to make some points.

One of those points is this: That there are smart, literate and savvy people living everywhere in this country, not just in the major urban centers, and if we can just get them together, ask them what they really believe in and find some kind of square-peg-in-round-hole consensus, brilliant things can happen.

In his own words:

We may never publish another issue of the New Haven Review (our motto is "Published Annually at Most"), but by just publishing once, we've made a statement in support of literary culture. Wouldn't it be cool if other small- and medium-sized towns -- Austin, Des Moines, Albany, etc. -- decided they wanted local book reviews, too? Maybe such reviews would feature local writers doing the reviewing, the way ours does, or maybe they would feature reviews of books by local authors. Either way, they would be reminders that major urban publications do not have to be the sole instruments for book reviewing.

Here's to Oppenheimer and his cohort. May the Bard smile upon you.

In a mood of complete impulsiveness, we've decided to offer a question of the week.

Who knows where this will go if it goes anywhere. No doubt it will die on the digital page. Nevertheless, to honor those intepid literary and aesthetic pioneers before us, we offer this question while keeping in mind we'll never get answers to pressing questions unless we ask.

So here it is, our question of the week. The floor is wide open.

What accounts for the minimal role of value-judgments in contemporary reviews?

Discuss amongst yourselves . . .

Update: Glenn Weiss, of Aesthetic Grounds, asks that we clarify what we mean by "value-judgments." It's a slippery term indeed. But here we simply mean a critic's reluctance to apply or even avoidance in applying his or her judgment to the art in question.

But then again, we here in Flyoverberg also want the question to be as open to interpretation as possible. So perhaps we need to decide what "value-judgments" are too and how to apply them and in which circumstances and for what purpose. A conversation about coming to a consensus might be healthy, too.

Your thoughts?

Update No. 2: Glenn Weiss adds his two cents at Aesthetic Grounds. Bottomline? The question about values is a question of identifying and establishing values. Read more here . . .

I encourage our best and brightest to join or to form different groups around values. How else can we have a diversity of human experience with the coming global end to traditional geographic diversity? If we don't form more groups, then we may be left only with economic diversity.

Update No. 3: Late Sunday night, book/daddy came from the shadows to offer this tidbit in response to our Question of the Week. Check out his response in our comments section, based on Gail Pool's book, "Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America."

The flaw logic of the relativist approach to art criticism? . . .

On John Carey's 2006 book, "What Good Are the Arts?"

Carey has a keen nose for elitism of any kind and delights in exposing what he regards as fraudulence in the art world. This includes, naturally enough, excesses and absurdities of the avant garde, such as the Italian artist Piero Manzoni, who produced as works of art labeled tins of his own excrement ...

By concentrating on such stunts, Carey shows little desire to produce a balanced historical account of modernism. He traces our current bad, elitist attitudes back to Kant, who, he argues, thought of beauty as a mysterious supersensible property of art works. Kant believed that standards of beauty were "absolute and universal." For Carey, Kant's aesthetics is a "farrago of superstition and unsubstantiated assertion," [emphasis added] and he cannot understand why anybody ever believed any of it.

What's worse, Kant infected western thought with the intellectual disease of imagining that works of art are somehow "sacred" objects set off from the rest of ordinary experience. Carey's account of Kant strikes me as embarrassingly partial and confused, but I doubt if Carey cares: for him, Kant is just another way to denounce the preciousness endemic in the art world.

Ruskin is dismissed for treating art as religion and a higher moral realm. "Taste," Ruskin declared, "is not only a part and an index of morality -- it is the ONLY morality." [italics mine]. Carey has little trouble demolishing this sentiment, though I wish he had found more original examples than Hitler's tastes in opera and the fact that Auschwitz guards could listen to classical music at night and go back to killing people by day.

All of the problems Carey discovers with art and its uses lead him to a surprisingly empty definition when he finally gets to it: "My answer to the question, 'What is a work of art?' is 'A work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art for only that one person'." [mine] This aesthetic solipsism may be one way to respond to the snobbery of the likes Kenneth Clark, but it does not do much to advance Carey's argument. After all, if art is whatever you say it is, then the Tate can hardly be faulted for buying Manzoni's feces.

From Denis Dutton's review for the Press in New Zealand in 2006

The terrible consequences of the short-sighted management of daily newspapers . . .

Through this kind of management, they've told their employees they don't care about them, they've told their readers they don't care about them, and they've sold out their duty to serve as the Fourth Estate for a quick buck. But even more than that, these CEOs have justified it all by claiming it's their fiduciary duty to stockholders that's made them do it. I don't agree. To defend themselves under the guise of protecting the stockholders makes no sense. If people bought in at $50 per share and the changed economic realities mean that shares are worth only $40 apiece, squeezing out short-term profits to artificially raise the stock price only means that people are going to get screwed if they don't sell their stock in time. Is it a CEO's responsibility to help his current boss (read: shareholders) swindle his future boss (read: shareholders) by stripping all the future value out of a company? I don't think so, and I think what's happened is morally reprehensible.

From "Greedy Vultures: Why corporate management of daily newspapers spells disaster for the news business, community debate and our way of government" by Jeff vonKaenel, published in the Sacramento News & Review in December 2006.

I'm very glad that Bridgette and Jennifer have continued talking about some of the differences between generations. It's not a conversation that you hear enough about, especially in media dominated by the sensibilities, interests, fears and anxieties of the Baby Boomer Generation, those born between 1946 and 1964.

There has been an off-blog conversation going on that's concerned about sparking a "generational flame war," as one of us called it. But we think there is merit in discussing the differences between boomers and those of us in Gen X and Gen Y (all four of us in Flyover are in Gen X, though I might be on the cusp; I'm 33).

The first thing I'd like to point out is this: As the boomers get grayer, there's a gradual but ever-hastening uptick in what I'll call the "rhetoric of declension." That is to say, the ubiquitous talk that aims to persuade and, oddly, to reassure the participants of the conversation that the world, indeed, is going straight to hell.

My parents started me on that tone, as evangelical Christians who believed the emergence of a beastly Antichrist would be any day now and that the Son of God would then return to take back with him to heaven the twice-born and Lord-we-hope-so everlasting souls of the Saved.

Then there's everybody else saying: Moral values are in decline, education is in decline, the government is in decline, the arts are definitely in decline. I'd hear this from parents and family and teachers and professors and parents of my friends.

It's like some grand paradigmatic narrative that all the adults in my adolescent life bought into. And the benchmarks of this teleological tale -- the story and its characters are, after all, slouching toward one inexorable outcome -- came when JFK and Bobby and George Wallace and the Gipper got shot.

This rhetoric of declension is everywhere, and it's getting more intense as boomers grow old, retire to the Sun Belt (which is here on the Georgia coast, by the way) and begin to wax nostalgic for the good old days when things weren't so hectic and people were just plain nice.

If it's growing more intense in everyday life, the rhetoric is virtually screaming when it comes to the arts, where it is especially pernicious. George Cotkin, in an insightful piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, provides an excellent example of how deep it goes by characterizing the state of cultural criticism from the view point of those who thinks it's going down the tubes.

The state of cultural criticism today, in the view of many, is debilitated, perhaps even moribund. For [Sven] Birkerts, Alvin Kiernan, Russell Jacoby, and others, there once existed a lively, deep, public, and engaged cultural criticism. Great critics -- Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, Clement Greenberg, Alfred Kazin, and Dwight Macdonald -- roamed the roadways of criticism, stopping to dispense sage or impassioned judgments and to uphold standards. What happened?

According to this line of thought, our present generation of cultural critics, arriving after the assault of postmodernism and the increasingly widespread commercialization of culture, has been cast adrift, without any firm basis for judgments. Publications and institutions to support serious criticism, in this view, either no longer exist or are few in number.

Critics today, it is also claimed, are too cozy behind the ivied walls of academe, content to employ a prose style that is decipherable only to a handful of the cognoscenti. The deadly dive of university critics into the shallow depths of popular culture, moreover, reveals the unwillingness of these critics to uphold standards. Even if the reasons offered are contradictory, these Jeremiahs huddle around their sad conclusion that serious cultural criticism has fallen into a morass of petty bickering and bloated reputations.

Cotkin goes on to say that this is a revisionist perspective of cultural history and that there was no Shangri-La of Literary Criticism, that there was in-fighting, vanity and narcissism even among the ranks of High Modernists perched atop the Ivory Tower.

Cotkin was inspired by an essay by Sven Birkerts, a well-known literary critic who in 2004 (when Cotkin wrote his piece) saw occasion to once again mourn the decline of intellectual discourse after the Partisan Review closed up shop.

But even the venerable Partisan Review wasn't immune to displays of self-aggrandizement, folly and cravenness, as Cotkin points out. Besides, there are many outlets for intellectual inquiry today. Cotkin's list includes Reason magazine, the New York Review of Books, the Claremont Review and the Boston Review.

Remember, Cotkin's piece was written three years ago. Much has happened since then. I would add to that list NextBook, Prospect, SignandSight and the many thoughtful and skillfully managed blogs we read -- PBS's MediaShift, Culture Lust, Theatre Ideas, Bookforum's Shelf Space et al. and, of course, Artsjournal's blogs.

Back to my original point: generational differences. Where do you think this rhetoric of declension leaves those of us in Gen X and Gen Y when we have to deal with this gargantuan belief that everything's going to tarnation?

What's left for us when persuaded to believe that the reason the theater, orchestra and dance company are struggling is because people don't support like they used to.

What's left to believe in if all of this is true?

I hope it's clear that I'm being somewhat hyperbolic and somewhat facetious when I say all this. But I stress -- somewhat. With the media being run by boomers and arts groups being consumed with the theory of "get-'em-while-they're-young," I get a sense that Jennifer was onto something when she said it looks like Gen X/Y is being written off.

I also get a sense that boomers don't understand how Gen X/Y perceives the world. Moreoever, many boomers, as they get older and more entrenched in their ways, seem practically drunk on the sweet nector of nostalgia for having been the generation that "changed the world."

Elton John provides a nice example of the latter when he expressed his wish for the internet to be shut down because it keeps "people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff."

"Instead they sit at home and make their own records, which is sometimes OK but it doesn't bode well for long-term artistic vision.

"It's just a means to an end.

"We're talking about things that are going to change the world and change the way people listen to music and that's not going to happen with people blogging on the internet.

"I mean, get out there -- communicate.

"Hopefully the next movement in music will tear down the internet.

"Let's get out in the streets and march and protest instead of sitting at home and blogging.

"I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span.

"There's too much technology available."

Note that to be considered a social force one must "march and protest." I don't know about anyone else, but I'm really tired of this. It's as if Elton and his ilk didn't know that the social upheavals of the 1960s were fought on the op-ed pages as much as on the streets. And they used words in newspapers, just like blogs do.

The reason Boomers don't understand the way Gen X/Y thinks has to do with, oddly enough, the Grammys. This year, we put a wire story about the results right on the front page the day after the Grammys awards. The reason we did that has a lot of do with the cynicism at the heart of the rhetoric of declension: Pop music is what those kids like. Put it on the front page and maybe they'll read the paper. Maybe if we keep putting all this celebrity crap out there, these whipper-snappers and their confusing ways might step up like they're supposed to and be the new generation of newspaper readers.

Well, they don't read the newspaper. What's the point? They already knew who won and who lost the Grammys hours before the press run that night. There are those who might argue that popular music is popular for a reason: lots of people buy the CDs of these artists. But that doesn't take into account the fact that Gen X/Y are not buying CDs. They're downloading. The people buying CDs are boomers, mostly.

And they're already subscribing to the paper.

I'll jump in to a conversation kicked off by Bridgette last week and continued by numerous commenters and John. Bridgette wrote about how authenticity is one of the hallmarks of what Gen X arts audiences are seeking. She used a Michigan theater company as an example of a group that's pursuing a successful and artistically worthwhile strategy.

Commenter Mike Boehm and my co-blogger John raised the issue of trying to reach Gen X through their kids. Is this strategy for arts marketing advisable? Does it even work?

To be blunt, my own take is that writing off Gen X adults in favor of their kids is misguided and dispiriting. First off, the obvious: not all X-ers have kids. I'm one of 'em. So trying to reach me about the arts, a political issue, what-have-you "through my kids" is a non-starter.

Second, I think John was on to something when he stated: "Is it possible that at some point, given the intensity of arts marketing being leveled at children, that the arts will be something that's considered child's play? Something kids do, not adults?"

I don't know if things are quite that drastic (and John's not necessarily saying that they are), but I do worry about a view of art as primarily something enriching for kids, an educational nugget to be digested along with long division or something to boost ACT scores in a testing-focused climate.

Don't get me wrong: I am not knocking arts education for kids. I am all for it, both in the schools and through whatever parents may have the means to provide after school. I am a product of public schools and, although I don't recall much being available on the elementary level, I did have access to art and music in middle school and ceramics and creative writing electives in high school. Through my parents, I had ten years of private piano lessons, plus a year or two of ceramics courses at the local art museum. As a middle-class kid, I was lucky in that regard. I know how important these formative experiences can be.

Yet I believe the arts--both witnessing and doing--are equally important to adults. That is why I believe we can't write off a segment of the adult population as arts participants. One figure whose ideas guide me in that area is Wisconsin's Robert E. Gard.

Gard (1910-1992) was the author of The Arts in the Small Community, Grassroots Theater: A Search for Regional Arts in America and dozens of other books. He championed rural arts and the belief that everyone had something to contribute; all people's lives could be enriched by making art. He argued that all people had a right to create art that was an expression of themselves and their places.

Gard was the recipient of the first rural arts development grant from the NEA. His project nearly wasn't funded, but no less than Leonard Bernstein, who was sitting on the review panel, argued in favor of it and the rest is history. What Gard started in 1964, the School of the Arts at Rhinelander--a summer art school for adults in a northern Wisconsin community of about 8,000--continues to this day.

I spoke today to the director of the Beaufort Performing Arts Center in Beaufort, S.C. Among other things, we talked about how she has succeeded in attracting Gen X and Gen Y to the theater by appealing to their parental instincts.

"I get them through their kids," she said.

She organizes story hours, puppet theaters, interactive performance art. And every fall there's the ubiquitous "Nutcracker" in which every child and her cousin auditions for and gets a part, packing the theater with proud parents.

This venue director is not alone in targeting children. Every major arts organizations in the Savannah region devotes significant resources to attracting children -- by bussing kids in for concerts, quartering off a section of an art museum for kids or partnering with other arts groups to provide arts activities.

The thinking is: Get hooked on the arts when they're young. But does this really work? Or is this a desparate strategy of an arts community in desparate need of a strategy that works in the face of the millions of other cultural options being offered to children? Is art special enough to warrant special attention? And if it is, can this attention be maintained into adulthood?

Is it possible that at some point, given the intensity of arts marketing being leveled at children, that the arts will be something that's considered child's play? Something kids do, not adults?

Our man in LA, Mike Boehm, had some thoughts on this and other things that he shared with us last week. I wanted to bring them out front for further discussion. -- J.S.

Re: marketing to Gen X: The common wisdom based on RAND and other studies is that when it comes to creating interest in the arts, if you don't catch 'em young, you lose 'em for good.

Obviously, it's important to optimize marketing approaches to the cohort born in the '60s and '70s, but this is a generation that, generally speaking, got the short end of the stick in its arts education, due to assorted economic and political reasons.

They also came up at a time when the arts were being culturally marginalized. The Boomer vibe was influenced by the highbrow Kennedy "Camelot" aura and a celebrity culture in which Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were the ultimate Hollywood glamour couple, and Beverly Sills, Leonard Bernstein and Nureyev and Baryshnikov were mass-media figures; the latter two not just great dancers, but Cold War heroes.

Gen X, to the extent it was paying attention, saw political leaders make a whipping boy of the NEA; they were sold Hollywood glamour couples who were not apt to lead them to Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, and instead of the Beatles' omnivorous example of prominently using classical influences to enrich rock, they grew up with the pointless musical debate over what it meant to be a true punk, and whether music that didn't hew to some outsider Independent/Alternative party line could ever be "authentic."

I don't think anything has changed in the '80s and '90s that might have enabled kids born in those decades to get a contact high on the arts by inhaling the cultural air around them.

So: should the institutional arts groups practice a form of triage and put everything into educational programming and educational lobbying, in hopes of winning the children born in this century and the tail end of the last one?

Under this strategy, they could rope in some Gen X and Y parents via their kids, all the while praying that the Boomers and pre-Boomers now sustaining the arts as audiences and donors will live long and prosper.

Or do they spread scarce resources more thinly and target the Xs and Ys along with the oldsters and the kiddies? Not an easy call.

Overhanging the arts, along with society as a whole, is whether America's leaders tackle the health care and Social Security crises in a way that avoids all-out generational warfare and reaches an equitable and economically sustainable solution.

Suggestion for cultivating Gen X-Y and doing a worthy deed: lifetime passes to museums, theaters and concert halls for Iraq War veterans. Maybe lifetime newspaper subscriptions, too.

Art is doing philosophy? . . .

An interesting set of ideas about art, its context and its relation to philosophy comes from the American philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto. What makes something a work of art is not, says Danto, to be found by looking at its obvious properties. Danto believes that what "makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo box is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is."

What are we, however, doing when we ask about the difference between a Brillo box in a supermarket and a Brillo box in an art gallery? Danto's answer is that we are asking a philosophical question. Art now prompts us to do philosophy. Much of art today is about boundary testing of 'art': "Can this object be considered art?", "What is art?" Danto argues that art is doing philosophy; art is collapsing into philosophy.

G.W.F. Hegel in the nineteenth century declared that art would in future no longer be a predominant mode of expression for human beings. Danto seems to agree: Art has nothing left to do. It has run itself out, and has as its only project a philosophical one, the definition of art. And that would much better be left to the philosophers.

From "Aesthetics and Philosophy: A Match Made in Heaven?" by Anja Steinbauer for the September/October 2006 issue of Philosophy Now

The most reasoned discussion of blogging's value yet . . .

But [bloggers] are, more often than not, trademarks of the kind of journalism that makes a difference. And if there is anything bloggers want more than an audience, it's knowing they are making a difference in politics. They are, to give them their due, changing what is euphemistically called the national "conversation." But what is the nature of that change? Does it deepen our understanding? Does it broaden our perspective?

From "All the noise that fits: The hard-line opinions on weblogs are no substitute for the patient fact-finding of reporters" by Michael Skube for the Los Angeles Times

A new critical consensus? . . .

The democratization of criticism -- as in the Amazon system of readers' evaluating books -- is a messy affair, as democracy must be. But the solution to the problems of criticism in the present are best not discovered in the musty basements of nostalgia and sentiment for the cultural criticism of a half-century gone. Rather the solution is to recognize, as John Dewey did almost a century ago, that the problems of democracy demand more democracy (against the corporatization of culture), less nostalgia for a golden age that never was, and a spirit of openness to what is new and invigorating in our culture.

From "The Democratization of Cultural Criticism" by George Cotkin for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

This past week I've spent a lot of time researching for two books I'm working on. Both are college textbooks, one on hospitality housekeeping management and the other on the world of spas.

An article in Lodging Hospitality on "Reaching Out to Generation X" talks about marketing to Generation X:

Turns out they're married and have kids and are pushing 40. So even though they remain high on style and don't know where (let alone how) to draw the line between business and leisure, they've settled down and are looking to nest wherever they travel. That drive reflects the times they came of age, when many of their Boomer parents divorced and many of their Boomer dads lost their jobs. No wonder they value community, connection and connectivity. No wonder it's de rigueur to appeal to their need for the total experience. No wonder product-driven marketing is so 2000."

Community, connection, and connectivity. And they're talking about business marketing and not art?

Later, the article says:

Hospitality marketing rarely addresses Gen X's complicated approach, Rach suggests. It also doesn't take into account this demographic's fine-tuned, ironic sense of humor. "They don't want advertising that tries to fool them or promises things that can't come from that product," she says, calling a recent campaign for Sprite that ordered, Obey your thirst, a successful marketing effort. "The idea was that if you were thirsty you needed to drink something, not that by drinking it you would become something.

Marketing in this industry tends to be extraordinarily product-focused, when what this generation is looking for is an experience based upon relationships," she says.

As one of those Gen X members who is pushing 40, this resonated. I have a finely tuned bullshit radar. Marketing that lies simply doesn't work. My generation grew up on commercials and learned early on that our toys didn't live up to the hype. What we look for really is about connection and community. We want to belong and we want to have meaningful, authentic relationships.

Authenticity is a word they don't address, but I would add to the list. Neither art nor advertising is an excuse for lies. If you're not real, if you're not authentic, then you're not likely to get our ear for very long. Once we figure out you're fake, you're done.

We have had several new theater groups spring up in the past ten years in Lansing, most of them founded by members of Generation X or those on the border. The ones that have succeeded are those that are committed to the ideas of connection and authenticity.

This past season I was wowed by a production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch done by a relatively new group called Peppermint Creek Theatre Company. Later, when I was talking to someone about the show, they expressed the opinion that there was a generational difference in those who liked the show. I'm starting to come around to the view.

In many ways, it comes down to the idea of connections. Why would I, a Midwestern, white, middle-aged mom who grew up in the suburbs feel such a deep, strong connection to a character like Hedwig? Perhaps it is because I ignored the character's self-created hype and looked at the heart of the person being portrayed. Sure, I've never had a botched sex change operation, but I (and every other person on this planet) have struggled with issues of identity and self-definition. I've taken extreme actions to escape what seemed to be an inescapable situation only to learn that a little patience would have mitigated the problem. I've been disappointed that others don't see me the way I see me. These are the things that Hedwig is about far more than the bitterness a transgendered performer feels about having been left with a mutilated penis.

Hedwig is a powerful musical because it makes those connections with individuals. It doesn't arrogantly preach to the audience telling them that they're too obtuse to get it. If you don't like us, don't ask us to join in the experience of your art.

The show's director and artistic director have a deep respect for their audience, a respect that shows in every production they do. They're not preaching to an audience they think is hateful and stupid. They're inviting people they respect to engage in a dialogue about the world we live in.

It's not about the product. It's about the relationship.

Take a look at their season last year. They did The Pillowman, The Goat or Who is Sylvia, 9 Parts of Desire, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. The plays include the torture of children, bestiality, war in Iraq, transgender issues, and theology.

It could have been disastrous. Had they been preaching from a pulpit in a contemptuously dismissive attitude, it would have been a failure. The audience would have soon figured it out and stayed away. Instead, Peppermint Creek begins with respect, a respect that is obvious in every interaction with them. They trust their audience to handle challenging topics and don't try to make a controversy out of every brave choice they make.

The result is that their houses were packed last year and they reaped multiple awards from everyone who gave them out. Despite the subject matter of their plays, I was never shocked at what I saw. I was engaged. I saw things that mattered to me and that stayed with me long after the play was over.

Theater has much to offer that Generation X wants. So why aren't they coming to the theater? Perhaps there needs to be a change in marketing focus for the arts world as well. Quit hyping the product. Tell us about your true value--the connections that we will make with each other and with the art form. Don't tell us what we'll get out of theater, because you have no way of knowing. Tell us instead, that there will be a unique experience every night because we will be a part of the creation. Invite us to come engage our brains and hearts in our community and trust us.

Theater is unique in what it offers. If it can find a way to focus on these connections rather than the product, who knows what revitalization it might find?

It's a topic for another blog entry, but a case might even be made that this is why there is such a ground swelling of theater throughout the country even while it stagnates in its traditional homes. Could it be because theater that is local is communicating the message of connection and community rather than the really great product that they're selling on their stage?

The times they are a-changin' . . .

From Tim Adams' interview with James Watson, the co-discoverer of the double-helix, the molecular form that DNA takes. He wrote this piece updating the debate first established by C.P. Snow in a classic essay about the "Two Cultures," one literary intellectual and one scientific intellectual, for the London Guardian last month.

I asked [James Watson] how he thought the climate of scientific research had changed since he made his fateful discovery of the structure of life in 1953. As ever, he came at the question from an unusual angle. He doubted, he said, that in today's world, he and Francis Crick would ever have had their Eureka moment.

'I recently went to my staircase at Clare College, Cambridge and there were women there!' he said, with an enormous measure of retrospective sexual frustration. 'There have been a lot of convincing studies recently about the loss of productivity in the Western male. It may be that entertainment culture now is so engaging that it keeps people satisfied. We didn't have that. Science was much more fun than listening to the radio. When you are 16 or 17 and in that inherently semi-lonely period when you are deciding whether to be an intellectual, many now don't bother.'

Watson raised an eyebrow, fixed me again with a look. 'What you have instead are characters out of Nick Hornby's very funny books, who channel their intellect in pop culture. The hopeless male.'

As James Watson knows perhaps more clearly than anyone alive, biology works in mysterious ways.

The future of old-school journalism . . .

Most of what matters about the coming media age is already being decided outside of traditional newsrooms, on YouTube and countless other Web sites, or in the advertising agencies that calibrate Google search results with the mouse-clicking habits of young consumers. Perhaps Google or its ilk will find it profitable or desirable to fund independent, expert foreign correspondence; or to support investigations of corporate and government power; or to train the sort of journalists who feel free to call out their employers' pay packages on the proverbial front page, although there are no signs of this yet. Or perhaps the Sulzbergers and the Grahams can adapt their public trusts successfully to the new technologies. And even if their efforts fail to become profitable these families might still preserve their newsrooms' independence by converting them into nonprofit foundations, similar to what the Poynter family did with the St. Petersburg Times, in Florida.

From "Read All About It," the comment in this week's New Yorker on the takeover of the Wall Street Journal by media baron Rupert Murdoch by Steve Coll

From Lori Ortiz, a dance critic and new reader of Flyover. She comments here on yesterday's post ("Hyperlocalism et al.: a note of caution") about the dubious nature of "citizen journalism" and "reader reviews."

Her last sentence really struck a chord with me.

Company blogs promoting their product over others, and screen names for specially interested groups and individuals, are putting holes in public trust.

Have you ever checked out "reviews" of hotels? It's too easy for someone, or more than one, to plant a bug in the consumer's bonnet about the competition.

A new program, just out, tracks Wikipedia sources. That should help a bit. The best defense is to seek many sources, and credentials.

The responsibility falls on the consumer to look for the truth. [emphasis added]

Another take on the issue from nearly four years ago . . .

Are bloggers journalists? Will they soon replace newspapers?

The best answer to those two questions is: those are two really dumb questions; enough hot air has been expended in their name already.

From "Emerging Alternatives: Blogworld, the New Amateur Journalists Weigh In" by Matt Welch for the Columbia Journalism Review September/October 2003.

Can readers really tell the difference? Or does this devalue journalism? . . .

Once again, good thinking from our man in Lexington, Ky., Rich Copley, in reaction to this morning's post about the potential pitfalls of hyperlocalism, citizen journalism and many of the other current trends in newspapering.

I actually got into a conversation with a musician about this last week. He was saying that his big concern with the Internet wasn't so much that people were stealing his music but that with services like MySpace and YouTube, "anyone can be as legit as anyone else. You can watch someone's video online, but that doesn't tell you whether they can stand up in front of an audience and deliver the same thing live," or whether its been digitally manipulated in some way.

I thought, "I know exactly what you are talking about," because the whole citizen journalist-reader review thing makes it harder for readers to discern between a trained professional journalist and the person who just posts something on a lark or to advance an agenda. I wish papers would be more careful not to compromise their good brand names, but that doesn't seem to be happening.

Perhaps it's time the case was made for a new definition . . .

It has been on the endangered list for ages, as management experts and talking heads pecked at it. ... "Culture" used to be the word used to describe activities such as listening to Bach or going to the theatre and art galleries. ... Now when you see the word "culture" it is generally being used as an all-purpose insult for people who have fallen behind the times and are reluctant to embrace new practices introduced by boardroom barbarians or government gorillas. "Management culture", "institutional culture", "workplace culture", "four-wheel-drive culture", "a culture of neglect"... In the past week, I have heard governments being accused of having "a culture of resisting disclosure of information", welfare authorities said to have "a culture of indifference" that affects vulnerable children, and an "anti-adoption culture" standing in the way of people wanting to adopt from overseas.

Culture has become what you have when you have a problem. ... "Culture" has become a virus, infecting government, union and PR statements and emails sent around by management, HR and consultants whose earnings are doubtless linked to the number of times they use it negatively in their final reports.

From "The respectable word that fell in with the wrong crowd" by Jenny Tabakoff for the Sydney (Australia) Morning News.

Art is being separated from the people who make it. News is being separated from the people who report it. The consumer has control; she is in charge; she doesn't really care where her media -- news, music, movies -- comes from.

Just as long as she can get it.

Case in point is the most recent report regarding illicit downloading. This study from Europe finds that teenagers there are downloading songs for illegally because everyone's doing it, even their parents. The more people who do it, the more people will do it. That's why, despite being aware of the potential for legal repercussions, teenagers have little fear. In fact, they say they'll likely do more.

I've been drawing a lot of parallels between the music industry's woes and the issues facing the newspaper industry. The reason is that the changes taking place in one seem to mirror those in the other -- and the changes center on the consumer.

As I noted last week, a fundamental component of that change is a shift in position, in the case of newspapering, of the reader from a place of passive consumption to active participation. It seems any effort to discover a new business model to save an ailing newspaper industry will have to address this shift in the reader's position.

When USA Today launched its new website earlier this year, it addressed this issue head on by aiming to "create a community around the news." In this way, USA Today was structuring itself similarly to social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook and Bebo, which give users tools for active participation.

"Using the new features, users can see other news sources directly on the USA Today site; see others readers' reactions to stories; recommend content and comments to each other; interact using comments and in public forums, upload digital photographs to the site; write arts and culture reviews of their own; and interact more with the newspaper's staff," according to the paper's PR in March.

By giving users so many ways of interacting with the news, the newspaper and each other, the hope is to drive traffic toward the website and keep it there. The thinking is that the information and virtual experience will be so valuable that readers will endure advertising, as they do with TV, if they want to get at the goodies they value.

It sounds like a great idea and goodness knows we need good ideas right now. But I'm skeptical. As I've mentioned before, the new technologies of Web 2.0 are having the same affect on us right now as the phonograph did in the early 20th century: Just as the phonograph changed the way we hear music, Web 2.0 is changing the way readers uses the news. There is a fundamental change in consciousness underway.

As the new USA Today website makes clear, there are already serious attempts in the works to harness that change. And it may turn out to be an emulated model. Indeed, if it catches on, "creating a community around the news" will be a major shift from the way 20th Century Mass Media was structured.

Is it a good shift? I don't know. But one thing's for sure: Just as capital will naturally try to consolidate, capital will also try to get something for nothing.

What do I mean? I mean those in control of most of the capital will naturally try to seize a non-marketplace idea and press it into the service of the marketplace.

Let put it this way: The spirit that animates believers of Wikipedia is a good spirit in essence. That spirit wants to see information be free, democratic, accessible and used in ways that benefit the lives of the countless people who most need it.

That's a non-marketplace idea and it's a great one. The reality, however, is human nature. If anyone can access Wikipedia, then anyone can commit whatever acts of dishonesty, slander, et al. that they wish (until at least it's detected and corrected).

Wikipedia has been compared to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Some say its just as accurate. Some don't. The vital difference, however, is mediation: One has the benefits of experts in their fields sifting through information, making it quality stuff.

The question isn't about accuracy, really, because as I said before Wikipedia will fix acts of dishonestly. The real question is more fundamental: Which do you trust?

I think this "creating a community around the news" thing is interesting, but I fear it could create a situation like Britannica vs. Wikipedia. (I know it wouldn't be exactly like this; no one can vandalize news reports by USA Today staff like they can on Wikipedia; I'm just trying to make a point here, jeesh.) Will "communities around the news" challenge our trust, too?

I'm also worried that newspaper companies looking to do journalism on the cheap -- and we know there are plenty of those out there -- may take the otherwise positive notion of "creating community," a notion that appeals to our native American sense of fairness and equality, and use it for far less noble ends.

The buzz words now are hyperlocalism, citizen journalism, iReporting and so on, but mostly hyperlocalism and citizen journalism. On CNN, they're calling it "iReporting" or something like that. Anyway, it's sounds great, so empowering to the community, but guess what? It's also really cheap.

Cheap is the magic word to boardroom VPs of publicly traded news companies looking for a rationale to acquire information, images and video that previously, in order to get them, required paying a professional journalist a salary and benefits.

Now, backed up by the ideology of "hyperlocalism" et al., execs can talk up the case for more "reader-generated content" while talking down the fact that it's free of charge. We arts journalists should be concerned. We're already feeling pretty insecure about our relative value to the news hole. Well, with the new USA Today website, users can "write arts and culture reviews of their own."

Cheap is as cheap does but that don't matter when shareholders come a-calling.

And while management is focusing on getting more readers involved in the newspaper (everyone is blogging, blogging, blogging), they're failing to provide the human and financial resources needed to give readers something to read.

In my newsroom alone, the staff has shrunk by half since I arrived. Many have left for other newsrooms, some have been fired, others have left the field entirely. One reporter left to head a nonprofit in education. Another to be a PR flack for the city of Savannah. One is taking a post with a research foundation. And another, a veteran sportswriter, resigned yesterday to work for the local TV station.

Local TV news! That's got to be a new low.

Readers are taking notice, too. We have this feature called the Vox Populi. Readers can call in to voice their opinions anonymously. A recent caller complained about the lack of reporting on local news and issues in the Savannah Morning News: "Why do you have a multimillion dollar building but only run stories from the AP?"

I guess I'd better get used to repeating myself, but here it is again: While I understand why some are celebrating the potential of emerging technologies, I'm still skeptical. We don't live and work in a vacuum. While the technology, like the phonograph, may change our consciousness, we still have to make a living.

I don't mean to sound alarmist or even Marxist. I just think there's reason to worry as long as profit-driven, growth-oriented companies run newspapers. They are going to do what's best for shareholders, not journalism and not for readers, as John S. Carroll, the former editor of the LA Times, noted in a speech cited in Russell Baker's essay on the state of newspapering.

Bottom line: the bottom line trumps all, and if we're not careful amid our celebration of the potential benefits of emerging technologies on arts journalism, we may, like our friends the musicians, end up finding out later on that no one's getting paid.

I've never understood those music fans who have an obsessive need to know their idol's favorite color or birth date. I adore Rufus Wainwright and Andrew Bird, but I don't care much about their personal lives. Their music is what matters to me. Similarly, I seldom seek out information on the personal backgrounds of writers I admire, but this profile of Whitney Gould, from the current issue of Milwaukee Magazine, caught my attention.

Gould is the architecture critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. It feels good simply to type that because so few papers have architecture critics, and Gould is an especially fine one. A Wisconsin native, she writes with intelligence, passion and a clear point of view. First and foremost, I think of Gould as someone who demands authenticity and honesty in architecture. She doesn't despise faux-historical buildings out of some middlebrow sense that they're ticky-tacky; she objects because virtually all architecture worth its salt is, in some way, genuinely of the time and place in which it was built.

The Milwaukee Magazine profile, despite some odd word choices ("grandmotherly," anyone?), is well worth reading. Gould's family background and entry into journalism are intriguing.

And for a taste of Whitney Gould's own writing, a recent column called "We should care about good design" directly addresses why the public should be invested in the built environment surrounding them. Indirectly, it also makes a case for architecture criticism, since people in Gould's profession have a plum opportunity to raise issues and shape the debate. And through periodic online chats, Gould engages in real give-and-take with the public.

Gould closes her column with a quote from Winston Churchill ("We shape our buildings; thereafter, our buildings shape us") and this observation of her own: "[Buildings] affect the quality of life in our neighborhoods; they establish the identity of our cities; they color our work days. If we don't make it our business to care about such things, we will deserve the awful results."

I'd argue that in smaller to mid-size cities (like Madison, where I live), good architecture is even more crucial since a single major project has a bigger impact on the overall look and feel of the city.

Since Flyover (namely, John) has been in a quotin' mood lately, I'll throw out a favorite of my own, something I've had tacked near my computer for ages:

"Our culture is first of all an urban one, the city the place of our history and our social life--factors that have impressed themselves inextricably upon the face of the houses, but also in the structures of the streets and plazas." (Christoph Schreier, from the exhibition catalog "Thomas Struth: Strassen--Fotografie 1976 bis 1995)

This idea of the city as the locus of our history in a very physical way, with that history literally written upon its face, has long affected me, and it's why I share Gould's view that good architecture matters--as does thoughtful writing about architecture.

(Note: The Schreier translation from the German is mine. Here's the original for my fellow Germanophiles: "Denn unsere Kultur ist zuallererst eine städtische, die Stadt der Ort unserer Geschichte, unseres soziales Leben, Faktoren, die sich unauslöslich in das Gesicht der Häuser, aber auch in die Strukturen der Strassen and Plätze eingeprägt haben.")