IS ARTS CRITICISM DEAD? PROGRAM DIES AT COLUMBIA

The front page of today's ArtsJournal points to a story in Sunday's Los Angeles Times headlined "Critical condition," about the death of arts criticism. The Times subhead summarizes the gist of the story: "Once almighty arbiters of American taste, critics find their power at ebb tide. Is it a dark time for the arts, or the dawn of a new age?"

ArtsJournal's summary gives a more detailed inkling:

Arts critics used to wield tremendous power as American tastemakers, their words forming the crux of the cultural sphere and their opinions read as seriously as those of political commentators. These days, cultural tastes are controlled mainly by savvy marketers, and critics have become ever more marginalized, frequently reduced to bleating from the sidelines and begging for a return to serious cultural discourse.

Coincidentally -- well, not so coincidentally -- ArtsJournal publisher and editor Doug McLennan also reported Sunday on the death of the National Arts Journalism Program. In a mass email to more than 100 former fellows of the program, he confirmed what had been rumored among them:

After an outstanding 11-year record of advocating for and promoting the cause of arts journalism, the National Arts Journalism Program -– the only program in America dedicated to the advocacy of arts journalism -- is being closed down at the Columbia School of Journalism.

So what happened? When Pew's generous funding ended a couple of years ago, NAJP was left with the considerable task of raising its entire operating budget from other sources. ... Columbia generously offered some financial help to fill in the gap, but made it clear that it was one-year assistance. The program's budget of $1.6 million in 2002-03 fell to less than half that by the current year. ...

The short version is that the Columbia J-School, like most universities these days, while happy to host and enjoy the prestige of programs, is reluctant to spend money and resources on them. Last year Columbia gave NAJP some financial help to ease the loss of Pew money, but J-School dean Nicholas Lemann says that none of the 30 programs housed at the school (with the exception of the Columbia Journalism Review) is getting money from the school this year.

McLennan, who is on the NAJP advisory board (he's also a former fellow, as I am), noted that the Journalism School would soon be making an official announcement about closing the program. McLennan's message drew responses about the death of the NAJP and its larger meaning from many former fellows and others associated with or interested in the program. Here are several representative ones:

"The news of the demise of the NAJP is very sad indeed, and yet another sign that serious intellect in this country is continuing to lose ground, along with serious art. It is a tragic time for the arts and arts criticism, perhaps the most ominous in our history."
-- Robert Brustein ('03, theater critic, The New Republic)

"At a time when life is becoming ever more drenched in business and politcs of the most naked and base kind, anything that diminishes the meager beachhead that culture still has in our lives is to be lamented. I know that there are many universities -- Berkeley among them -- that would be only too pleased to take this excellent program in. But, alas, it is always a question of resources. That this country is so awash with such extravagant wealth at the upper reaches of the sociological food chain, but that a program like this nonetheless languishes and perishes at the middle reaches, is a reality that seems absurdly bitter."
-- Orville Schell, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

"This is deeply disheartening news -- for a nation, a culture, and a profession that have been receiving quite enough disheartening news as it is. The idea that it could happen in a time when -- despite the growing impoverishment of the general public -- gigantic fortunes are being concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires, many of them in arts-related industries, makes it all the more disheartening.

"It dramatizes for me the state of a society that has deeply misunderstood its values and misplaced its priorities. It represents, along with the abhorrent state of our politics, another lurch on the seismic cultural shift toward a new Dark Age. Those of us who engage in the arts -- and criticism has its place among them -- must be prepared to face a world that is readying itself to abandon its professed values in favor of the worship of money and power.

"My fellowship time at the NAJP -- which came during and after the trauma of 9/11 -- was of immeasurable importance in my life. It renewed my belief in the value of my work. It has made me want to keep working. And I want to see the NAJP survive, just as I want to see the arts, and arts criticism, survive -- 'so that life shouldn't be printed on dollar bills,' as an American playwright once put it."
-- Michael Feingold ('02, chief theater critic, The Village Voice)

The NAJP fellowship was invaluable for me, too, and I'm deeply grateful for the chance it provided to explore subjects that interested me. Nevertheless, I thought the following opinion, which is not likely to be heard from any of the rest of us, was worth adding to the conversation.

"The critic is the Artist-Prophet's harbinger and apologist. As the cultural phenomenon of the Artist-Prophet dies, so too will the critic. Our traditional style of criticism was formulated by 19th century German literary feuilletonism. That is the period that gave us cultural nationalism with its host of artist-prophets and their critics. These forms of nationalistic elitism were inevitable developments as the bourgeoisie arose. The Internet is just one more medium that helps to dissolve nationalism and elite bourgeois status. As nationalism and class status become less relevant, the critic's function as a spokesman of the elite will die.

"Even in the 'higher' arts, the corporatocracy of global capitalism will require a new kind of feuilletonist -- a sort of generalist gadfly who is part of a marketing apparatus focusing largely on celebrity. Eventually the NYT cultural section, for example, will look a lot like People magazine. Much of The New Yorker is already a kind of People magazine for yuppies -- gossip with a touch of niveau couched in the publication's self-consciously affected urbanity.

"This should not surprise anyone. Art will always be culturally isomorphic with the larger social structures of society. Mass marketing requires a reductive concept of the human. The aesthetic values of global capitalism by necessity esteem baseness. The key is for some theorist to define and codify the new feuilletonism's style, content, social and economic purpose. In the meantime, we should remember: Blessed are the base, for they shall inherit the earth.
-- Bill Osborne (composer, musicologist, and an advocate of the NAJP)

Osborne cites Alex Ross's review of Tristan in the current New Yorker as "a good example of the critic/artist-prophet relationship." He writes: "Ross and others like him can't seem to break out of the artist-prophet mold. They try to tone down the nationalism in the music, but it is a very willful form of blindness and thus leaves entire parts of the picture missing. Praising prophets is their forte. The problem is there will not be any more new members of Wagner and Co."

Will the Internet "dissolve nationalism and elite bourgeois status"? It's an open question.

"Anyone who believes that the Internet is some kind of emancipatory space for resistance -- for artists, critics, bloggers, consumers, or whomever -- is dreaming."
--Gina Arnold ('00, freelance rock critic)

"Maybe it has diminished the power of the critic as all-powerful seer by turning every culture-blogger into a niche-critic with their own diluted following of a few hundred or thousand readers, but as a reader it's often a treat to read writers I enjoy unencumbered by the editorial filters of a daily paper. Especially now that 'alternative' weeklies -- once the bastion of the juicy loose talk and incisive jabbing you rarely get in the dailies anymore -- are merely another cog in the corporate money machine, fretting with 'charticles' and blurb-sized reviews and 750-word caps on pieces."
-- Steve Dollar ('98, freelance cultural writer)