KCRW's Seymour responds on Goldman

Yesterday afternoon, as I was perusing mega-media site LA Observed, I noticed this at the bottom of a post about the ethical problems (and here) of KCRW and its art critic Edward Goldman:

[KCRW general manager Ruth] Seymour responds to LA Observed: "I don't respond to anonymous allegations, which could just as easily be made by someone who is angry about a bad review or about not being reviewed at all."

Twenty minutes later, I KCRW emailed, telling me that Seymour was willing to chat with me. (For several days Seymour had declined, through a KCRW spokesperson, to talk with me.)

When we talked yesterday evening, I asked Seymour if it was OK for an on-air critic to personally profit from his position, particularly from access provided by a public radio station.

"I've known Edward," Seymour said. "He's worked for us for 20 years. He's been wonderful for the art scene here in Southern California. When I called him to say, 'Who is this guy Tyler Green?' he had only the most complimentary things to say about you. So I regret that I didn't just pick up the phone to call you... Ed talks to people who are outside the world, people who are not as knowledgable about art, and he is sometimes able to communicate his own passion for art. There is no way Edward would ever write a review that he did not believe in."

I told Seymour that I hadn't suggested Goldman ever wrote something he didn't believe. I said that the ethical questions that gallerists raised were partly related to things he had said on-air and partly related to how he leveraged his position as an on-air critic to demand questionable kickbacks (or, to use a much more permissive term: beyond-the-industry-norm commissions) from galleries.

"But to quote these anonymous people who won't even give their names!" Seymour said. "Why do you believe them?"

I explained that I knew who they were, I had independently checked out their stories and that the stories were solid. And that surely she could understand that people who wanted to be reviewed on Southern California's most prominent radio platform, KCRW, who wanted maximum exposure for their artists, surely weren't going to risk infuriating the station's critic by going public. That that was the whole problem: Goldman had allegedly demanded money from (at least) one gallery because he knew that it couldn't say no.

"I think what you're saying is just not borne out," Seymour said. "If, in fact, he reviews something and says, 'This is a wonderful piece,' and two or three weeks later one of the people in his class buys the piece, you're assuming..." Seymour trailed off and changed course: "You're not saying he wrote the review because he wanted the person to buy the piece. But that would be the conflict. The conflict is exactly that."

I pointed out to Seymour that one of the two examples on MAN yesterday raised that precise question, which is why this was a real ethical problem: Given the station's obscenely permissive ethics policy (scroll down to the pull-quote), who knows when Goldman is saying something he belives and who knows when Goldman is saying something to move an art object? I'm not saying Goldman has done that, but that's what ethics policies are for: to remove that possibility. Seymour wasn't buying it.

For there to be a problem "there has to be a direct fiduciary relationship between the guy putting the record on the air and also being a stake holder in the record," Seymour said, using a music analogy because KCRW is a national leader in indie-music broadcasting. Then Seymour told me that she didn't believe the gallerists who talked to me and suggested that they were using anonymity to lie. She said that if they were telling the truth surely they would have just picked up the phone and called her. I repeated my explanation about why I think a gallery would be reluctant to do that.

"No, I can't understand why they'd need to be anonymous," she said. "After 20 years -- I'm a real access person. And at the end of the day I'm not someobody who doesn't know anything about the art world. I lived in that world in the sixties. I'm connected enough so that on a personal basis -- not even someone directly calling me at the station -- I'd have heard about this from a lot of people. I'd say in the 20 years that this just hasn't come up. I just don't believe it given the people who run art in this town... people aren't afraid to tell me things like this."

In our entire 30-minute conversation, despite my repeated attempts -- and even taking the specifics of these two cases out of the equation -- Seymour never told me if it was OK for a critic of hers to demand kickbacks from galleries or if it was OK for him/her to promote something on the air and to then attempt to profit from it. "It exists on every level," she said about conflict, suggesting that KCRW's listeners should just learn to live with it. Earlier in our chat she told me that, "anybody who appears on KCRW... hopes that it will somehow further their career."

"I'm not going to can anybody on the basis of anonymous charge," she said. "Given my connections here and my 20 years of being in this town I would have heard about this from people. There's no reason that [gallerists] should so terrified of speaking to me. I understand what you're saing about Edward, but there's a way of approaching me as well. I'm not going to make any decisions based on anonymous accusations."