As fine-arts institutions grapple with the growing problem of declining mainstream media interest in their activities, they’re looking to the Web for solutions. Hence my “Sightings” column in today’s Wall Street Journal, a report on the Cleveland Orchestra’s new attempt to take up the slack. Here’s an excerpt.
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The Cleveland Orchestra helped get one critic fired. Now it’s hired another one. In February Enrique Fernández reported for duty as “critic-in-residence” in Miami, where the orchestra has been playing an annual residency since 2007. Mr. Fernández is not, however, your run-of-the-mill music critic. For one thing, he doesn’t write reviews; for another, his pieces don’t appear in a newspaper or magazine. Instead he writes a blog on the Cleveland Orchestra’s Miami-based website. His job is to get Floridans talking about the orchestra–and posting their own opinions of its concerts.
The ironies surrounding Mr. Fernández’ appointment are manifold. In 2008 Don Rosenberg, the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s classical music critic, was reassigned to another beat for having written predominantly negative reviews of Franz Welser-Möst, the Cleveland Orchestra’s music director–reviews about which the orchestra’s management had previously complained to the paper’s editors. Mr. Rosenberg responded by suing the paper for defamation and age discrimination. He lost, but the resulting stink has yet to dissipate.
Is the Cleveland Orchestra having second thoughts? I doubt it. Despite his resounding title, Mr. Fernández is not a critic in the ordinary sense of the word. His blog, which you can visit by going to clevelandorchestramiami.com and clicking on “blog,” is an online magazine that runs feature pieces about the orchestra and its activities in Miami. In addition, Mr. Fernández invites concertgoers to post their own thoughts on the orchestra’s performances: “Online everybody’s a critic….Comment on the concert you are about to experience. Review if you wish, if you must. Hey, it’s your ticket, rave on, pan on.”
Mr. Fernández and the Cleveland Orchestra are clearly trying to come up with an institutional equivalent of the “online communities” that spring up around homemade blogs. This kind of blogging is still relatively new in the world of art, and to date the only institutions that seem to have embraced it wholeheartedly are museums…
Mr. Fernández’s title points to the great flaw of institutional blogging, which is that it is institutional. Whatever else he does with “his” blog, you can bet he won’t be saying anything on it that’s even mildly critical of the Cleveland Orchestra….
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Read the whole thing here.
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
