John: insider-outsider

Doug: Glad you’re back in action. Are you back in your house? Is your bedroom still under siege? I must say, even without the Great Tree, your place looks beautiful. And look on the bright side (if there ever is a bright side in the skies of Seattle): now you’ll have more sun in your back yard.
I like your stirring defense of insider criticism, though if you’re so sure of your position, why did you stop reviewing your friend’s orchestra, and why are you shy about naming his (her) name? Look: like everything in life, I’ve come to realize in my weasel-like old age (the fine line between accrued wisdom and bland compromise), rules suck. You yourself say you tread a middle ground, and so do I. Of course “objectivity” is easily debased into a phony balance in which every view, no matter how noble or repellent, must be countered with its opposite. But still, the ideal of a critic who can transcend friendships and entanglements and tell it like it is (like the critic feels it is) is not to be scorned. Maybe objectivity is not the highest goal, but fairness.
As you suggest with your conductor-friend, when you know someone, you may either pay them off with flattering reviews or, if you have a conflicted sense of honor, you maybe treat them more harshly. Either way, you aren’t responding to their work but to some combination of their work and their person and your affection for both.
But like I say, no rules. As we age in the world of the arts, social contacts, maybe flowering into friendships, are inevitable You just have to try to do your best with them. Me, despite my belief in contexts and the cultural-historical positioning of the arts within society, I’ve never felt comfortable knowing artists (except for friends like Linda R. or Helene Grimaud) and have always felt uncomfortable backstage. I even felt uncomfortable as director of the Lincoln Center Festival going backstage and paying courtesy calls on artists I’d engaged before their performances.
Is the following story in my book? It’s not at hand. Anyhow, when I was younger, one of my heroes was the Wagner tenor Wolfgang Windgassen. I spent the summer of 1965 in Friedelind Wagner’s Master class at Bayreuth (there’s an article about that experience in my book). I clung like a spider to the light grid above the Festspielhaus stage for 14 performances of “Tannhauser” with WW in the title role. I never felt inspired (or courageous) enough to go up to him and introduce myself and tell him I admired him. One time I was in a Bayreuth restaurant with friends right next to the table where he was eating with his friends, but no contact. I was shy, or embarrassed. Maybe I didn’t’ want to spoil my artistic image of him onstage by mixing it up with his real person. Who knows? When he sang Tristan in San Francisco in the early 70’s, not long before his sudden death, I finally did manage to mumble my appreciation. It meant nothing to him and it made me feel awkward, but I still admired him then and admire his recordings now. For me, they’re the real Windgassen.
Last night I went with Greil Marcus and Bob Christgau and our wives to see Lou Reed’s concert performance of “Berlin.” (Years ago Reed amusingly attacked Bob and me in a rant on his “Prisoner in Disguise” album.) Not too long ago I was at a dinner party with my wife Linda and him and Laurie Anderson. He spent the whole time talking about his difficulties finding a good contractor to fix up their loft. Maybe he was putting us all on. But it was no walk on the wild side, and that’s the Lou Reed I prefer, the “real” Lou Reed.
You ask about how my four-year experience as an arts administrator affected me when I returned to journalism. Well, it certainly offered me insights into how the performing arts work that I would otherwise never have had. Since most of the time I was a presenter rather than a producer, the artists I engaged would come and go without necessarily forming lasting social bonds, though when I run into some of them today — Kurt Masur, Anthony Russell Roberts of the Royal Ballet, Nicholas Payne formerly of the Royal Opera, Deborah Voigt, et al., we’re friendly (if not friends). I’m still tight with my old LC Festival staff, all of whom I hired and nearly all of who are still in place. My biggest production was the 18-hour kunqu opera “The Peony Pavilion,” and I remain close friends with its director, Chen Shi-zheng, and with Josephine Markovits of the Festival d’Automne a Paris, our principal co-producer.
But when I came back to the Times, I was an editor (Arts & Leisure), not a critic, and then I was a roving arts columnist, and finally a dance critic. I do have friends from years past in the dance world, Wendy Perron above all, whom I commissioned to do an evening-length work at the LC Festival. But she’s now editor of Dance Magazine, so no conflict there. I go back a long way with Trisha Brown (with whom Wendy used to dance), and she and her husband Burt Barr live next door to us. That didn’t stop me from reviewing her. I even covered Anna Halprin’s “comeback” a few years ago in San Francisco; it’s in the book.
But your larger point, that everyone has biases, aka tastes, and that to try to hide them is foolish, is certainly true. Overtly expressed tastes and passions lend a necessary flavor to criticism. I think “Outsider” makes perfectly clear some of the parameters of my own taste. But once again, my no-rules axiom and your middle ground make the most sense. And fairness remains paramount.
When the always amusing, always brilliant Richard Taruskin implies that the early-music movement is only a projection of the present onto the past, he is surely overstating his case. To abandon any effort to find out how things once were, how they looked and sounded and how their creators first heard them or wanted them to be heard, would be sad. That’s why I admire the dance reconstructions of Millicent Hodson and Pierre Lacotte and Catherine Turocy. They may be guesswork, more or less, but they’re amusing guesswork. We can no more easily toss aside a pursuit for historical “authenticity” as we can abandon the ideal of journalistic objectivity. They may be phantasms, but they’re seductive ones.