That filter, though, is important, as a review is meant to be an outside evaluation of a work or a performance. Artists reviewing themselves is different from artists Tweeting after a performance that they were happy with it, or alerting fans and followers about a concert that’s going to happen, both of which should be encouraged, in my opinion. Of course, everything and everyone is somehow biased, somehow agenda-ed, and paid critics are no exception.That said, do we need publicists writing reviews of their own clients’ work? Do we need artists reviewing their own work? A separation of perspective exists for a reason. And despite these blurred lines, traditional media can still be uplifting or damaging to an artist’s career. Surely publicists and managers of every generation have liked to be in control, and what creates a feeling of more helplessness than a bad review of a CD your client and you have been working on for years? What is more frustrating than a profile for which a journalist clearly went in to an interview with an agenda, completely unbeknownst to you? Because we have grown so accustomed to Tweeting, updating, and blogging our every thought, our urge to comment on negative features and reviews rather than ignore them or learn our lesson with certain writers is accelerated. <\/p>\n
In response to the two angriest (and lengthiest!) e mails I’ve received about this blog–one from a publicist at a major New York presenter and another from the head of a major record label–I suggested they make their comments public. I do believe that this blog is a forum for discussion and that my words, though perhaps the most numerous, are nowhere approaching final. Neither the label nor the presenter commented, and frankly, as a publicist, I would have advised them to do just that. Where, then, is the disconnect? I write this blog and want people to post their criticisms, and then I tell my own clients that they shouldn’t comment on their own features or reviews? Am I simply a Big Old Hypocrite, or are we all at a point in media history wherein we’re not quite sure whether everyone having the access, ability and inclination to respond in a public way is helping us or hurting us?<\/p>\n
This self-described “review by hearsay” in the Anderson Valley Advertiser<\/i><\/a> would make any publicist, manager or artist’s hackles shoot up to the sky. Amazingly, it is a review of a concert performed by organist Cameron Carpenter by a critic who wasn’t at the concert! <\/i>It’s comic gold, really:<\/p>\n While I’ve already admitted that I wasn’t even at the concert, I Call it a new genre: the review by hearsay.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n If this popped up on my Google Alerts, I would probably first send it to my friends under some kind of “What the…” subject line and then most likely pass it along to my client and the rest of the team under a similar subject. That said, it is published, it is completely ridiculous, things do live on the internet forever, and anyone would have a right to be upset by it. Enter the angry manager. All the correspondence above and below was published on the Anderson Valley Advertiser <\/i>website. <\/i>It’s unclear whether the writer, David Yearsley, asked for permission to add Cameron Carpenter’s manager’s e mails to his review. I assume he did not. <\/p>\n Informed of the article by Google Alerts, Carpenter’s agent, Richard “Dear Mr. Yearsley: I’m rather shocked. You should have recused “I managed Virgil Fox [one of the greatest 20th-century organists, (According to Norman Lebrecht, Cameron Carpenter is no longer with this agent. See his blog post<\/a> on the subject, complete with another e mail. It seems everyone likes printing Richard Torrence’s passionate discourse.)<\/i><\/p>\n You can read the entire exchange back on Review By Hearsay dot com<\/a>, but the publishing of e mails just continues. I wonder what Torrence thought would come of this, and I wonder if he requested anywhere that it not be published. Why did he not write a formal e mail to the writer’s editor? Why did he not contact the presenter of the concert and suggest that they never provide the writer with press tickets again (excuse me – never provide his wife and daughters with press tickets again)? Does saying that Cameron Carpenter’s girlfriend “had never seen him so distraught” really solve any problems, here? <\/p>\n There is only one comment on David Yearsley’s post, How Cameron Carpenter Blew It In Ithaca, <\/i>so the publishing of the manager’s e mails did not spark the discussion that perhaps Yearsley thought it would. <\/i>It seems to me that if someone stumbled upon it somehow, the “review” on its own would have simply made that person chuckle and they would have moved on to another. Complete with his agent’s rants, though, it makes me want to stick around, read the whole thing, and send it to friends. <\/p>\n Did you ever think Virgil Fox’s former manager and Kanye West would have anything in common? No you did not, but the wonders never cease here on Life’s a Pitch. <\/i>Last week, Kanye West posted the following on Twitter<\/a> tearing apart LA Times <\/i>writer Chris Lee:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (Screenshot found on the LA Times<\/i> website.)<\/p>\n In prose form:<\/p>\n “I believe the writer’s name was Kriss Lee who so bent on giving a I wonder if Chris Lee is insulted by Kanye West’s soulless spelling of his name as “Kriss.” How can anyone <\/i>believe anything<\/i> he ever Tweets again? <\/p>\n These Tweets have been removed from Kanye West’s otherwise exceedingly positive Twitter feed, which originally began as a sort of image and personal rehabilitation prone to the hashtag #itsaprocess. Early in his Tweeting career, West claimed that this was all him, with no publicists involved. The LA Times <\/i>monologue was one of the few negative outbursts, and that’s what was taken down? And no one suggested he do that? <\/p>\n It is important to acknowledge the difference between a negative review\/piece and a wrong review\/piece. Corrections should be pointed out (if one more person tries to make Hilary older than 30 you will hear my scream throughout the land – GO TO WIKIPEDIA), but I wonder where the commenting on the commentary and the comments will get us. Sometimes, maybe, it’s best to print out a copy of that terrible blog post, let your friend’s cat pee on it, and let it go.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Further reading: here<\/a> is an article on Slate about hotels defending themselves in the comments section of TripAdvisor and here<\/a> is Lisa Hirsch over at <\/i>Iron Tongue of Midnight<\/i> on artists reading and commenting on reviews of their performances. Also, Neil Gaiman on his relationship with his Twitter followers<\/a>. <\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There’s a line…maybe it’s from Newsies…or Roman Holiday…about how today’s headlines will line tomorrow’s kitty litter bins. Today, newspapers and magazines that remove articles from their sites after a certain date are rare; the Philadelphia Inquirer is a notable offender. When a feature or review in a newspaper would never been seen or heard from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-539","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\noffer this virtual review of Carpenter’s Ithaca appearance, or better a
\nreport on its reception among a pair of music lovers dear to my heart:
\nmy two daughters, Elizabeth and Cecilia, ages ten and twelve
\nrespectively. They’d been taken to the concert by their mother, Annette
\nRichards, the Cornell University organist. It is from children that the
\ntruth, musical or otherwise, is most likely to emerge. They’ve heard
\nrecitals and services by their parents on organs across North America
\nand Europe, from the electronic travesty in the Christian Science
\nchurch at the bottom of our street to the great Silberman organ from
\n1755 in the Catholic Cathedral in Dresden.<\/p>\n\n
\nTorrence, appeared in my in-box within minutes of the posting of my
\npiece. He’d written me some months back with warm words about my review
\nof Carpenter’s grammy-nominated CD, Revolutionary. His attitude towards
\nthe most recent offering was somewhat less enthusiastic.\n<\/p>\n
\nyourself because (1) you weren’t there, and (2) you ended up putting
\ndown the audience. I can’t even fathom why you accepted the assignment;
\nor were you looking for clay feet? Further, you should have made much
\nmore about the horror of the Schlicker organ [Schlicker is the
\nnow-defunct company of Buffalo that made the Ithaca College organ]. All
\nSchlickers were and are (if they are still around) horrors. To rebuild
\none is the height of folly (did you and your wife have something to do
\nwith that?). Cameron had just played a rebuilt Schlicker in Cleveland
\ntwo weeks before, and he said it was the worst organ he had ever played
\npublicly-and said that he had memory slips (in five years, I’ve never
\nseen him have one) and played badly. However, after encountering the
\nIthaca organ he called to say that the Cleveland organ couldn’t hold a
\ncandle to the horror of the Ithaca organ. And he said that he, once
\nagain, played badly. Don’t worry, he knows full well how he plays, and
\nhe was profoundly unhappy. His girlfriend, who was with him, said that
\nshe had never seen him so distraught. Yes, he blamed the organ, but
\nthat was the truth. Was he supposed to lie? Why was he asked to play
\nsuch an organ? Is there no one up there who knows anything about
\norgans, you and your family’s claims not withstanding?<\/p>\n
\nand after his tenure at the Riverside Church in New York City, a
\nproponent of the electronic organ; see Torrence’s illuminating
\n“irreverent biography” of Fox, for 17 years, and he often had to walk
\ninto bad situations. For him, as bad as it was, the Rodgers Touring
\nOrgan was a godsend; he could at least know, in advance, what he was
\ndealing with. A specification won’t tell you that, but I can now see
\nthat the Schlicker name can–and as Cameron’s manager I will see that
\nhis talent is not maligned again because of a Schlicker organ.I would
\nalso hope that a person of supposed integrity would not send his
\nchildren and wife to a concert, and then review it himself. You thought
\nyou took yourself off the hook because you told the truth, but you
\nobviously didn’t have a clue, yourself, what Cameron was going through.
\nFurther, you have gone out of your way to make a great and serious
\nartist–stuck with a piece of shit for an organ–look bad. Bad form,
\nand not a recommendation for Ithaca or Cornell. The one positive result
\nof your review? He will never be invited back to play in the area. Your
\nloss.
\nRichard”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"KanyeWestTwitter.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/KanyeWestTwitter.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\n
\nsoulless description of my work that he decided to call the album not even by the right name ironically but I feel more
\nstrategically removing the word ‘Beautiful’ from the title!
\nWoooooooooooow! I assumed a respected media source like the Los Angeles Times would
\nsend a writer that would at least have the respect to call the album by it’s proper title. It’s called “MY BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED
\nFANTASY” Kriss. Even if your goal was to perpetuate non-positive thought association. You see what happens when you write with a
\nnegative agenda. You have the entire Los Angeles Time’s coming off like a non credible news source that can’t even fact check a well publicized album title. How can anyone believe anything you ever write again? I feel sorry
\nfor the LA Times more than anything for missing the opportunity…”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n