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Out There

Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology

Out There

The media make a potentially fatal mistake by dividing arts coverage into high and low, old and young, and by trivializing our passionate attraction to things. In Out There I propose that all creative expression has the potential to be both thought-provoking and popular; to write about flea markets as if they were museums (and vice versa); to celebrate singers and chefs.
A short example:

Why should I, or anyone, have been surprised that a few years back, Yoko Ono was number one on the dance-club charts — with a gay redo of her and John’s Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him? It was a nice story: a young friend had told Yoko that his once-hip mom cited those old lyrics when the boy came out to her, so Yoko gave him some post-hip ammunition (Every Man Has a Man…) to sing back.

Some of us think of Yoko Ono primarily as a talented, well-funded Fluxus artist; some as an avant-garde screecher; some as a mythic has-been, the demon who broke up the Beatles. How can any cultural critic know exactly which reader, listener or viewer is out there? Pleasing a shape-shifting audience would seem to be impossible, especially when the culture also won’t hold still.

During most of my professional life I’ve been a citizen of two different worlds: the fine and the popular arts. When I was a restaurant critic, many of my arts friends teased me about my frivolous hobby (though no one refused a dinner out). My food friends couldn’t fathom why I’d occasionally speed up a meal to go to a gallery opening or make a curtain. The two camps were baffled equally by my lifelong attraction to barrel-bottom TV, tear-churning beach reads, coming-out potboilers: cultural junk food. And real junk food, too.

Pleasure, I told them, was my reason. Material pleasure, I discovered, is never entirely physical: it always latches on to emotions, memories, ideas. And the pleasure of thought is never entirely cerebral: it invariably comes with heart and skin attached.

So that’s my starting point. Did I mention that I love stories, and TV remains our narrative cornucopia? That eating is culture? That I’m a gay man who has no trouble getting angry about what is — and isn’t — out there?

Jeff Weinstein

Based in New York, I've been an editor of arts coverage at New York's "Soho Weekly News" (1977-79); of visual arts and architecture criticism and much else at the "Village Voice" (1981-95, with a stint as managing editor of "Artforum"); of the fine arts at the "Philadelphia Inquirer" (1997-2006); of arts and culture at "Bloomberg News" (2006-07). Until recently... Read More…

Out There

The media make a potentially fatal mistake by dividing arts coverage into high and low, old and young, and by trivializing our passionate attraction to things. In Out There I propose that all creative expression has the potential to be both … [Read More...]

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Recently & Elsewhere

I wrote and narrated a Daylight Magazine slideshow (click on "Read more" below to access it and the rest), an appreciation of the late photographer Milton Rogovin. Also one about the late photographer Helen Levitt. To go back in time, kindly click … [Read More...]

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  • Mark William Van Wagner on Clarion: “Maybe the next time MARQUEE PROJECTS has another poetry reading night, we could get you to participate again but this…” Mar 1, 20:40
  • Edith Newhall on Clarion: “Lovely piece, Jeff! You prompted me to listen to the sound of the ancient conch shell as wind instrument. A…” Feb 20, 19:09
  • Carol Felsenthal on Clarion: “Reading this, I realized there’s so many things I don’t know about writer/editor/friend Jeff Weinstein. Just read & savored “Clarion.”…” Feb 20, 15:40
  • Jenny Dixon on An -ing Life: “What a wonderful delicious writer you are…a voice that does ‘t age. – Jenny D.” Nov 24, 09:00
  • Jeff Weinstein on An -ing Life: “Fifteen years, oh my goodness. Love to you, too.” Nov 24, 00:05
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