A History of Rock Criticism - Columbia University

140 REPORTING THE ARTS II

better writers Ian Dove and JohnRockwell until Rockwell came on staffin 1974.

By then—beginning with RichardGoldstein of The Village Voice, whosePop Eye column began in 1965—rockcriticism was epidemic. It was a stapleof the nascent alternative-weekly busi-ness, de rigueur in short-lived lifestyle

monthlies like Eye and Cheetah, raisond’etre in such fanzines-going-commer-cial as Paul Williams’ seminalCrawdaddy, Robert Somma’s cerebralFusion and Dave Marsh’s gonzo Creem.You could read it in Life (AlbertGoldman), The New Yorker (EllenWillis), Saturday Review (EllenSander), and Esquire (myself). And ofcourse, rock criticism was the backboneof the most successful magazine startupof the late ’60s, Rolling Stone.

So why were the dailies so slow tocatch up? Beyond the home truth that,artswise, the dailies are always slow,there were three reasons. First, the spe-cial hold of classical music on the high-brow sensibility should never be under-estimated. Since opera and symphonyseem the embodiment of genteel cul-ture, popular music of every kind, jazzincluded, has always gotten short shriftcritically. Second, rock criticism’s ’60sstrongholds were mostly undergroundor counterculture, a formation the

When do we say television becomes acultural reality? Around 1948, right?And when did The New York Timesradio columnist Jack Gould begin hismove to TV coverage? November 16,1947, with a review of the Theatre Guildproduction of a play called JohnFlaherty. Nor was Gould alone. JohnCrosby of the New York Herald Tribunewas only the most prominent of count-less TV critics scattered at dailiesnationwide by the early ’50s.

When do we say rock and rollbecomes a cultural reality? Around1955, right? And the first rock critic at adaily paper? The locally beloved,nationally obscure Jane Scott, who was45 on September 15, 1964, when shereviewed a Beatles concert, commenc-ing a long, effusive career at theCleveland Plain Dealer. Nationally,however, this meant nothing. I’m awareof two generalists—downtown colum-nist Al Aronowitz of the New York Postand, crucially, jazz critic Ralph J.Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle,later gray eminence at Rolling Stone—who wrote about pop music occasional-ly. No doubt there were others, as wellas classical dabblers (one was RobertMicklin, who ceded Newsday’s rock beatto me in March 1972). But dedicatedcritics? In the dailies? In the ’60s? Notbloody likely. Stringer-turned-major-domo Robert Hilburn wasn’t hired toreplace forgotten stringer Pete Johnsonat the Los Angeles Times until 1970. Theinsufficiently legendary Lillian Roxon, ahip and sharp-tongued version of Scotttill her death in 1973, was a pop special-ist at Australia’s Sydney MorningHerald for years before she joined NewYork’s Daily News in 1971. The New YorkTimes relegated its occasional daily rockcoverage to the dreadful freelancer MikeJahn until 1972, then shared it between

dailies in their lowest-common-denom-inator caution resisted more recalci-trantly than the upmarket slicks. But Ibelieve the third reason was mostimportant. Rock and roll was supposedto be for kids.

Well, right. In the ’50s, rock and rollwas for kids. But even then that meantolder kids, which is to say teenagers—incipient adults. You’d think some jour-nalistic visionary would have tried toinstill the newspaper habit in thisdemographic. Any failure to do so cer-tainly rests more with such factors asthe demon television and the imminentdemise of Western civilization than rockcriticism or the lack thereof. Still, somealert, thoughtful, entertaining musicreviewing might have made a differ-ence. Yet neither arts editors, with theirmiddlebrow prejudices, nor general edi-tors, with their hardboiled ones, seem tohave considered it.

Thus rock criticism underwent ajourney rather different from that offilm (which was helped along, as TVcriticism was later, by the movies’ linksto theater and hence literature). Strictlyspeaking, film criticism had a prehistoryin the trades, as did rock criticism, withrhythm-and-blues proponent PaulAckerman of Billboard the key name.Movie fan magazines began withPhotoplay in 1911; date their musicalcounterparts to the swing magazines ofthe ’30s or 1943’s Hit Parader. But by1920, with the 1915 release of Birth of aNation a benchmark, the dailies had alock on the critical appraisal of cinemain America, where the traditional news-paper standards that defined it as moviereviewing predominated.

At the new music mags and alterna-tive weeklies, no such standards were inplace. It was, of course, the ’60s. TheNew Journalism was in the air, along

A History of Rock Criticism

By Robert Christgau

It was, of course, the

’60s. The New

Journalism was in the

air, along with loose talk

of freedom, revolution

and astrology.

NATIONAL ARTS JOURNALISM PROGRAM 141

with loose talk of freedom, revolutionand astrology. None of us was gettingpaid much, and few had actual jobs orbelieved we needed them. There was aworld of necessity out there, and beforelong it would step on our necks; in themeantime, however, rock criticism wasa literary haven. Even at Rolling Stone,where former daily reporter John Burkswas charged with imposing order, thefirst reviews editor was only hired inJune 1969. Greil Marcus wouldn’t aban-don his doctoral studies for a full-timecareer as an intellectual gadfly until1972, and his standards were plentifuland stringent. He wasn’t above rewritingsubmissions with no consultation (andlittle complaint). But when he wasbrought onboard to oversee a sectionthat had previously come together adhoc, he set himself against Stone’salready entrenched culture of reverence.Marcus wanted fans who expectedrecords to change their lives and got madwhen they didn’t. He wanted, he says,“betrayal and outrage and enthusiasm.”

Standards established, he left inearly 1970, and before the end of theyear the job had passed to columnistJon Landau, the straightest of the oldCrawdaddy crew. A sometime recordproducer, Landau by 1977 was manag-ing Bruce Springsteen, an artist he hadfamously dubbed “rock and roll future”in Boston’s Real Paper before their busi-ness relationship began. Relying heavilyon writers from the Boston alt weekliesas well as the Bay Area, Landau profes-sionalized Stone’s section while promot-ing an auteur theory derived fromAndrew Sarris. This turn from the pre-vailing Kaelism—an unsystematicresponsiveness that valued lively writingabove all else—had the commonsensicaleffect of insisting that the artist with hisor her name on the cover was express-ing a vision traceable from album toalbum. But it also reinforced the cultureof reverence by paying obeisance totrusted mainstays, including manysinger-songwriters whose less-than-meets-the-eye equivalents in film Sarrisregularly roasted to a crisp. Much ofLandau’s cadre has faded away. JanetMaslin and Stephen Holden both endedup at The New York Times, where

Maslin never wrote about music andHolden is now a film and theater criticwho occasionally deigns to praise adultpop and/or dismiss anything liked by kids.

Countering Rolling Stone at a lowerlevel of profitability was Creem, whichsoon lured Lester Bangs from Californiato Detroit, where he set a wildly irrever-ent tone many others there emulated.Creem was born to be brash—even nowDave Marsh writes with a chip on hisshoulder in the self-published, outspo-kenly left-wing Rock & RapConfidential. But it got truly crazy onceBangs started spouting copy and charis-ma. Except for Richard Meltzer, whofirst appeared in Crawdaddy and wasBangs’ only acknowledged rock-critical

inspiration, no colleague at Creem (oranywhere else) approached Bangs’ par-ticular brilliance. Unfazed by fame, yetso drunk on his own élan vital that hisattempts at cynicism were often endear-ing, he wrote from an emotional, explic-itly subjective laff-a-minute vantagethat still offends prigs who consider thefirst person a sin. His unending passionfor music fed off his knowledge and intohis insights. Creem continued toembody a culture of irreverence evenafter Marsh and Bangs had moved toNew York, in 1973 and 1976 respective-ly. If Rolling Stone gave the worldSpringsteen, Creem provided early con-tributor Patti Smith.

This polarity was far from absolute,

however. Multiplatinum demigod andpunk godmother both resisted singer-songwriter gentility and arena-rockpomp with rebel poses, terse song formsand hard beats, and got hosannas inboth Stone and Creem as a result.Different as they were, both magazinesvalued idealistic cunning and formalcourage in not just the music theypraised but the writing they published—auteurist gravitas had no more place inthe straight press than gonzo nose-thumbing.

My aim when I took over the VillageVoice Riffs section in 1974 was a synthe-sis—Meltzer meets Maslin, Holdenmeets Bangs. I also wanted more poli-tics, more women writers and, pleaseGod, a few blacks and some salsa cover-age—as well as more ways of seeingblack music, as the word “disco” becamethe latest way to imply that African-American pop wasn’t “artistic” enough.And though I didn’t succeed to theextent I’d hoped, the attempt provedprophetic in the weeklies and, by osmo-sis, the dailies as rock criticism grew up.The Voice’s Pazz & Jop Critics’ Poll,which became official with a mailing to24 close colleagues in 1974—and whichin its 2002 edition canvassed some1,500 critics and tallied ballots from 695of them—provided an excellent way togauge this growth.

Hand wringing is always a tempta-tion in retrospectives like this, and I’llindulge before I’m through. Rock criti-cism was certainly more fun in the olddays, no matter how cool the tyros opin-ing for chump change in netzines likePopMatters and Pitchfork think it isnow. But let me accentuate the positive.How did we get from a Beatlemaniathat went without significant criticalconsideration in the daily press to anembattled megabusiness that attractslocally generated reviews and featuresfrom the Portland Press Herald to TheFresno Bee? And this in addition toscads of weekly leisure guides and ashelf full of specialized national maga-zines, including no fewer than threecash cows ruminating on hip-hop—astyle many baby-boomers refuse to rec-ognize as music at all—that are also,what a coincidence, the first ever to

Rock’s commercial

juggernaut became

impossible to ignore, as

did the actually existing

musical interests of

working journalists

whose hair kept getting

longer and whose

mean birth date kept

getting later.


attract respectable numbers of AfricanAmericans to popular music journalism?

The answer is basically simple. WithRolling Stone a beacon, editors andpublishers slowly climbed aboard.Rock’s commercial juggernaut becameimpossible to ignore, as did the actuallyexisting musical interests of workingjournalists whose hair kept gettinglonger and whose mean birth date keptgetting later. Not that every hireadvanced the craft. At the smallerpapers, the popular music beat was (andstill is) often tossed to whatever ambi-tious copyperson or local loudmouthput a hand up. Nevertheless, canons ofartistic quality, critical vocabulary, his-torical overview and cultural commit-ment quickly asserted themselves. Theaesthetic was hell on pretension and inlove with authenticity, excitement andthe shock of the new. Although it valuedformal imagination over technical skill,it expected tuneful songwriting and reg-ularly got hot for strong tonsils or slip-pery fingers deployed in the service ofform, authenticity or both. The prosethat articulated these standards favoreda slangy informality that didn’t rule outacademese unfit for use in a familynewspaper. Blues-and-country-had-a-baby and Sgt.-Pepper-begat-the-con-cept-album proved handy origin myths.With the circa-1976 advent of punk, theVelvet Underground was anointed aseminal band even though it hadn’t soldmany records, which was a crucial para-digm shift. Most important, and mostremarkable, was that rock criticismembraced a dream or metaphor of per-petual revolution. Just as Marcus hadinsisted, worthwhile new bands weresupposed to change people’s lives,preferably for the better. If they failed todo so, that meant they didn’t, in thecant term, “matter.”

These generalizations are so sketchythey approach caricature; variations arelegion, exceptions innumerable. Butthey sum up the ideology that underliessome gnostic gospel or other at Spinand Creative Loafing alike, and even inthe dailies, where tastes and stylebookscan get pretty hidebound, they pertainbig-time. From what I see at Pazz & Joptime, rock critics have more rebel rheto-

ric in them than any other journalisticsubclass. The punk upheavals, whichkicked in shortly after rock criticismestablished itself and were supportedfar more enthusiastically by the pressthan by record companies or radio,spawned a profusion of more-uncom-mercial-than-thou fanzines and anexplosion of college music writing inofficial campus newspapers and insur-gent publications.

Meanwhile, back at the dailies, punkput a permanent crimp in any hopesthat the geek in the corner with the ear-phone head would automatically coughup the celebrity inches editors covet. By

the mid-’80s, a burgeoning indie-rocksubculture had turned so-called “critics’records” into a staple of discretionarycoverage, a deal sealed when Nirvanabriefly made alternative a byword. Ofcourse rock critics had to provide back-stage interviews and arena-pop reviews,although at the larger papers these taskswere often handed off to second-stringers, gossip columnists and enter-tainment reporters. But where a moviereviewer was obliged to acknowledgethe weekly blockbuster, the plethora ofmusical options made it harder for edi-tors to dictate specifics. Big prestigerecords—Sting solo albums, say—werewidely reviewed. But surefire bestsellersin low-prestige genres like disco, metaland teenpop were counted less news-worthy than the latest by R.E.M.(launched as a critics’ band) or theReplacements (never anything else).Disagreements between the cops on thebeat and their sergeants at the deskoccasioned considerable friction, andthe superior officers often prevailed. Butit’s remarkable that there was an argu-

ment at all, and this stemmed in consid-erable measure from the history of rockcriticism outlined above.

Personally, I think authenticity is acrock, and believe today’s rock-criticalorthodoxy is far too dismissive of popforms and audiences, even at thedailies—the terse song forms and hardbeats early rock criticism championedwere explicitly pop usages. But there isan editorial logic to reviewing R.E.M.rather than Rick Springfield, LucindaWilliams rather than Mandy Moore—not just journalism’s principled commit-ment to aesthetic quality, which we ofcourse assume, but the self-evident factthat music criticism’s reading audienceis a subset of music’s listening audience.Music is sensual, preverbal, counterana-lytic and sometimes pretty dumb (whichdoes not equate with bad). Except forsometimes pretty dumb (which doesequate to bad), criticism is none of thesethings, even in its blatant consumer-service form.

Yet with music coverage ensconced,editors now dream of attracting the kidstheir predecessors disdained ratherthan the alienated college students theyended up hiring, who while less numer-ous are an apter target. The hardboiledmiddlebrows at the desk still glance atBillboard’s Hot 200, woeful shadow ofits 1999 self though it may be, and won-der why their paper hasn’t weighed inon the new one by this Chingy guy (it isa guy, right?). Nor is there reason tobelieve these touching dreams will dis-appear. Editors will always think theyunderstand “the reader” better thantheir minions. Nevertheless, giving rockcritics their head contentwise is in thebest interest of everyone concerned—readers and listeners, writers and musi-cians, captains of the music and jour-nalism industries.

Rock criticism’s literary dimensionhas been squeezed hard by a design-driven journalistic marketplace whereprint is seen as “gray.” In Rolling Stone,Spin, Vibe and every other nationalmusic mag, review lengths have dimin-ished inexorably, and the feature essayhas gone the way of the California con-dor. Even in the alternative press, thedrive to transform “arts coverage” into

Consumers need

gatekeepers far more

now than when popular

music was what got

played on the radio and

made the charts.


“entertainment guide” is visible every-where. Only on the Net, where the fewcritics with paying gigs suffer similarstrictures but hobbyists enjoy more lati-tude, are the gonzo first-person and themad harangue tolerated.

The musical marketplace, however,exerts rather different pressures. Nolonger does rock or any other kind ofpop seem a commercial juggernaut. Yetwhether the villain be “electronic theft”or the shortsighted abandonment ofartist development in pursuit of themalleable audience and the high-over-head blockbuster, the end result is thesame. And it’s not what self-servingdoomsayers seeking punitive copyrightlaws claim, either. Music isn’t “dying”—although maybe some fun pop kindswill lose their juice once rich-and-famous is bled to a husk by reality tele-vision. It’s just spreading out.

Before the downloading panic, thekey statistic about popular music wasthe approximately tenfold increase inalbum-length releases between 1988and 1998. The figure has dipped some,but even if the current estimate of27,000 new titles annually is correct,almost every artist ever cut loose by amajor label—as well as innumerable up-and-comers and going-nowheres—will

continue to hawk more hours of record-ed music than there are hours in a yearfor years to come. Assuming the Re-cording Industry Association of Americadoesn’t destroy online music altogether,the Internet will make it easier to access,and for better or worse will help shiftconsumer focus from albums to individ-ual songs. But there’ll still be moremusic than anyone can absorb, especial-ly anyone with other things to do.

This means that whether the technological future is utopian or dra-conian, the consumer-service aspect of rock criticism has been redefined.Consumers need gatekeepers far morenow than when popular music was whatgot played on the radio and made thecharts. They need people whose life-work is seeking out good music of everysort and telling the world about it—maybe not literally, but with the linguis-tic informality (and rebel rhetoric) themood and ambition of quality popularmusic still regularly demand.

Thus we have the influential Blendermodel—several hundred brief, gradedrecord reviews arranged alphabetically,a format that traces back throughEntertainment Weekly to the ConsumerGuide. Here, regrettably if predictably,uniform length and the refusal to pre-

sume reader sophistication flattens toomuch of the prose. Things are looser inthe hip-hop press, but propagandisticmyopia, compounded by permissiveediting, renders even XXL and Vibeduller than they might be. The alt week-lies continue their wildly inconsistentwork, constrained more than ever byescalating newsprint costs and insultingword rates. And finding the provocativecriticism you’d hope would be floweringon the Net—I could name a few randomobsessives, and there have to be more—is harder than unearthing the one rivet-ing indie-rock album in a pile ofpatched-together freebies. Informedgatekeepers do perform a social func-tion, and they’re rarer on the Net thanin college radio.

In theory, and conceivably in prac-tice, the dailies could help fill this need.The newspaper business missed itschance to define rock criticism at theoutset. Even if it had been on point,however, the rush of reality would cer-tainly have outstripped the definitions.Now that same business shares withRolling Stone the opportunity to hangon for dear life as it follows a story that’snever disappeared from human lifewhether it got into the papers or not—and, bet on it, isn’t about to now.


the club circuit. So without perceivingit themselves, musician critics canbecome champions of the obscure orthe technically proficient simply torealign the relation of their art to theworld and to alleviate their personaldisappointment. Who can blamethem? Move the goalposts and thescore changes. The problem here for a

musician who wants to be a critic isthat much musically innovative andsocially rich pop music—especiallynow—is a direct repudiation of the ideaof an apprenticed, learned craft. Just asit would be a mistake to let, say, con-servative economist Francis Fukuyamareview a book by Marxists MichaelHardt and Antonio Negri—not thatsuch a blatant editorial mistake wouldhappen at a major newspaper in2004—professional musicians are pre-cisely the last people who shouldreview popular music. Pop is the erup-tion of an unknown voice using over-looked technology. Knowing how itusually goes is exactly what you don’t want.

Musician critics may let their pro-fessional bias discolor critique some-times, but they also have a body ofmaterial knowledge that can enhancethe discourse around pop music.Musician critics David Grubbs andFranklin Bruno remind us that thereare fruitful ways for a musician to usespecialized knowledge as a booster foranalysis. “Probably, given how popular

Fiction critics are usually novelists.Poetry reviewers are, with very fewexceptions, poets. Nearly half of all artcritics are also artists. But when youlook to the two commercial art formsthat earn more than these three artforms summed and cubed, somethingfunny happens. Film critics are rarelydirectors or actors, and pop music crit-ics are rarely musicians. And thoughsome of my fellow musicians disagree,this seems appropriate. Film and popare art forms that work quickly, andthrough wide dispersal. Their impactleapfrogs training or literacy. To under-stand these forms is not necessarily toknow their blueprints but to be able toabsorb and understand their impact.Because I am both a musician and apop critic, I can count measures andsubdivisions more easily than someonewithout any musical training. But myability to identify time signatures doesn’t necessarily put me ahead of anyother critic with good ears and a lot ofenergy. Pop music and film replicatebecause of their immediacy. Image andsound both have global transparency.You don’t need to know where BritneySpears learned her trade to participatefully in her work, to access the zing of asong like Toxic. And though an analysisof the song’s chromatic loop-de-loopsmight be pointed and interesting, itwill likely speak to a narrative of pro-duction that runs alongside the textbut doesn’t necessarily relate to howthe text lives and bounces around inthe world.

Pop is an art form built by and foramateurs, who are sometimes remu-nerated on a scale beyond the ken ofprofessionals in any field. Faced withthis extreme social algorithm, profes-sional musicians often resent theirtime in expensive music schools and on

music works,” says Bruno, “it’s lessimportant that critics know muchabout, say, harmony, than about record-ing technology.” As Grubbs adds, “Ihave a decided preference for criticswho understand the nuts and bolts oftheir given subject—not because yearsspent in the salt mine confer authority,but rather because these things aid awriter’s powers of description. Think ofAmerican Pastoral and Philip Rothlearning how leather gloves are crafted.”

With professional frustrations setaside, musician critics are well-suitedto enrich critical analysis with insightsinto modes of production and thematerial basis of an aesthetic, the latteran area of huge potential for pop criti-cism: What equipment has enabledwhat genres? What songs are beingquoted in which other songs, and howoften? How common are certain rhyth-mic patterns, and where did they firstappear? Too often, though, the musi-cian critic reaches for a form of self-pity common to many craftspeoplerubbing against the digital age. “Youtry it” was the refrain I heard frommany musician critics, indicating dis-taste for both critics who don’t play aninstrument—critics could easilyrespond, “You try going to 200 shows ayear”—and players succeeding in amusical field the musician perceives asinimical to their training. The trainedjazz improvisers resent the hip-hopartists who don’t play an instrumentbut sell records, the hip-hop artistsresent the rock bands who receivemore press coverage, the indie artistsresent the critics for pointing outwhere the indie artist went to college.Musicians, not surprisingly, take musicfairly personally.

But so does everybody. That’s whatmakes it popular music. Like others,

Subject/ObjectFirsthand Knowledge in Criticism

By Sasha Frere-Jones

Pop is the eruption of an

unknown voice using

overlooked technology.


musicians and critics frame their expe-rience in the first person. This is sym-pathetically enhanced by the highdegree of first-person subjectivity inpop. Multiply all of this and you see ahigh dose of informal subjectivity inpop criticism. (This variable is lessprevalent in art criticism, where a state-ment such as “The big titanium bunnymade me think of when I learned toride a bike” would not likely appear.) Allthis first-person yammering is a goodthing for pop criticism, which has roomfor both high theorists and bedroomdiarists. The problem with a musiciancritic’s first-person complaining is notthat it’s complaining—it’s the claim toauthority that, in turn, blocks percep-tion. If a musician believes, prima facie,that he knows better, his critique is nomore than an expression of pique andan explicit rejection of the democratiz-ing power of the music at hand. But ifthe critic and listener can agree to occu-pying the same unstable and overheat-ed ground, then anything is fair game—Althusser’s theory of ideological stateapparatuses, the difference betweenChet Atkins’ and Steve Vai’s use of thewhammy bar, and how it feels to buyyour first stereo with your own money.

This is all framed by the fact thatpop criticism is anchored by (or definedagainst) the reality that pop music ismechanically reproduced and sold. Thereader of pop criticism is a consumer ina way that someone considering goingto a gallery show is not. A minority mayread pop criticism as prose or philoso-phy, but to the larger audience it is abetting broadsheet. Will I win, lose or

show with my 10 bucks? When answer-ing that question, what constitutesexpertise for the relevant critic?Knowing how to play the guitar or, per-haps, knowing how to listen to recordsin the same way as other listeners? “Icould never have written about LucindaWilliams’s Car Wheels on a GravelRoad, for instance, because the sound isso compressed I cannot stand to listento it,” admits bassist-writer TimMidgett. “If I hadn’t had a hand in mas-tering a bunch of records in my life, I

might not have that problem, but I haveit, and I have to be aware that my earsare the way they are.” The average read-er likely agrees with The Village Voicecritic and Burnt Sugar bandleader GregTate, someone whose musical expertisehas not hampered his critical faculties:“I prefer critics with informed and pas-sionate ideas about the art they review,who can write engaging prose, andcould care less about their musical pro-ficiency. Those who only deal with theproduct have proven as insightful asthose with technical insight.”

With some exceptions, informedpolymaths have more to offer readers

than the deep specialists. In the late1960s, then-editor Greil Marcus pub-lished rock critic Lester Bangs in therelatively new Rolling Stone, eventhough he had published very fewpieces. Bangs—who himself wrote andrecorded music and even thought ofditching writing and becoming a full-time musician—then used the highcopy needs of various review sections tostay busy and develop his craft. Andwhile record reviewing is not the samebeast it was when Bangs started in1969, writers can still get a byline withalmost no résumé. It is this unsuper-vised nature of pop criticism that hasallowed remarkable stylists andthinkers to work with more formal dar-ing and political chutzpah than theirbrothers and sisters across the aisles inthe book review section.

Most of the important figures inpop criticism—Robert Christgau, GreilMarcus, Ann Powers—are not musi-cians but rather experts in hearing andunderstanding lateral connections. Poptends to saturate and bear the mark ofthe present more than it boomerangsback and forth through time. A musi-cian craftsman is often the oppositekind of agent, invested in the longitudi-nal history of a small niche. Whether anautodidact or a conservatory graduate,a musician comfortable with the popaudience and willing to subordinatetechnical knowledge to the needs ofthat audience would be a valuable criticindeed. Let’s hope we see more of thiskind of critic, and soon. Blackberryrock is scheduled to peak in about five minutes.

All this first-person

yammering is a good

thing for pop criticism,

which has room for both

high theorists and

bedroom diarists.


familiarity with Longfellow’s TheSong of Hiawatha, which all liter-ate Americans once knew]. It is apicture of the peace and beauty oftoday colored by a memory of sor-rows gone that the composer hasgiven us at the beginning and endof his second movement.

But Henderson’s review is mostremarkable where it deals with thequestion most debated about this worka century ago: “Is it American?”Boston’s critics would answer: No. ToPhilip Hale, of The Boston HomeJournal, Dvorak was a naive interloper,a “negrophile” susceptible to the notionthat “the future of American musicrests on the use of Congo, NorthAmerican Indian Creole, Greaser andCowboy ditties, whinings, yawps, andwhoopings.” New York critics disagreed,none more inspirationally thanHenderson:

William James Henderson’s reviewof the premiere of Dvorak’s Symphony“From the New World” in The New YorkTimes of Dec. 17, 1893, is one of themost impressive feats in the history ofAmerican musical journalism.Henderson begins:

The attempt to describe a newmusical composition may not bequite so futile as an effort to photo-graph the perfume of a flower, yetit is an experiment of similarnature. Only an imperfect and per-haps misleading idea of the char-acter of so complex a work of art asa symphony can be conveyedthrough the medium of cold type;yet when there is no other way,even that must be tried.

There follows a detailed account—of origins and intentions, methodologyand programmatic allusions—that tothis day may be the most evocativedescription of Dvorak’s symphony everpenned. No one has more eloquentlyput into words the polyvalence of thefamous Largo, in which the influencesof plantation song and Hiawatha inter-mingle. “It is,” writes Henderson, “anidealized slave song made to fit theimpressive quiet of night on theprairie.” He continues:

When the star of empire tookits way over those mighty Westernplains, blood and sweat and agonyand bleaching human bonesmarked its course. Something ofthis awful buried sorrow of theprairie must have forced itselfupon Dr. Dvorak’s mind when hesaw the plains after reading “TheFamine” [Henderson here assumes

In spite of all assertion to thecontrary, the plantation songs ofthe American negro possess a strik-ing individuality. No matterwhence their germs came, theyhave in their growth been subjectedto local influences which havemade of them a new species. Thatspecies is the direct result of causesclimatic and political, but neveranything else than American. OurSouth is ours. Its twin does notexist. Our system of slavery, with allits domestic and racial conditions,was ours, and its twin never exist-ed. Out of the heart of this slavery,environed by this sweet and lan-guorous South, from the canebrakeand the cotton field, arose thespontaneous musical utterance of apeople. That folk music struck ananswering note in the Americanheart. . . . If those songs are notnational, then there is no suchthing as national music. It is a fal-lacy to suppose that a national songmust be one which gives direct andintentional expression to a patrioticsentiment. A national song is onethat is of the people, for the people,by the people. The negroes gave usthis music and we accepted it, notwith proclamations from thehousetops, but with our voices andour hearts in the household. Dr.Dvorak has penetrated the spirit ofthis music, and with themes suit-able for symphonic treatment, hehas written a beautiful symphony,which throbs with American feel-ing, which voices the melancholy ofour Western wastes, and predictstheir final subjection to thetremendous activity of the mostenergetic of all peoples.

Classical Music Criticism at the Crossroads

By Joseph Horowitz

It should not surprise

us that this great era

in American music

criticism—the 1890s—

was equally a great era

in American classical

music. Critics were

focused on the creative

act—and so were con-

ductors, orchestras

and audiences.


Henderson’s review is today incon-ceivable in our daily press for threepowerful reasons. The first is simply itslength—3,000 words. Our reading andeditorial habits preclude such leisurelyexegesis. (Were Henderson’s review tobe quoted in the Times today, not a single paragraph would surviveuntrimmed.)

Second, Henderson was intimatelyfamiliar with the symphony and itscomposer before he sat down to listento or write about it. A century ago NewYork’s leading musicians and criticswere members of the same communityof culture. Contemporary accounts tellus that no sooner had the symphonyended than Dvorak’s box was mobbedby music critics falling over one anotherin their eagerness to be the first to con-gratulate him. Henderson received thecity’s most notable conductors, singersand composers weekly at his home. Hisgreat friend Henry Krehbiel of The NewYork Daily Tribune—the acknowledged“dean” of New York’s music-critical fra-ternity—was then the leading scholarlyauthority on plantation song; he was ade facto artistic adviser to Dvorak inAmerica, feeding him samples of“Negro melodies” and Native Americanchants. On Dec. 15—the day before thepremiere, two days before Henderson’sreview appeared—Krehbiel published a2,500-word analysis of the New WorldSymphony, based in part on discussionswith the composer and incorporatingno fewer than 14 musical examples.Henderson also had the benefit ofattending a “public rehearsal” of theNew World Symphony, also on Dec. 15.When it came time to file his review, hewas ready.

But the third reason Henderson’sfeat is unthinkable today is the one thatmost interests me. Today’s musicreviews are mainly about the act of per-formance. Henderson’s review of thefirst performance of the New WorldSymphony is silent on this topic. Thename of the conductor, Anton Seidl, isnot mentioned once. Nor is the readerever told what other music was playedon the same program. In the properorder of things it simply did not matter.

It should not surprise us that this

great era in American music criticism—the 1890s—was equally a great era inAmerican classical music. Critics werefocused on the creative act—and sowere conductors, orchestras and audi-ences. By far the most performed com-poser in New York was RichardWagner, who had died just a decadebefore. A living composer, Dvorak waswidely acknowledged as the city’s pre-eminent musician (imagine such athing today). Of paramount importanceto Dvorak—as to Seidl or Henderson or

Krehbiel—was the creation of anAmerican canon. That is: It was gener-ally assumed that, as in Germany,France, Italy or Russia, the musicalhigh culture of America would begrounded by a native repertoire ofsonatas, symphonies and operas.

In Boston the Symphony regularlyperformed the music of Boston com-posers. No one pretended that theyranked with Mozart and Beethoven; noone cared. George Chadwick alone wasperformed 78 times prior to SergeKoussevitzky’s arrival in 1924. In NewYork Seidl hailed Edward MacDowell asa greater composer than Brahms. Thathe was wrong is beside the point.

But no great American symphonywas written, and no American canonmaterialized. Instead, American classi-cal music degenerated after World WarI into a culture of performance. NotAmerican composers, but Americanorchestras, and foreign-born performersresident in America, comprised its

spine. The symbol of classical music formillions of Americans was an Italianconductor, Arturo Toscanini. Neverbefore had a noncomposer enjoyed suchliving supremacy in the world of classi-cal music, usurping the place of aMozart or Beethoven, Wagner orRichard Strauss. Never before had aconductor of such stature and influencebeen so fundamentally divorced fromthe music of his own time and place. Asif by default, classical music ceded lead-ership in American musical life to gen-res more vernacular. Popular musicproved the more significant, more dis-tinctive American contribution.

Certainly the American composerceded leadership. However much AaronCopland, through his writings as muchas through his music, tried to redirectattention, Americans remained fastenedon the dead European masters. So, overtime, did conductors cede leadership. InNew York before World War I, a Seidl orTheodore Thomas or Gustav Mahlerchampioned the living composer withmissionary fervor. So, in Boston,Philadelphia and Minneapolis, didKoussevitzky, Leopold Stokowski andDimitri Mitropoulos. After 1950, how-ever, only rarely were conductors truetastemakers. Rather, American orches-tras became marketing and fund-raisingmachines terrified of alienating theirsubscribers. Gone, too, were the greatclassical music entrepreneurs of yester-year: visionaries like Henry Higginson,who invented, owned and operated theBoston Symphony; or OscarHammerstein, whose short-livedManhattan Opera bravely defied theelitism of the Met.

Instead, the nation’s leading musicbusinessman was Arthur Judson, cre-ator of Columbia Artists Management,who insisted that only the public couldlead taste. When the New YorkPhilharmonic’s gutless programmingwas challenged in 1931, Judson—whowas also the Philharmonic’s manager—could write, “I believe within the nextfew years the Beethoven Fifth, no mat-ter how badly played, will be welcomedbecause of the message it conveys.”Judson also advised, “There are certaincomposers like Bruckner and Mahler

As if by default,

classical music ceded

leadership in American

musical life to genres

more vernacular.

Popular music proved

the more significant,

more distinctive

American contribution.


who have not yet been accepted heartilyby the American public. . . . We can onlygo as far as the public will go with us.”

Today the leadership vacuumremains. And yet, with the waning ofmodernism, important American com-posers (and other American composersalas less important) are reconnectingwith orchestras and audiences. The ero-sion of high culture, the interpenetra-tion of what had been elite and populararts, may yet put classical music out ofits misery. In my forthcoming history ofClassical Music in America, I write:

What does “classical music”mean today? If the term is to retainanything like its old aplomb, itmust refer to a moment now pastand to its attendant prestige andinfluence. What comes next inthese post-classical times? We willfind out. Certainly we will notabandon Bach and Beethoven.Bruckner’s symphonies will contin-ue to furnish cathedral experiencesin the concert hall. But this tradi-tion, on its own, can only diminish.Renewal, if renewal there will be,will likely come from the outside—from a postmodernism freed fromthe pantheon and its backwardpull. The possible convergence ofold ways and new will greatlydepend on composers and otherpersons determined to lead taste.

What the composers may con-tribute remains an open question. . . . Equally unknowable, equallycrucial is the coming contributionof the tastemakers—the peoplewho run orchestras and opera com-panies, write about them, broad-cast and record them. Traditionally,America’s high-cultural currentshave benefited from the shapinginitiatives of individuals of vision—or submitted to the vicissitudes ofthe market. . . .

[Steve] Reich, [John] Adams,[Gidon] Kremer are not “classicalmusicians.” Rather, they are eclec-tics for whom neither Europe northe concert hall represents themeasure of all things musical.Unquestionably they point toward

a post-classical music of the future.But there is no predicting thetopography of this new terrain, orits crucial impact upon the residualclassical music landscape it willdiminish or synergistically refresh.

To chart the history of classicalmusic criticism in the United States isto discover a similar trajectory yieldinga comparable crossroads. Krehbiel, tomy mind, marks the apex—for hisintellectual distinction, for his culturalbreadth, for his activist role in advisingand supporting Dvorak, in helping toengineer an “all-American” concertmovement, in studying and promotingthe folk and indigenous music of many

nations, in annotating the programs ofthe New York Philharmonic, in trans-lating German and French librettos aspart of the fruitless but enlightenedcampaign for opera in English, in tire-lessly lecturing and teaching profes-sionals and laymen. More than awriter he was an organizer, a doer. Theculture of performance sidelined crit-ics as it did composers. In New Yorkthey were reduced to chroniclingToscanini’s concerts as rites of tri-umph. As chief music critic of theTimes, Olin Downes felt called upon totestify:

The first Toscanini concert ofthe season by the PhilharmonicSymphony Orchestra took placeyesterday evening in Carnegie Hall.This meant an auditorium againcrowded to capacity with the mostimpressive audience of the sea-son—an occasion when musiclovers in all walks of life assembledto hear Mr. Toscanini’s interpreta-

tions and do homage with him tothe genius of Beethoven.

To his chagrin Henderson lived longenough to witness this genre of criti-cism and to groan in 1934, “Criticalcomment . . . is almost entirely directedto the ‘readings’ of mighty magicians ofthe conductor’s wand. . . . Can [thepublic] ever again be trained to lovemusic for its own sake and not becauseof the marvels wrought upon it bysupermen?” Downes was a new criticalbreed—a populist who advised the lay-man, in a 1941 essay, to “Be Your OwnMusic Critic.” This trust-the-public atti-tude ran parallel to Judson’s wait-and-see admonitions on repertoire.

During my own short tenure as aTimes music critic, I discovered that Idid not believe in the vast majority ofthe musical events I was sent to cover—and I feel quite certain that aHenderson or Krehbiel would havefound New York’s concert fare of thelate 1970s mystifyingly superfluous. Idid not think that I was a particularlygood Times music critic, nor did I thinkthat a Times music critic was a particu-larly good thing to be. I could not acceptthe paper’s capitulation to a degeneratestatus quo. I could not abide its insis-tence that critics not write in the firstperson, and the linked prohibition onconsorting with those they wrote about.The latter restriction—more an attitudethan a coherent policy—was vaguelyunderstood to be as venerable as theTimes itself. And yet Henderson did notkeep his distance from musicians andmusical institutions—and neither, forthat matter, did Olin Downes. As far asI am aware, the arm’s-length rule origi-nated with Harold Schonberg, whobecame chief music critic in 1960. Andneither Harold nor anyone else on themusic staff seemed to share my discom-fort with third-person pontification.

In retrospect the third person wasalready a terminally embattled postureof “objectivity” during the years—1976to 1980—I was forced to employ it.The third-person omniscience of aHenderson or Krehbiel was girded bytheir confident grasp of music’s trajec-tory and its necessary future. By the

Granted, befriending

the artist or impresario

risks imbalanced

judgments. But what

personal judgments are

not imbalanced?


late 20th century there no longerexisted a cultural consensus to do thegirding; the mainstream, or what wasleft of it, was crippled and diffuse.Today, in an even more variegated andconfused cultural environment, first-person opinion is inescapable even atthe Times. Logically this concessiondictates a more engaged critical pres-ence. Granted, befriending the artistor impresario risks imbalanced judg-ments. But what personal judgmentsare not imbalanced?

There is a classical music crisis. Itis artistic and economic, sociologicaland institutional. It cannot adequatelybe surveyed or understood on the side-lines. Those who write about classical

music need to know how and by whomorchestras and opera companies arerun. They need to discern whetherprogramming is captive to marketingand development or—as at HarveyLichtenstein’s Brooklyn Academy ofMusic, where I toiled in the 1990s—whether it constitutes a creative initia-tive, galvanizing marketing and devel-opment in its wake. They need—likeAlex Ross in The New Yorker—to com-mand the full cultural landscape, toknow where the high-low synergy iscooking. This degree of knowledge ispossible only via immersion and advo-cacy—the charged posture of W. J.Henderson reviewing the New WorldSymphony 110 years ago.

Our fractured times require leader-ship from institutions, from com-posers, from conductors, from critics—once, long ago, a more bondedcommunity. For all of us in music themoment is undeniably difficult—butalso opportune.

“Criticism at the Crossroads” was com-missioned by the Music CriticsAssociation of North America andColumbia University’s National ArtsJournalism Program for “Shifting Ears:A Symposium on the Present State andFuture of Classical Music Criticism,”Oct. 16 and 17, 2004, at Columbia’sGraduate School of Journalism.


ested, somewhat informed, and wouldlike to know more. Often, we also haveno clue about how to evaluate much ofwhat we see. Outsiders sense that moremight be said about the work of RobertMelee than “Yuck.” (Eeeee-uw! forinstance.) And so, for help, we turn tothe critic. Usually we do not turn to theinsiders who write for such specialty

journals as Artforum, Art in America orARTnews—lovely as those folks maybe—but to critics writing for main-stream publications: the newspapersand general-interest magazines that ori-ent us quickly on a range of subjects.

Pity the poor mainstream art critic.He or she tills marginal soil, despite anexplosion in art production in recentyears. The National Arts JournalismProgram’s 1999 study, Reporting theArts, found that mainstream publica-tions allot to the visual arts the leastspace of nearly any art form. (Film is thebig leader.) Not surprisingly then, forthe critic, economic insecurity is part ofthe game. NAJP’s The Visual Art Critic(2002) found that most practitioners atthe more than 250 publications studiedare freelancers. Of those who have full-time positions, many are obliged tocover other subjects.

Overwhelmingly, critics reportedfeeling a burden to explain why visualart mattered. In other words, not onlydo art critics feel perpetually called onto justify the work they review; in the

In the fall of 2002, Robert Melee’smother was for sale. The cost was$6,000 an hour, during which time youcould do with her as you chose.Evidently no takers emerged. And it isno surprise, considering the frightfulfigure Mom cut at the opening ofMelee’s show “You Me and Her’’ at theAndrew Kreps Gallery in New York’sChelsea neighborhood. For there shesat, in an elevated glass box, clad innothing more than a boa and fishnethose.

A grappling with Mommy acrossmany media, Melee’s exhibition includ-ed paintings, mobiles and video pieces.The ensemble functioned as a kind ofcreepy burlesque show on parent-childrelations, with an indictment of subur-bia thrown in for good measure. High asthe yuck factor was, inscrutability ran asolid second: I visited the show oneafternoon when Melee’s mother wasabsent, and wandered through with nosense of who the specified “Her” mightbe. (A transsexual in a fright wig? Orwas that her actual hair?)

I am not, by profession, an art critic.But as an editorial writer for a mid-sized daily, I am convinced that visualenvironments have more to do with ourcultural identity, and hence our politics,than most public-policy devotees mightallow. And so I look—at museum shows,at work in galleries, at billboards, movieposters and window displays, even atcolor schemes in hotel lobbies (wheremauve, I am glad to report, has at lastdied a much-deserved death).

If we can speak of “outsider” artists,why not outsider critics? I considermyself one of the latter, and will admitto all the implied deficiencies. Thebeauty of this designation is that it cov-ers most people who make up thepotential audience for art: We are inter-

same breath, they work to justify theirjobs. Small wonder, then, that mostplaced a premium on the freedom tosimply describe work and attempt toplace it in context. Fully two-thirds ofthose polled claimed a kind of boosterrole for themselves. The real stunnerwas that only 27 percent felt it impor-tant to determine the quality of the artthey described. Job insecurity mayaccount for some of the reluctance tojudge. But not all. It is therefore worthasking whether the working conditionsthat confront most critics today haveproduced a kind of critical vacuum (theoccasional diatribe notwithstanding),and whether that in turn has led to adecline in what art aspires to, even asthe quantity of art itself soars.

A critic who is inclined to sortthrough and judge, to evaluate tech-nique, ponder an artist’s intent, discernattempts to grapple with or reject fore-bears, has her work cut out for her. Nocoherent movements in the making ofart currently exist. At the same time, arthistory is long and growing longer. Atradition once confined largely to draw-ing, painting and sculpture fractureddecades ago, spawning a variety of newforms: conceptual and performancepieces, earth works, video art. The 2002Whitney Biennial suggested that theparameters for what may be consideredart are broader than even the most up-to-date critic might allow. The biennialfeatured, among other things, a projectby the Auburn University School ofArchitecture to make houses for therural poor out of recycled materials. Theshow’s curator, Lawrence Rinder,asserts that the bounds of artistic prac-tice and experience are even more capa-cious than the biennial survey proposed.

This explosion of forms has

Reflections of an Outsider Critic

By M.J. Andersen

Pity the poor mainstream

art critic. He or she tills

marginal soil, despite an

explosion in art produc-

tion in recent years.


occurred alongside a proliferation ofstyles within media. As the criticRaphael Rubinstein argued in a March1, 2003, essay for Art in America, recentyears have brought forth so many stylesin painting alone that it has becomeimpossible to keep track of them all. Aninability to survey the entire landscapein one medium (and these days, thatlandscape is international) makes it dif-ficult for a critic to speak with authority.On what basis, then, should he or shepresume to judge new work?

Some of the best conversations Ihave had on this subject have been withcurators, who, perhaps surprisingly,express sympathy for the position ofcontemporary art critics. The lack ofclear trends is confusing and difficultfor the critic, acknowledges JudithTannenbaum, curator of contemporaryart at the Rhode Island School ofDesign Museum. But it is healthy forart. “It gives people room to go in theirown direction,” she notes. By contrast,during the post-World War II era, whencritics such as Clement Greenberg laidout the rules for what successfulModernist art should be, “a lot of stuffwas left out.”

In some ways the curator’s taskresembles the critic’s. An unremittingand unrealistic attentiveness to the newis required, along with continuous self-instruction in what has come before.Curator and critic both attempt to findmeaning within a realm of shifting stan-dards. Curators, however, must choosewhat to show: They perceive certainconnections, imply value of some kind, decide what is worth looking at and why.

But the mainstream critic is limitedto what museums and galleries offer,usually in a given geographic area.Critics who wish to encourage local pro-duction of art while also raising ques-tions regarding value must walk a veryfine line. Not judging is the easiest path.Moreover, philosophical support for notjudging is easy to find.

When artists inevitably rebelledagainst the dictates of Modernism andtried out a number of alternatives, criti-cal thought also changed course.Lumped under the catchall title of post-

modernism, much of the theory becameincestuously entwined with the newwork, a development that the Mod-ernists have much to answer for. Pieceafter piece could not be understoodexcept as an expression or extension oftheory. And for that, a viewer often hadto look outside the work itself. ThusRobert Melee’s recent output did notintrinsically divulge that his mother wasthe subject—literally a piece of work.The movement continues to affect artstudents, many of whom can beobserved trying to work out its premisesin forms lame and lamer.

For postmodernists, grand pro-nouncements are beyond contemplat-ing, since master narratives are all sus-pect, and every attempt at assigningvalues betrays a form of hierarchicalthinking (e.g. Mozart is better thanMadonna) that serves the interests ofthe powerful. The critic who attempts tojudge under such circumstances is atbest uninformed, at worst a lackey ofthose better left unnamed. Yet whilepostmodernism’s chief assumptionshave lately been under assault, little inthe way of a bigger, better idea has cometo take their place. We might say no topostmodernist thought while feelingunclear on what we might instead sayyes to.

Postmodernist ideas have influencedcurators as well as artists, of course, andwith some positive effects. More womenand black artists have broken through,as have aspirants with no classical train-ing. But attempts by museums and gal-leries to appear more inclusive are notall they may seem, for in the end choices

must still be made. New hierarchies willbe unavoidably established. Often the“de-skilled,” the shocking and the simplybaffling are raised up in what is finally aparody of the democratic impulse. Thesometimes-comical result is that artexhibitions, claiming to have trampledon the distinction between “high” and“low” art, instead have cemented it.

Unable to “read” the objects orenterprises offered up for their inspec-tion, bewildered viewers are apt todecide the problem is with them:Perhaps the surest way to know that athing is art is if you cannot understandit. For such audiences, art by definitionremains high art. They know that thetrue low art of our time flourishes safelyoff the premises, at neighborhood arts-and-crafts fairs and at the local multi-plex. No matter how much theory wethrow at it, the distinction between highand low art resists erasure. Critics whoduck this problem only increasetheir travails.

Faced with so many intertwineddilemmas, what’s a mainstream art crit-ic to do?

I say, more judging.I say this with all the authority of

your uncle in Abilene, but I say it all thesame. The world grows increasinglycrowded with representations of reality.Which ones have urgent meaning? Doany of them ensnare us in falsehoods?How shall we know what to prize?These are not idle aesthetic questionsbut questions intimately bound up withour dreams and our ideas of how tolive—ideas that shape our public policies.

The culture wars of the 1990sdemonstrated a fierce hunger for a dis-cussion of values. Unfortunately, whenthe skirmishes involved the visual arts,crude judgment frequently rushed in tofill a void. With forthright critical dis-cussion of artistic values so routinelylacking, defense of free speech becamethe fallback position. And it ended upsounding surprisingly feeble. It is notonly the curious viewer who longs for adiscussion of values in art; no onecraves judgment more than artiststhemselves. Spend time with a few ofthem and you will see how true this is. A

Without judgment,

critics will never

convince their editors

that the visual arts

matter very much. A

world of equivalents is

nothing to write

home about.


thoughtful critique can move and chal-lenge an artist even if it is fiercely rejected.

The best critics will always try tokeep themselves open to new work andnew ideas. But in the end, a passion forart entails preferring one attempt toanother and being able to say why.Without judgment, critics will neverconvince their editors that the visualarts matter very much. A world ofequivalents is nothing to write homeabout.

All discussions of cultural valuesimpinge on one another. An arts criticwriting with some insight about, say, apainter’s attempts at self-portraiture canengage those who may not have thoughtmuch about painting but have struggledwith how to see themselves. Art thatchallenges the power of museums topick winners and losers can be shown toresonate with many people’s experiencesof corporate life. The formal qualities ofa piece of sculpture can evoke questionsabout nature or spirituality.

Critics who pursue such connec-tions should, in the long run, find relieffrom their perceived burden of havingto justify art. Those who succeed willneed to be well grounded in thehumanities and to keep abreast of all

aspects of culture. But it is just asimportant for them to see as muchactual work as possible. Editors shouldtherefore move heaven and earth togive writers more travel money.Creative ways of doing this might befound by transferring some dollars outof the film budget, for example, or occa-sionally combining the art critic’s rolewith that of the travel writer.

Editors reluctant to invest shouldlook up the studies. The NationalEndowment for the Arts’ Survey forPublic Participation in the Arts, con-ducted roughly every five years, foundin 1997 that 68.3 million people—orslightly more than a third of allAmerican adults—had visited an artmuseum or gallery at least once in theprevious 12-month period. It was thehighest level of attendance amongseven benchmark activities, whichincluded going to concerts and plays.To experience art, unlike TV and evenfilm, people must go out and see it.

Even with better support from edi-tors, art critics will continue to dwell inan insecure world. If, every time theyencounter new work, critics must firstgrope for a set of standards to apply

(for example, is the work skilled or de-skilled, and how good is it on thoseterms?), how can they speak with aconsistent voice—and therefore somecredibility—from week to week?

One answer has been found byJerry Saltz, the almost compulsivelyreadable art critic for The Village Voice.Saltz inserts himself into his work as akind of art-world Candide, managing tobe both insider and outsider at once.The critic-as-character strategy doeshave limitations, since it sacrifices aclearly worked out aesthetic for some-thing more provisional. In hands asnimble as Saltz’s, though, it is rarelyboring, and enough to give even themost unschooled reader the courage togo out and look.

Saltz, it turns out, would not dreamof not judging. Saying critics should notjudge, he once wrote, “is like sayingbakers shouldn’t bake.” Today’s art crit-ics must work from an inevitably limit-ed base of knowledge. But so musteveryone who lives a life. The critic whodoes not dare to question RobertMelee’s Mommy extravaganza, or try toexplain what is wrong with it, might bebetter off baking pies.


Bazaar and The Village Voice. And therewas also Theatre Arts Magazine, a rela-tively high-circulation journal totallydevoted to stories about the Americantheater.

The beginning of my time at TheNew Republic corresponded with aresurgence of highbrow criticism in afield that most intellectuals had previ-ously scorned. It was a time when young

Turks at smaller publications were agi-tating for a whole new kind of theater—engaged, experimental, impudent, irrev-erent and smart. Broadway had gottentired. At one time it had combined pas-sion for musical megahits with toler-ance for more serious work, whereasnow it seemed more and more driven bythe box office. If there was any art orintellect to be found in New York the-ater, you had to look off-Broadway.

I came to The New Republic verymuch under the influence of my prede-cessor, Eric Bentley, who in 1946 hadstunned academics and intellectuals byidentifying the playwright as a “thinker.”I added my two cents in 1958 with apiece called “The Theatre Is Losing ItsMinds,” along with some analytical arti-cles on the current Broadway scene forCommentary and Harper’s that pleaded

Once upon a time in America, theatercriticism was a universal practice.During the 1960s and ’70s, every news-paper and commercial magazine hadregular drama critics, and most smallpublications and scholarly journalsdevoted significant space to what washappening in New York City.

At the time, four major newspaperswere being published in the city, eachwith an influential reviewer. True, therewere not as many as in previousdecades, when seven newspaper criticsruled Broadway. But the shrinking ofthe newspaper world didn’t diminish itsfascination with the stage. The pagesthat The New York Times now calls Artsand Leisure were then known simply asthe Theatre section, devoted primarilyto reports on plays and interviews withplaywrights (today, the same pages arelargely devoted to features on actionmovies and warring rap stars). Duringthat period, The New Yorker, Time andNewsweek were growing almost as influ-ential as the dailies; George JeanNathan was still holding forth inEsquire; and even the little magazineswere beginning to have some impact.

Before I began reviewing for TheNew Republic in 1959, Stark Young andEric Bentley had been its well-respectedtheater critics. Mary McCarthy wasscorching theatrical earth for thePartisan Review; Richard Hayes wascomposing very stylish columns forCommonweal; Harold Clurman was ful-minating brilliantly in The Nation andKenneth Tynan was just beginning hislegendary tenure at The New Yorker,bringing cosmopolitanism, passion andwit to that magazine’s rather emptyurbanity. In addition to regular reviews,articles on the theater were frequentlybeing featured in such publications asHarper’s, The Atlantic, Life, Harper’s

for higher theatrical standards andgreater dramatic complexity. Now I hada visible weekly platform, right next toStanley Kauffmann’s film column, fromwhich to inveigh against the vulgarityand greed of the commercial stage.

My timing was fortuitous, for myvery first review, in September 1959,was of an event that proved to be a bea-con of the off-Broadway movement, theLiving Theatre’s production of JackGelber’s The Connection. All of themajor newspaper critics had pannedthis Beckett-inspired play about thenarcotic haze of drug addiction. Butalong with a number of other criticsfrom smaller publications, I found thisplay to be a breakthrough in its natural-ist staging and writing as well as agauntlet thrown in the face of the wholetheater establishment. It was the veryopposite of a well-made Broadway arti-fact; Pirandello-like, it invaded theaudience’s space, not only breakingthrough the fourth wall but followingyou into the lobby. Between DonaldMalcolm’s review in The New Yorker andwrite-ups in The Nation and The NewRepublic, the play managed to catch onand capture an audience—perhaps thefirst time that small-press reviewers hadbeen able to overturn an unfavorablemainstream judgment.

During the early ’60s the most influ-ential drama critic was writing not forthe Times but for the New York Herald-Tribune, namely Walter Kerr. Kerr wasan intelligent critic whose eloquentprose style embodied decidedlyPhilistine views, further limited by hisstrict Catholic upbringing. Always readyto praise some escapist musical ordomestic comedy, he persistentlypanned anything by the great mod-ernists Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov andPirandello; totally missed the boat on

When Dramaturgs Ruled the Earth

By Robert Brustein

It was a time when

young Turks at smaller

publications were

agitating for a whole

new kind of theater—

engaged, experimental,

impudent, irreverent

and smart.


Marat/Sade; and declared, after seeingWaiting for Godot, that Samuel Beckettwas “out of touch with the hearts andminds of the folks out front.”

In short, Kerr was a perfect foil forus young Turks. And our ranks weredefinitely swelling. The scholar-criticRichard Gilman took over RichardHayes’s position at Commonweal andthen left (to be replaced by WilfridSheed) to become the drama critic forNewsweek, one of the earliest examplesof an intellectual covering theater for amass magazine.

Gilman left his Newsweek job to joinmy faculty at Yale School of Drama. Thelively universalist Jack Kroll took overhis position and maintained Newsweek’sliterate posture, blending Gilman’sintellectual weight with his own pop-ulist energies. John Simon wrote seriousand scholarly theater reviews for TheHudson Review before New York maga-zine encouraged him to sink his fangsinto unsuspecting actors and play-wrights. Meanwhile, a new periodicalcalled The New York Review of Bookshad appeared during the newspaperstrike of 1962-63, started primarily inrevolt against the Times book reviewsection. The noted literary criticElizabeth Hardwick became the NewYork Review’s regular biweekly theatercritic, writing tough-minded articlesthat, if somewhat short on theaterknowledge, at least treated the stage asa forum that was missing a great oppor-tunity. Susan Sontag replaced MaryMcCarthy as the resident theater scoldof Partisan Review. The scholar-trans-lator Albert Bermel began to review forThe New Leader. All shared a pro-nounced distaste for the profit-drivenproducts of Broadway and a desire toendow American theater with some ofthe quality it had traditionally enjoyedin Europe and Russia.

As theater critics, we were makingthe same kinds of demands on plays asliterary critics were making on booksand intellectuals on general culture,questioning the reputations of theenshrined and proselytizing for under-estimated new talent. We were feelingour oats and beginning to share ourefforts with a much wider public. At the

same time, artists and intellectuals alikewere becoming annoyed with the stran-glehold maintained on the arts by TheNew York Times, which, despite WalterKerr’s influence with theater insiders,always had more influence with ordi-nary theatergoers. Brooks Atkinson’ssuccessor at the Times, HowardTaubman, was proving even more tone-deaf than Kerr to the exciting newthings that were happening on the NewYork stage. An impudent new mood wasin the air, symbolized by Joe Heller’s

Catch 22, Stanley Kubrick’s DoctorStrangelove, Nichols and May, and PaulSills’ Second City troupe, that wasapparently below the threshold of thesereviewers. A long advertisement in theTimes, instigated by Philip Roth amongothers, called for a radical change in thequality of that paper’s cultural writing,and to everybody’s surprise the editorsseemed to take notice.

At least that was how I interpretedthe moment in 1965 when I wasapproached by Clifton Daniels, theTimes’ managing editor, who inquiredwhether I might be interested inbecoming the paper’s theater critic.Flattered as I was by the proposal, dailyreviewing was clearly not in my future.Theater notices in those days had to becompleted between the falling of thecurtain and the rising of the sun, and Iwas unable to write that fast. Moreimportantly, though I had no hesitationabout speaking my mind from a seat ofrelative powerlessness, it was quiteanother thing to be responsible for thepotential unemployment of so many

theater workers or the mental health ofso many sensitive artists. So I turneddown the offer and recommendedStanley Kauffmann for the job.

It was a favor for which he maynever forgive me. Stanley was appointedand lasted about a year. After a highlycontentious season, in which heannoyed Broadway producers by askingto review previews, he was replaced byWalter Kerr, responding to the Times’invitation to leave the Herald-Tribune.The revolt was over. A few years later,the Times would consolidate its returnto traditionalism when Kerr moved tothe Sunday section and the paper’sdance critic, Clive Barnes, took over thedaily post.

The ’60s was also the decade whenthe resident-theater movement wasmoving into full gear with the financialaid of the Ford, Rockefeller and Mellonfoundations, not to mention the bud-ding National Endowment for the Arts.Barricades were being built betweencritics from smaller publications andnonprofit theater on the one hand, andthe major critics and the commercialstage on the other. My confrontationwith Walter Kerr over Jonathan Miller’sproduction of Robert Lowell’s The OldGlory at The American Place Theatrewas typical. Kerr dismissed it out ofhand. I found it one of the finest of theyear and an occasion for rejoicing that amajor American poet was writing forthe stage. My review concluded with amock challenge to Kerr: I offered tostop reviewing Broadway musicals if hewould agree to stay away from off-Broadway experiments.

Kerr treated my proposal with thedisdainful silence it probably deserved.And his attitude was even more loftywhen—after abandoning my critic’s jobfor the next 13 years—I moved to NewHaven to start the Yale RepertoryTheatre. Kerr wanted to come up andreview our productions. I wrote to himthat these were essentially the workshopprojects of a developing company, andas such should not be subjected to thehit-flop standards of the commercialtheater. Would he kindly stay away?Kerr replied, “I will respect your wishes.I wish I could respect your manners.”

It is one thing to write

screeds about the

vulgarities and

stupidities of a powerful

cultural behemoth. It is

quite another to take

responsibility for

the results.


Ouch. A few years later, forced by thefunding climate to depend more andmore on national recognition, I wouldbe humbly begging Kerr to come. Hedid, and wrote reviews that were rarelymore than mildly patronizing.

As for reviewers in cities supportingresident theaters, they were mostlywould-be Walter Kerrs who had cuttheir teeth on pre-Broadway tryoutsand Broadway tours. For a while, wetried to foster critics’ learning, scholar-ship, style and knowledge of theaterprocess through a DFA program indrama criticism at Yale. Yet most of ourstudents couldn’t find newspaper jobswhen they graduated (Michael Feingoldof The Village Voice was a notableexception), probably because the editorsdidn’t want anyone more informed thantheir readers. As a result, I finally had toadmit defeat and let Yale’s criticism pro-gram devolve into a program in literarymanagement.

The critics whom I most wanted toevaluate our work—and that of non-profit companies forming all over thecountry—were my former colleagues.But now that America was finally devel-oping the kind of theater they had beencalling for—dedicated to art, not profit,to works of high literary sensibilityrather than mere entertainment—thoseneeded to do the work of evaluationwere headed elsewhere. Hardwick,Gilman, Sheed and others went back tobook reviewing and general criticalessays; Sontag became a novelist; andBentley occupied himself writing plays.

Jack Kroll was a constant visitor andan intelligent analyst of resident theater,though even he was not allowed to revieweverything he wanted. William A. HenryIII, a gadfly of Yale Rep while he wasundergraduate theater critic for the YaleDaily News, later developed into a verycogent critic of plays produced outsideNew York for Time magazine. JohnSimon would have come more often if wehad provided him with a limousine, butwe knew he hated any deviation from atraditional approach to the classics. Theothers showed very little interest in ourwork or that of other resident theaters.Indeed, by this point they had mostly

stopped reviewing plays.It is hard to say with any accuracy

why the intelligentsia lost interest in thetheater just as it was in the process ofreform. One reason, surely, was whatmany consider to be the collapse ofBroadway. It is one thing to writescreeds about the vulgarities and stu-

pidities of a powerful cultural behe-moth. It is quite another to take respon-sibility for the results. For yearsBroadway had been synonymous withAmerican theater and attracted hugeaudiences. But now it was buckling atthe knees, felled by escalating ticketcosts and diminishing creative excite-ment. Box-office sales had fallen precip-itously. The flops outnumbered the hits.The commercial theater was ceasing tocreate, or even attract, the major starswhose names could keep box officeshumming. And even leading play-wrights such as Miller, Williams andAlbee were finding it hard to get com-mercial production. If their plays finallydid reach Broadway, they were usuallypanned—and this time not by their oldantagonists but by The New York Times.Indeed, after 1979, when I had returnedas reviewer for The New Republic, I feltcompelled to defend the same play-wrights I had once criticized, sometimesif only to counteract the perfunctoryway they were being dismissed by FrankRich, who had developed unprecedent-ed power as the latest critic for theTimes. Combining Atkinson’s gravitaswith Kerr’s show-biz savvy, along with abit of Simon’s vituperation, Rich wasbecoming known as the Butcher ofBroadway.

There had always been something

vaguely parasitical about our criticalfeeding off of big Broadway reputations.We needed them, not just to exerciseour vocabulary of scorn but to provideus with a negative context. We alsoneeded their reflected glamour. (In anarticle called “Ann-Margret and theCritics,” Rocco Landesman, a theateraficionado before he became aBroadway producer, shrewdly analyzedthe motives of small-publication critics,saying that we were secretly asstarstruck as anyone else.)

I suppose I was naive to believe thatthe new resident-theater movementcould attract the kind of critical mindscommensurate with its ambitions. Firstof all, who would provide these NewYorkers with travel money for trips toMinneapolis, Louisville or any of theother “remote” places where plays werebeing produced? Partisan Review? TheNew York Review of Books? From timeto time, my own theaters—first the YaleRepertory Theatre and then theAmerican Repertory Theatre inCambridge—invented pretexts for intel-ligent writers to come see our work,though rarely in their capacity as critics.We invited the likes of Lizzie Hardwick,Harold Clurman, Eric Bentley, andSusan Sontag to lecture, direct, or writeplays. Michael Feingold, Albert Bermeland Stanley Kauffmann spent time withus in Cambridge as adapters, translatorsor panelists. None of these eminent peo-ple ever wrote about any of our produc-tions or, to my knowledge, those of anyother resident company outside ofNew York.

Instead, the work of my theater andof similar ones throughout the nationwas being reviewed by the local media,who were applying the same standardsto Shakespeare and Beckett as to thecommercial claptrap being shuttled toand from a greatly weakened Broadway.In an article called “Where Are theRepertory Critics?” I called for a newkind of critical mind, one capable of rec-ognizing that a resident theater was nota show shop turning out hits and flopsbut rather a living organism of artistsdeveloping alongside audiences. Ibegged for the critic who could recog-

Somehow, people of

extraordinary talent—

playwrights, directors,

actors, composers,

designers—continue to

work against the odds.


nize that the actor he praised in Waitingfor Godot may have been the same onehe had panned the previous week inTwelfth Night, that there were linksbetween plays and performances capa-ble of being appreciated by a discerningintelligence. Most of the local reviewersI spoke to about this issue complainedthat they lacked the space and/or theeditorial support to offer anything morethan snap judgments and a synopsis ofthe plot.

My final effort to change the prevail-ing intellectual climate took place in1992, when the American RepertoryTheatre ran a symposium on critics andcriticism. The weekend symposium wasintended as an opportunity for a num-ber of critics to sit on panels with the-ater artists and, through discussionsabout the nature of American theatercriticism, air their disagreements.Following an amiable keynote addressby Benedict Nightingale, former Sundaycritic for The New York Times, the bloodbegan to flow. Frank Rich had beeninvited but declined—wisely, no doubt,since he turned out to be a major target.There had been, for example, a back-stage feud going on between him andJack Kroll ever since Rich anointed himwith the title Jack-the-Hype, an appela-tion Kroll took the opportunity to rebutin public. Jules Feiffer took ferociousexception to John Simon’s exceptional

ferocity, and both engaged in the kind ofrough-and-tumble rarely displayed out-side of gladiatorial combat. And KevinKelly of The Boston Globe, perhapsbecause he hadn’t been invited, wouldreserve his own comments for futurereviews of our work.

Looking back, though, I believe thiswas a very healthy act of catharsis that,without perhaps changing any minds,demonstrated the fact that there werealternatives to the prevailing system ofreviewing. The event also showed that ifthere was discontent with the state ofAmerican theater, there was also consid-erable dissatisfaction with its criticism.

Did anyone care? Certainly, to judgeby the dwindling amount of space beingdevoted to plays in newspapers andmagazines, interest in the theater wasdiminishing among the general public.Time and Newsweek had virtuallydropped their regular drama coverage.The last theater article I can rememberbeing published in Harper’s was ascreed aptly called “Theaterophobia” bythe movie critic David Denby. AfterFrank Rich abandoned daily criticism tobecome an op-ed writer, the Times lostmuch of its interest in the theater, aswell as some of its power, and at presenthas given up its Sunday theater columnas well. The New Yorker continued tocover theater—mainly when John Lahr,who spends half his year in London, got

a chance to praise some Englishimport—but in a desultory way. EvenThe Village Voice cut down its once-hefty reviewing staff. The heyday ofAmerican theater criticism seemed tobe officially over.

I’m not foolish enough to ring deathknells for the American theater or forAmerican theater criticism. Somehow,people of extraordinary talent—play-wrights, directors, actors, composers,designers—continue to work against theodds. And there are still people of intel-lect, writing for Internet organs likeHotReview (Jonathan Kalb) or incheeky journals like The New York Sun(Jeremy McCarter), or even for mass-circulation dailies like Newsday (LindaWiner), who are responsive to the moreadventurous expressions of the form. Inacademic journals, Elinor Fuchs andArthur Holmberg are always worthreading for their scholarship and wit.

Whether these people will manageto establish the kind of influenceenjoyed in the past is doubtful. But ifthere is one thing we have learned overtime, it is that theater criticism cannotsimply be the negative expression of adisgruntled voice railing at lifelessobjects. It has to recognize, endorse,and advance the possibilities of renewal.Without this, criticism becomes simplyanother mode of performance, and thecritic another actor gesticulating in the void.


“framed” experience. When you look at apainting, you see it in a frame. It isframed off in space. When you go to amovie, it begins and ends. It is framedoff in time. Buildings, however, areframed neither in time nor in space.They exist in relatively stable relation totheir spatial context, especially the con-

text of other buildings. And they existindefinitely in time.

It’s helpful to remember that thisused to be true of painting as well.Before the Renaissance, a paintinginvariably existed in some permanentrelation to a cultural and physical con-text. Perhaps it was an altarpiece, inte-gral with its church, meant not as an art-work to be appreciated in isolation butrather as an illustration of the meaningof Christianity. Or it was a mural, or afloor mosaic, or a decorative frieze, all ofthem permanently attached to somelarger place and system of values.

Then it dawned on someone in theRenaissance that you could take thepainting off the wall, frame it, sign it andsend it out to the marketplace, where itcould be sold. Painting changed forever.Now you could talk about an Uccello ora Kandinsky as a commodity, as a brand-name product.

Something similar has happened

My favorite definition of a critic is bythe French author Anatole France, whowrote, “A good critic is one whodescribes his adventures among master-pieces.”

That’s the ideal. Good criticism isn’ta judicial system or a system of punish-ment. As a critic, you shouldn’t be pri-marily a member of the taste police. Youshould be a fan, an appreciator, anenthusiast, someone able to awakenyour readers to the wonder of the worldas it is as well as the wonder of howmuch better it could become. Myfavorite example in any field is theAmerican critic Randall Jarrell, whowrote about poetry with a sense ofshocked and delighted discovery. It’seasier to raise people’s standards byadmiring what’s good than by knockingwhat’s bad.

Architectural criticism is in someways unique. Other critics are, to a largeextent, consumer guides. They help youdecide which play to see, concert toattend, book to read or restaurant to try.Architecture is not “consumed” in thesame way. Except in the case of an occa-sional spectacular and heavily hypednew art museum, we don’t normally buya ticket to see a building. The question,therefore, is why have architecture crit-ics at all? What is their purpose?

I think it is to stimulate a conversa-tion in society about what constitutes agood place for human beings to live andwork in. A work of architecture mustalways be understood as a contributingpart of something larger than itself. It’srare that it can usefully be evaluated asan isolated art object.

For that reason, I think architecturecritics go astray when they imitate criticsof other arts. The experience of works ofart other than architecture is normally a

more recently to architecture. It too hasbecome frameable and signable. Wehave found a way to rip the building outof its context in time and space. Thechange here, of course, came with thearrival of contemporary media, especial-ly with the invention of photography inthe nineteenth century and the rise,starting about 1930, of architecturalphotography as a profession of highlyskilled practitioners. Photography is theremoval of context. A photograph of awork of architecture frames it off fromthe world and freezes it at a singlemoment in time.

We now live in a culture so pervadedby media that we barely notice it. It is aworld of framed images in our maga-zines, on our screens, and increasingly inour imaginations. We have thereforecome to think of buildings as we think ofpaintings. We think of them as existingnot in a specific time and place, but inthe worldwide media stream of images.

I’m often reminded, in this connec-tion, of the Smith house, designed by thearchitect Richard Meier and built in themid-sixties on the coast of Connecticut.I’ve never been there, and neither hasanyone else I know. But it is familiar toevery architect in the world, at leastthose of my generation, through photo-graphs by the great architectural pho-tographer Ezra Stoller.

In this case, it seems to me that theimage, not the house, is the end productof the design process. The housebecomes merely a means to the image.The image is a far more potent andinfluential presence in world culture.Inevitably, once that’s realized, architectsbegin to design with an eye to the even-tual photograph.

Art exists in order to be appreciated.It is a grave error, but one commonly

Thoughts on Architecture Criticism

By Robert Campbell

It is the quality of the

world of interactive

spaces that matters

most, not the aesthetics

of this or that

individual building.


made by critics and others, to believethat buildings exist primarily for thesame reason. A building is a work of arttoo, but of a different kind. Whichbrings me to my own definition of archi-tecture. It’s this: Architecture is the artof making places. The places may berooms and corridors, or streets andsquares, or gardens and golf courses. Asfar as I’m concerned, they’re all architec-ture, because they are all places madefor human habitation.

And that’s how you experience archi-tecture: You inhabit it. You don’t merelylook at it or walk around it. You inhabitit—either literally with your own body orfiguratively with your imagination—asyou look up, perhaps, at a window andimagine yourself to be inside lookingout.

You inhabit with all your senses.Think of a visit, let’s say, to a church inan Italian hill town. You enter thechurch, and suddenly the air is cool andhumid. The ache in your knees speaks ofthe steps you have climbed to get here.The intense sun outside is replaced bythe shadowy cave of the church. Soundhere is more hushed, yet more reverber-ant. You hear a motorcycle start up out-side, making you feel how intensely youare inside. You’re starting to smell thecandles now. Light draws you towardthe altar. As you move across the floor,you realize it’s been carved into a kind oflandscape by many people walking overtime. And as you move, you begin tohave the primal experience of architec-ture—perceiving that space configuresand reconfigures around you as youmove through it.

Not too much of that experience ispurely visual. Yet in the media culture,we pretend to ourselves that framedimages can wholly represent places.

There are, of course, some kinds ofart that resemble architecture in beingunframed. Installation art is precisely areaction against the framed object onthe white and placeless museum wall.Such art interacts with its context. Onethinks, for example, of Donald Judd’swork in Marfa, Texas, where his art isinextricably involved not only with thepreexisting town, its landscape, and itshistory as a military base, but also with

the living and working quarters of theartist. But such works are very much theexception. Most art is framed off. Mostart is also useless. Indeed, RobertRauschenberg defines art as that whichhas no use. But architecture can neitherbe framed, nor can it (with rare excep-tions) be useless.

Buildings exist in relation to otherbuildings. Together they shape thespaces, both indoors and out, in whichwe live our lives. It is the quality of theworld of interactive spaces that mattersmost, not the aesthetics of this or thatindividual building. As the Luxembourgarchitect Leon Krier has suggested,when an architect designs a building heor she should think, “I am making apiece of the whole world.”

It is the shift from thinking aboutarchitecture as the making of places tothinking of it as the making of frameableaesthetic objects that has made architec-tural criticism so much more problemat-ic today than in the past. It is possible toestablish criteria with which to evaluatethe quality of a place. But it is difficult,to say the least, to assess the merit of anarbitrary formal exercise. As a result,there is today no consensus about what“good” architecture is.

That wasn’t always true. The profes-sion of architectural criticism as nowpracticed was begun by Ada LouiseHuxtable, the New York Times criticfrom 1963-82. There had been a coupleof notable predecessors—MontgomerySchuyler in many publications from1880-1914 and Lewis Mumford in TheNew Yorker in the 1930s and 1940s—butHuxtable was the first full-time profes-sional architecture critic writing for anewspaper.

Huxtable knew her values and

expressed them emphatically. And theTimes encouraged definite opinions. Sherecalls that the editor who gave her thejob, Clifton Daniel, would often say inthe early days, “Make up your mind, AdaLouise. Make up your mind.” Huxtablehad little difficulty in doing that, becauseshe was a dedicated modernist. Shewrote in an era when modernism wasstill fresh, and the battle to establish itover historic styles was still in progress.The pale ghost of early modernism’ssocial agenda, based on socialist politicalbeliefs, was still present. So was themovement’s infatuation with themachine.

Huxtable was the public voice of themodernist consensus in American archi-tectural culture. She was also, coming asshe did from an art history background,a dedicated preservationist whodespised new buildings that revivedolder styles. When, in 1970, she won thefirst Pulitzer Prize ever given in the fieldof criticism (and later, in 1981, received aMacArthur Fellowship), she solidifiedthe status of architecture criticism as abeat for major newspapers.

Today the old modernist unanimityhas disappeared. New styles of architec-ture now appear every few years andenjoy a brief run of fashion. They thenfail to disappear. We’ve seen styles calledpostmodernism, deconstruction, blobarchitecture, modernist revival, newurbanism and neoclassicism. We’ve seennotable architects become fascinatedwith, among many other themes, tecton-ic-plate movement, linguistic analysis,fractal geometry, climatic sustainabilityand junk materials as primary sourcesfor architectural form.

We’ve seen a revival of architecture’sbeing perceived as an elitist cult activityto be appreciated only by the knowing,in-group aficionado. We’ve witnessed, bycontrast, a powerful reversion to the tra-ditional, a move that is certainly a reac-tion against the confusion and, to manypeople, incomprehensibility of contem-porary styles. An example would be aplace like Princeton, which is now anx-ious to restore the “brand image” of theschool as established by its neo-Gothicarchitecture of 100 years ago. And we’vealso seen, in the work of someone like

New styles of

architecture now

appear every few years

and enjoy a brief run of

fashion. They then fail

to disappear.


the Dutch architect and writer RemKoolhaas, a kind of slummer’s delight inthe worst excesses of populist, capitalistsprawl development.

In this swamp of multiple and arbi-trary viewpoints, where does the criticfind a place to stand? It’s no longer pos-sible to be, as Huxtable was, the voice ofa clear consensus that believed in itselfwith an almost messianic fervor. In theabsence of a fixed set of values againstwhich to appraise a building, how does awriter make value judgments? What, toask the question once again, is the pur-pose of an architecture critic?

I would argue that the only answerto that question is to abandon our habitof looking at architecture as a frameableart like painting, and to see it again, aswe did before photography, in a largercontext. We have to reach outside archi-tecture to find the values by which tojudge it. It sounds corny to say, but it’stime to remember that architecture isabout how we should live on our planet.It is about where we live, not what welook at. I suggest that the future ofarchitecture lies in re-attaching it tothese larger issues.

You can summarize these issues withthe one world “health”—personal health,social health and planetary health.Architecture can, for example, help keepus from being obese by creating walka-ble, bikeable communities, or by offeringenticing public stairs instead of hidingthem behind the elevator, or by keepingus in touch with the natural world. Itcan help preserve democracy by creatingsettlement patterns that draw differentkinds of people into public places wherethey mix, meet and learn about oneanother’s concerns. It can help preservethe planet by curbing the kind of mind-less sprawl development that destroysnature while poisoning the atmosphereand maximizing consumption of plane-tary resources.

Spelling out those aims is the workof another essay. The purpose of this oneis to point a way out of the current messof values-free aestheticism. The role ofarchitectural criticism, unlike that ofother kinds, is to make connectionsbetween architecture and other values.Or as Columbia University President

Lee Bollinger put it in a spring 2003talk on journalism in general, it is tomediate between confused experts onthe one hand and common sense on theother.

In no way do I mean to play downthe purely architectural merits of build-ings. We can all delight in mastery ofmetaphor, craftsmanship, invention,light and space, and in the way a build-ing, like a poem, can comment on itspredecessors and thus join the great nar-rative of architecture history. There is allthis and much else besides. But thosejoys aren’t enough.

Nor do I suggest that the criticapproach a building with some kind ofpredetermined checklist of qualitiesagainst which it should be measured.Not at all. As I suggested in the fantasyof visiting an Italian hill town, your firstduty as a critic is to immerse yourself inthe work. Values have to be placed onhold while you do that. A building canbe good in ways that never would haveoccurred to you until you were there.The critic should come as close as possi-ble to drowning in sensual experience,only then striking out for the shore ofsome kind of formulation.

But when the formulation comes, itmust be to place the building within theframework of a larger world of values.As the landscape architect ReubenRainey once eloquently put it, “Designis, in essence, giving form to value.” Thathas always been true. The world webuild is a readable graph of the values ofthe people who create it. Often it’s agraph of power. When the king is incharge, the palace is the biggest build-ing. When it’s the cardinal, it’s the cathe-

dral. When it’s democratic government,it’s the capitol. When it’s the corpora-tion, it’s the office tower.

Take office towers: One may think ofthem, especially ones built in recentdecades, as being inexpressive of values.They are simple boxes of leasable space.They look like the carton the real build-ing came in. But that, of course, is pre-cisely the value they broadcast so elo-quently: that what matters in the worldis commerce and nothing more. Wherethe party-hatted spires of older sky-scrapers like the Empire State andChrysler Buildings were a metaphor fora kind of joyous individual aspirationunder capitalism, the boxtops of todayspeak of a more collective, anonymouscorporate culture.

That’s just one example. Arch-itecture is always eloquent, not just aslide show. We should be asking, though,whether it’s eloquent about the valuesthat matter long-term. Only when weask that question will we recover fromour infatuation with each passing visualstyle.

The British critic J. M. Richardsonce wrote, “Architecture cannotprogress by the fits and starts that a suc-cession of revolutionary ideas involves.Nor, if it exists perpetually in a state ofrevolution, will it achieve any kind ofpublic following, since public interestthrives on a capacity to admire what isalready familiar and a need to label andclassify.”

We must ask architects to first imag-ine a better world and then supply thebuildings that will help to create it.Buildings must be placed, and under-stood, within a web of larger values.When that happens, the public—some ofwhom suspect that architects have “rev-olutionary values” and subscribe to aprivate set of aesthetic beliefs nobodyelse understands—may once againbecome appreciators and supporters ofgood architecture.

In its landmark 2001 study TheArchitecture Critic, the National ArtsJournalism Program came up with somesobering facts. Of the 40 critics sur-veyed, 32 disagreed with the statement,“Generally speaking, we can be proud ofthe new built environment we have

The critic should come

as close as possible to

drowning in sensual

experience, only then

striking out for the

shore of some kind of

formulation.


developed over the past 25 years.” Of the10 American buildings the critics likedbest, none was completed later than1939, an amazing 65 years ago. I don’tfully agree; I would certainly place theKimbell Museum in Fort Worth, byLouis Kahn, on that list. But the largerpoint is true. For all the fuss over isolat-ed avant-garde works like Frank Gehry’sGuggenheim Museum in Bilbao, nobody

really believes we are living in a great eraof architecture.

When we succeed in reconnectingarchitecture to the needs and values ofthe larger world, that disbelief will end.So will the skepticism of the public.Interest in architecture will grow. So willthe number of architecture critics, nowpathetically few.

The critics who responded to the

NAJP survey understand this. Much oftheir writing crosses the border betweenarchitecture and broader social andenvironmental issues such as ecology,sprawl, urbanism, planning and preser-vation. Like President Bollinger’s jour-nalists, they are seeking to mediatebetween expertise—in this case, that ofthe architects—and the common senseof the larger public.


Of course, such a claim would be purefiction. For the most part, TV simplyignores such subjects as theater, dance,visual arts and—God forbid—poetry.And when the attempt is made, it oftenfalls flat. A fixed camera tries to capturea theater performance. A dancer keepsgetting lost on a dark stage. A large andresonant painting looks flat and unin-

teresting on the small screen.“I think that arts programming on

commercial television doesn’t necessari-ly work,” says Shari Levine, a vice presi-dent and executive producer at Bravo.“It just doesn’t have a big enough audi-ence. We’ve done opera in prime time—the viewer wasn’t interested.”

Though Levine says there aren’thard statistics available on how muchBravo has shifted away from fine-artsofferings in the last five years, she notesthat the network—which is home tosuch shows as Queer Eye for the StraightGuy—now positions itself as a main-stream-entertainment channel. Evenwhen audiences do flock to, say, TheThree Tenors on PBS, most of theirmembers are over 55—not the sort of viewers that commercial net-works crave.

Charles M. Gray, a professor of eco-nomics at the University of St. Thomas

The woman’s lips are lush and insis-tent. “I confess I love that which caress-es me,” they say. The tightly framed shotof her face is a pretty good way to snareyour garden-variety channel surfer. Hermouth is full and sensuous, her voicedramatic and beckoning. “Stand up andlook at me, face-to-face, friend-to-friend,” the lips continue. And eventhough we simply see a person talking—no sex, no violence, none of the freneticstuff to which television audiences aresaid to be addicted with the passion ofcrack addicts—there’s something aboutthe intensity of her delivery that makesthe moment compelling. Even the mostdisinterested observer might linger.

Can TV cover the fine arts? Sure itcan. But it’s so rare we’ve almost forgot-ten it can be done. As the lips segmentcontinues, it’s a mystery as to what it’sall about until we are introduced toRobert Pinsky, a former United Statespoet laureate, framed in a more stan-dard interview shot in which we can seehis entire face and upper body. “Themedium for a poem,” he says, “is breath.”

Yes, the subject is poetry. On televi-sion. This piece—on WGBH-TV’sacclaimed Greater Boston Arts, whichfeatures people from all walks of lifereciting the words of Sappho and oth-ers—is devoted to what some wouldconsider to be among the least telegenicof topics. You can almost sense the casu-al channel surfer, for whom fine-artscoverage on television is synonymouswith stuffy Masterpiece Theatre rerunsand poorly lighted ballet recitals, recoil-ing in horror. How dare this show be sointriguing—and so fluent in the lan-guage of television—that it tricks meinto watching something about poetry?

It would be nice to think that poetryis being covered in seductively creativeways on television all across the country.

in Minneapolis, says general televisioncoverage of the arts has decreased overthe past decade. Even classical music—one of the fine arts thought to be best-suited to television—dropped 8 percentin terms of media-participation ratesbetween 1992 and 2002, as comparedto 1982-1992. The 2002 Survey ofPublic Participation in the Arts indicat-ed that only 18 percent of the popula-tion, or 37 million people, viewed a clas-sical music performance at least once onTV, video or DVD in a 12-month period.“We can presume that the media, byand large being a for-profit media, don’tsee there’s a profit in this,” says Gray, cit-ing a study he and Joni Maya Cherboconducted for the National Endowmentfor the Arts based on the 2002 survey.“And the non-profit media became asmaller percentage of the total.”

So much for the giddy assumption,when cable first appeared, that morechannels would mean better coverage ofsuch niche markets as the fine arts.How much “A” is left in the A&E net-work these days?

As for network TV, you can prettymuch forget about it, except for suchholdovers as the venerable SundayMorning show on CBS, which still man-ages to work in an arts-related segmentmost weeks.

On one hand, some think that theless arts coverage on TV the better, sim-ply because the medium can’t do justiceto the subject. “Normally television—even public television—should be keptas far away from art as a convicted childmolester should from a neighborhoodplayground,” wrote Christopher Knight,a fine-arts critic for the Los AngelesTimes, in 2003. “Mass culture thriveson piety, genuine or fake, and piety suf-focates art.” Others say it might be moreuseful to think of television not as a sub-

The Fine Arts on TV

By Donald Munro & Joshua Seftel

How dare this show

be so intriguing—and

so fluent in the

language of television—

that it tricks me into

watching something

about poetry?


stitute for experiencing the arts first-hand, but more as a preview. For nomatter how inferior it is to the realthing, it can pique the interest of theaudience. Gray’s research also indicatesa strong link between media exposureand attendance at live events; someonewho’d seen an orchestral performanceon TV was thus more likely toattend a live concert.

Then there’s the issue of the artsrequiring context and background,especially among audience memberswho didn’t have childhood exposurethrough their parents or from a strongeducational influence. “Arts are complexthings to consume,” Gray says. “They’renot like potatoes and meat. We have todevelop what you might call ‘consump-tion skills.’ The media can be an impor-tant piece of that.”

Something’s better than nothing, itseems.

Are there any art forms that TV isable to portray well? While classicalmusic and opera can sometimes ade-quately translate, theater is a challenge.The exception might be plays with verysmall casts; an Albee drama mightcome across better than a play byShakespeare. The visual arts are diffi-cult, too. “If I were a painter, I wouldcringe to see my work on video,” saysBoston choreographer Caitlin Corbett.Then again, she adds, capturing livedance on TV isn’t exactly a breezeeither: “How can you? It flattens theessence of it.”

At one low-budget extreme, dancecan seem terribly static on television—faraway and disengaged—with one ortwo fixed cameras providing almost per-functory visuals. At the other end of thespectrum, though, TV’s penchant for theclose-up can destroy its overall look andfeel. “Then you’re missing all the chore-ography because you have to look at thesexy dancer,” says Corbett, whose CaitlinCorbett Dance Company juxtaposeseveryday movement with cutting-edgemodern dance. “You wind up not doingjustice to the work.”

Corbett says the best dance piecesshe’s seen on TV are those in which thevideographer collaborates with the cho-reographer instead of taking a purely

documentary approach. That collabora-tion includes a long pre-shooting dis-cussion, so the videographer under-stands the dance well before filmingbegins. “When you’re really able to seedance is when you aren’t trying to treatit as a live art,” she says. Then again,Corbett adds, the bigger the budget, thebetter the chance that a visually sophis-ticated mainstream audience will payattention. “Equipment has everything todo with it,” she says. “Lighting haseverything to do with it. The higher-endproduction you have, the better it’sgoing to be.”

Stephanie Stewart, the series pro-ducer of Greater Boston Arts, says thatlately it’s become more of a challenge to

raise money for arts segments on hershow. “It takes an enormous amount ofperseverance to continue making artsfor television, given that arts do not gar-ner large audiences and so need to bejustified on other, non-market-driventerms,” she says. “Even in public broad-casting, making this case just keeps get-ting harder.” And while the cost of pro-duction has come down in recentyears—shooting and editing are cheaperby meaningful margins—Stewart notesthat experienced producers may beforced out of the business if theirsalaries are cut too severely, causingproduction values to suffer.

You can’t help but imagine, then,that if enough resources were put intocovering the fine arts on TV, almost any-thing could look good—from the stuffi-

est opera to a segment on the most stat-ic of sculptures. Think about how muchmoney a television network puts intobroadcasting a professional footballgame—the myriad cameras, the top-notch direction, the fancy graphics.Compared to the craft and expense ofsuch endeavors, arts programming, forthe most part, is like a Friday-night highschool football game televised on cableaccess, using a stationary camera fromthe press box. Such a presentationmight get the job done for die-hard fansand the players’ parents, but for every-one else, it’s so unappealing you can’tmove your remote finger fast enough.

Yet TV can pull through despite itslimitations. Programs such as SundayMorning, Greater Boston Arts and thecancelled Egg have regularly trans-formed the fine arts into compelling tel-evision. Yo-Yo Ma’s six-part Inspired byBach film series, coproduced by PBS,racked up awards at the Berlin andVenice film festivals. The PBS series Art:21 garnered strong reviews for produc-ers Susan Sollins and Catherine Tatgeand director Charles Atlas, who “let theartists do the talking on their ownbehalf, both in the studio and at variousexhibition venues,” Christopher Knightnoted in an L.A. Times review.

Sometimes it’s about finding astrong narrative in an arts story, such aswhen Sunday Morning delved into themystique of the Baroque painterArtemisia Gentileschi, who became theIt Girl of the art world after interest inher was sparked in the 1980s. The resultwas strong on biography—including thescandal of what reads today like a mod-ern-day date rape. With such a fascinat-ing character, the story had extra “zip,”says executive producer Rand Morrison.

At other times, it’s about using thevery limitations of the subject matter tomake a compelling visual story.Consider when Greater Boston Artschose to do a piece on a postage-stampexhibition. When the producer andcameraman arrived at the gallery a fewdays before the exhibit was to open,they found a harried curator, a roomwith blank walls, and postage stamps allover the floor. There was nothing to film.

The producer ran to the store and

So much for the giddy

assumption, when cable

first appeared, that

more channels would

mean better coverage of

such niche markets as

the fine arts. How much

“A” is left in the A&E

network these days?


bought a large magnifier while the cam-eraman dug through the back of his vanand found a pane of clear glass. Theylaid the stamps on the pane, placed thecurator on one side with the magnifierin her hand, and shot the interviewthrough the glass. The result was a visu-ally arresting interview that featured theartwork in the foreground and the cura-tor in the background, playfully distort-ed by the magnifier as she spoke aboutthe stamps.

And then there’s poetry. If WGBHcan make it look good, isn’t there hope?

Even by the finicky standards of amedium that values the visual above allelse, the Greater Boston Arts segment onpoetry comes across as good television.When the first woman—with those com-pelling lips—recites the opening line, theimage itself draws the viewer in.

There’s no doubt that the pull of thispiece, and of others created for the series,is visual. We drink in the details on thevery real faces we see in front of us: the

odd-shaped nose of a man, the big plas-tic-rimmed glasses of a woman, the silverhoop earring caught in a sliver of one

frame. People are drawn to people.Stewart, at WGBH, never stops

thinking about the visual, no matterwhat genre is being presented. For her,that’s what sets TV apart. And eventhough it might make the job tougher, italso makes possible—when the starsand funding align—arts coverage that is

You can’t help but

imagine, then, that if

enough resources were

put into covering the

fine arts on TV, almost

anything could

look good.

art in itself.In many ways, fine arts will always

be an awkward fit on TV—unless some-thing pretty strange happens to thenation’s drinking-water supply andSuper Bowl-sized audiences start tuningin to 30-minute segments on disaffect-ed abstract-expressionist painters. Inthat case, production values wouldbecome so lavish that it would be hardnot to make art exciting. But the hoperemains that by taking a creativeapproach, even a niche market can benurtured.

“I don’t think the good old days arebehind us, but I do think we have tocome up with some antidotes to therelentless demands of the market whenit comes to the arts,” Stewart says. “In acelebrity-driven society, can you name aliving artist who is a household name?The problem is engendering the interestof a broad audience and of fundersdespite the fact that no one will getrich from it.”


are increasingly suspicious of them—partly because their cultural world isbeing ignored. What’s a paper to do?

“You can’t really cover somethingunless you have someone who’s invest-ed in it,” says Jeff Stark, editor of“Nonsense NYC,” an e-mail omnium-gatherum of unusual and uncategoriz-able New York events, which is sent out

every week with the note that “you donot have permission to use any of thelistings for your commercial publica-tion.” Stark has been on both sides ofthe underground/journalism divide. Aformer editor at Salon.com, he’s alsoone of the people behind the Mad-agascar Institute, a wildly inventiveBrooklyn arts collective that had neverbeen mentioned in the Times until thegroup’s director, Chris Hackett, injuredhimself and attracted the FBI’s atten-tion with an accidental explosion inJanuary 2004.

“If I was a music editor at a majordaily,” Stark says, “I’d never hire anyonewho didn’t go out at least four times aweek. Journalists can get really lazy—they think they know about a citybecause they’ve lived there for a while,and they forget that there are new peo-ple arriving and trying new things. Ifyou’re interested in covering the arts,you have to be going out to find them.They don’t come and find you. Papersshould be interested in finding goodstories and interesting things that are

A line that snakes around the blockfor hours leads to a manhole, throughwhich people climb down to an aban-doned 19th-century train tunnel filledwith a tunnel-themed art-and-videoshow; no newspaper covers it. Morethan a thousand people crowd into awarehouse basement in which artistsare displaying their work everywhere,musical and acrobatic performances arehappening in multiple rooms, and thebar is serving absinthe; no newspaperhas even been notified that it’s happen-ing. A truck with a sound system pullsup to the front of the public library, and100 people sitting on the steps abruptlyburst into an elaborately choreographedfive-minute dance routine, then dis-perse; organizers are careful not to letthe news media know about it. At a“subway party” in San Francisco, areporter introduces himself as beingfrom The New York Times, tries tointerview participants and finds himselfshunned as a tool of the corporate press.

There’s always more interesting artgoing on in any city than a newspaperhas room to cover. Especially in the last10 years or so, the arts and cultureunderground has fallen out of touchwith newspapers to the point wheredailies and even alternative weekliesmay not be in the loop about signifi-cant artists and events, while theInternet is becoming the preferredsource of information for young read-ers. Artists who operate below theradar may not know how to seek outpublicity from traditional print media;they may simply not care about “valida-tion” from the press. In some cases,especially if the circumstances of theirwork are legally dodgy, they mayactively try to avoid press coverage. Atthe same time, the smart young audi-ences that newspapers want to court

happening in their community—at themost basic level that’s their job.”

Those stories don’t often comeprepackaged as press releases or as list-ings from regular advertisers and well-established venues. Flyers—especiallyin record stores, no matter what medi-um they’re promoting—and word ofmouth are the traditional tools of theunderground, but new culture isincreasingly publicized, discussed andevaluated on the Internet—sometimeson e-mail lists like “Nonsense NYC,”sometimes on Web sites. As RobertKimberly puts it, “An Internet presenceis the reverse of a mass mailing: Youonly have to create it once for anyoneto see it.”

Kimberly runs a Weblog called “LasVegas Arts and Culture” that he startedin the fall of 2003 to cover his city’sscene, which he thinks its newspapersneglect. “This will sound terrible, but Idon’t subscribe to the local papers,” hesays. “I don’t find anything of interestin them.” He launched the site, withfree software from Apple and a freeaccount from Blogger, in response to aspecific event: Survival Research Labs,the infamous Bay Area robots-and-explosives group, had planned a large-scale performance in Las Vegas, “and alot of people didn’t know about it—andthey were people I knew would love it.I thought, this is the final straw.”

Heidi Calvert, who runs the multi-purpose art space Bluespace, in LosAngeles, says she doesn’t read thepapers either, especially for coverage ofart, and doesn’t have much hope ofnewspapers’ covering her scene any-time soon. “We’re just doing it our-selves. The artists go around passingout flyers, and we use Tribe andFriendster and Myspace andLivejournal to promote our events.

Below the RadarCovering the Arts Underground

By Douglas Wolk

“If you’re interested in

covering the arts, you

have to be going out to

find them. They don’t

come and find you.”


Even the L.A. Weekly is picky aboutwhat they cover—maybe you have toknow someone there or you have to beconnected with celebrities.”

In Portland, Ore., James Squeakyruns a Yahoo! mailing list, “pdxshows,”for people who want to get the wordout about informally organized hap-penings—mostly music, but sometimesother art events. He notes that thePortland Mercury, one of two localweeklies, covers some of the same terri-tory, partly because its music editor isthoroughly keyed into the local scene:“We’re fortunate to have the Mercuryin Portland, but I haven’t quite figuredout how to get those events into goodhands at the Willamette Week.”

That’s a constant complaint fromartists and event organizers whohaven’t dealt with print media in thepast. They don’t know where to start orwhom to call or what form to use fortheir information, and papers make itdifficult to connect with the right per-son. Some journalists are so lazy theywon’t get around to anything thatdoesn’t come from a paid publicist.Another Portlander, artist and occa-sional journalist Tiffany Lee Brown,notes that “part of the wall betweenthese events and coverage is simply apresentation issue.” She consulted withthe local group 2 Gyrlz PerformativeArts to help them understand how todeal with the press for their hard-to-classify “Enteractive LanguageFestival,” and notes that “with a greatdeal of determination and focus on thepart of the organizers, 2 Gyrlz was ableto get some mainstream media cover-age for the festival—a lot of whichmade sense and was accurate.”

But other artists and events pro-ducers aren’t so well-equipped. DavidCotner, who writes about avant-gardemusic for L.A. Weekly—and sends outa weekly e-mail list, “Actions,” whichcatalogues experimental performancesall over the world—says that “there hasto be an editor who’s there for writers tosay, ‘Okay, go ahead and run with it.’”And he notes that artists who don’thave regularly scheduled events (andpress releases going out on a regularbasis) can be a hard sell.

The contents of the “Squid List”rarely overlap with those of the printnewspapers. “Just look at what thepapers cover,” Beale says. “We’ve gotthe underground art scene, but SanFrancisco’s got an established opera,the symphony, SFMOMA [SanFrancisco Museum of Modern Art]—by the time they’re done with that,they’re not going to drill down to any ofthe good stuff. I’m sure they’ll be writ-ing about Survival Research Labora-tories in 20 years; if LawrenceFerlinghetti does something now, of

course it gets written about. To me thenewspapers are pretty far away.Especially in cities that have only onepaper, there’s such an obligation tocover all that mainstream stuff.”

One source of the problem is thatnewspapers traditionally have theirarts coverage neatly arranged in cate-gories: film, music, theater, visual artsand so on. But a lot of underground artdoesn’t fit easily into any section. It canbe amorphous and event-based, and itoften only happens once. As Beale putsit, “The film critic gets a screener, thedrama critic goes to the preview; whatdo you do with this? If you’re going tocover it, you almost need an ‘other’ sec-tion. It’s outside the established artworld—the point is not to make moneyselling it.”

Stark has less patience for newspa-per editors who can’t find a spot tocover worthwhile but uncategorizableevents: “If it’s that good, make room forit! I’m sorry for that music writer whoneeds to push their story back a day, orthat fifth film that was opening thatweekend that isn’t going to get writtenabout, but if you’ve got a good story,run it! I think that we journalists wanteverything to be in neat little sections,but our readers don’t care as much

about it within the fold of the arts sec-tion. Find the space and go with it.”

Conversely, there’s the problem ofwhat to do about artists and eventsorganizers who actively shun publici-ty—not on ideological grounds butbecause they’re legally dubious. “Houseshows—that is, bands playing in some-one’s basement—in particular, run intoproblems with police knowing aboutthem ahead of time,” Squeaky says.Some kinds of events become moreopen to publicity over time, though. Asan example, Beale cites Santacon, thetradition of having dozens of people inSanta Claus suits running amok acrossa city: “In the early days we definitelydidn’t want any press—we had a lot ofproblems with the cops back then. NowI think police departments know aboutit and don’t care.”

In any case, the consensus is thatnewspapers should try to be respectfulof artists’ wishes—and that reportersand newspapers that have demonstrat-ed an ongoing commitment to theunderground arts world are muchmore likely to find their subjects coop-erative. “Keep an open mind,” Cotnersays. “Don’t have preconceived notions.Know when to keep your mouth shut.And once you get in the community, befriendly—most people are genuinelyhappy to talk about what they do.”Notes Stark: “The number one thing todo is what MTV did, and what all themagazines that have been successful ingetting younger readers have done:Bring on younger people. You’ve got tolisten to them and let them be part ofthe news organization. If you wantpeople reading your listings to besmart 23-year-olds who go out a lot,then you’d better have a smart 23-year-old who goes out a lot editing that section.”

It’s also vital to avoid the error ofseparating coverage of newer, edgierart from a grayer “conventional” artssection. In practice it can make youngreaders trust newspapers even less. “Ihate when newspapers launch thosespin-off boutique papers that are sup-posed to do a better job of reaching outto young people and the arts,” Starksays. “It only ghettoizes them into this

“There has to be an

editor who’s there for

writers to say, ‘Okay, go

ahead and run with it.’ ”


substandard thing, and it ends up look-ing like a pathetic advertising grab.”Brown also argues for covering every-thing interesting in the same place:“We have social categories based on

class and education and employmentand subculture, and they tend to pre-vent us from experiencing a wide rangeof art. I welcome publications andevents that get people to crawl out of

their comfortable little boxes. That’spart of the reason I want mainstreammedia coverage—it opens the doors topeople being able to discover some-thing new and possibly mind-blowing.”

A History of Rock Criticism - Columbia University

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