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Rockwell Matters

February 25, 2008

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It could be argued, it has been argued that the internet is taking over our lives. In my case, that means the lives of arts critics. Everywhere you look, you find newspapers under siege, magazines even longer under siege, they even are so under siege that they have their own bloggers trying to keep up. A lot of us get our basic news from the internet now because it’s instantaneous, rather than a day late. In addition, there are every kind of arts blog — not to speak of artsjournal.com, which collates a lot of them. There are chat rooms on every conceivable subject relating to the arts. It is a wild and wonderful world out there.

Now, what I was thinking about in relation to all this, is the difference in the kind of criticism practiced in these two mediums, and whether or not the internet points to the future. The internet has often been regarded optimistically as a wonderful opening up of the dialog, of the democratization of opinion, the dethroning of critics who owe their position largely to the fact that they have a big or bigger megaphone than you do. And yet the disturbing part of internet criticism, of course, is how mean, nasty, gossipy it can be. People feel free, typing away in the privacy of their own homes, to vent any opinion, however ad hominem, without really worrying about its effect. The gentility of newspapers and their editing staffs, trying to maintain a kind of lady-like propriety, can be mocked, but it has its virtues as well. What interested me especially about these two kinds of criticism, however, was the specialist versus generalist issue. Newspapers, simply because of the economics of the thing, encourage generalist critics. They don’t want a separate contemporary ballet critic, an old-fashioned modern dance critic, an ethnic dance critic, a contemporary modern dance, and so forth: they need a dance critic.

Now, even if you have a lot of stringers, or if you have a magazine like the classical music magazine Fanfare, which has a million contributors — and so you can have your Toscanini specialist and your Wagner opera specialist and so forth — most print mediums cannot support a lot of specialists. The New York Times is a little unusual because of the size of its arts department. For example, Alistair Macaulay, the new chief dance critic of the Times, my successor, is focusing primarily on ballet and to some extent on the big-ticket modern dance people like Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor and Tricia Brown and so forth. But he has four other reviewers, who can pick up the slack and pursue areas that interest them more. When I was the chief rock critic, Stephen Holden came aboard — he since has become one of the movie critics — but at the same time he had a fascination for cabaret music, right from the beginning, a fascination not really shared by any of the other rock critics. So he has made it his own little specialty niche within the Times, and that’s OK, too.

The fact is people like specialists. If you look at sports programs a lot, the vast majority of commentators on sports programs are ex-jocks, male or female, who know a lot about the strategy of baseball or of tennis or whatever, and the internet allows for a million specialists, incredibly narrowly defined sometimes. The problem being, of course, if you can find them — the issues of trying to get a hold of obscure things — but links and Google and so forth allow you to pursue blogs and chat rooms that are of interest to them. Now you can argue that this is bad, that people stick to what they know and care about and ignore everything else. But in a newspaper, you can skip over articles or whole sections of a newspaper that don’t interest you as well. Some people might feel a regret for the loss of a central newspaper like The San Francisco Chronicle or The New York Times as the central voice of a community or even a nation. And yet, that position is often unearned and almost fascistic; an open dialog is better. Ultimately, I am pro-internet. Not that my opinion will have any effect on the runaway train that the internet is. The future, like it or not, of arts criticism lies on the internet, and I for one look forward to reading it in endless profusion.

— John Rockwell

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