Reporting the Arts:News Coverage of Arts and Culture in America is a recent study released by Columbia University's National Arts Journalism Project, financed by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Weighing in at 127 pages, printed in glossy color on heavy paper, filled with pie charts, bar graphs, and different-sized boxes, broken into bite-size segments, supported by a detailed "methodology" and acknowledgements running several column inches, the publication looks like the Annual Report of a Fortune 500 corporation.
Very sober and impressive.
Serious, weighty and not arty in the least.
Dull, worthy, and heavily footnoted.
Authors Michael Janeway, Daniel S. Levy, Andras Szanto, and Andrew Tyndall -- working with a team of a dozen consultants and research assistants for over a year -- have taken a look at newspapers in mid-sized and larger cities in an attempt to diagnose what they see as the ailments facing arts reporting in America.
The main conclusion of the four men is that while "arts and culture are booming in America," and every newspaper has an arts and entertainment section, the place of arts news and criticism is "insecure and uneven."
In addition to its major premise, the study makes some other somewhat obvious points:
*The New York Times has ten times as much cultural coverage as the Wall Street Journal.
*USA Today favors lighter stories about popular culture or blockbuster museum shows such as one featuring Vincent Van Gogh.
*Smaller local papers are filled with listings and use more wire service copy than national newspapers.
*High art and popular entertainment rub shoulders in the same section of most papers.
*Television and movie reviews are regular features of culture pages in most papers, as opposed to less frequent radio, visual arts, and dance coverage.
*Network television news avoids arts coverage, except on morning shows.
*Public radio and alternative weekly newspapers have more extensive arts coverage than daily newspapers.
There is, as well, a subtext demanding more coverage of "arts policy." (Curiously, the Washington Post and Washington Times are both absent from a study that is concerned at some level with politics and art).
However high-minded the intentions of the authors of this study, the resulting document misses the point of the crisis facing art -- and arts reporting -- in America today.
The "arts boom" is uneven because everything is being lumped into the category of art, perhaps even the half-time show at the Super Bowl.
Popular culture, especially on the internet, has never been more popular.
But high culture is facing the revolt of the masses.
The dilemma faced by arts reporters and their editors is actually quite simple and straightforward.
It does not require 127 pages of charts and graphs (albeit with lots of white space for high skim value): The public refuses to swallow the medicine the arts world has prescribed.
"High Art" today does not taste good, and Charlie the Tuna to the contrary, is not in good taste. (An account of this phenomenon can be found in James Gardner's book Art or Trash?).
It is so empty that it can only attract attention of a negative sort, such as the furor over the Brooklyn Museum of Art's "Sensation" exhibit -- a show damned with faint praise even by the critic from the New York Times. (A collection of articles about the controversy can be found at ArtsJournal.com).
The crowds thronging the museum are like those flocking to a public execution or crowding around a train wreck. They are curiosity seekers drawn by the notoriety of the occasion.
High Art is no longer even a hard sell.
It is an impossible sell, except as a macabre spectacle.
It has come to the point where Roger Kimball of The New Criterion has suggested renaming Britain's Turner award for achievement in contemporary art the "Bad Art Prize."
The "art" the authors of the Columbia study apparently seek to report to Main Street, USA (albeit in an indirect fashion, since they are transparently too afraid to openly call for Arthur Danto's Nation column to be syndicated to the nation's daily newspapers) is deeply antagonistic to the values of both middle-class, middle-Americans -- and to sophisticated and educated defenders of traditional aesthetic standards. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art's director, Philippe de Montebello, distanced himself from the "Sensation" exhibit in the pages of the New York Times).
It is also out of date, to the point where the NAJP study might have been persuasive in, say 1955. Today the public knows better.
Increasingly, cognoscenti who "know about art" find themselves aligned with those who "know what they like," against an art establishment that does not seem to know anything at all.
For example, Robert Wilson's recent Wagner production was booed by the opera fans when it premiered at the Metropolitan, and general manager John Volpe was called on the carpet to defend the offensive production at a hostile meeting of the board of directors. He was nearly fired, and escaped the noose by promising to return to more appealing productions.
Many knowledgeable opera-lovers have called Wilson a fraud. This is not a secret, except perhaps to the authors of the NAJP study. One can find these critiques posted on the World Wide Web on Opera-L.
Indeed the internet today currently provides precisely the detailed arts coverage that the NAJP calls for daily papers to offer (in depth which would be simply unaffordable for any newspaper, even the New York Times).
Why should the readers of the Cleveland Plain Dealer or Charlotte Observer have Robert Wilson foisted upon them as he is being rejected in New York, as was Peter Sellars before him?
That there is a disconnect between mass and popular culture is not the fault of the artist. Indeed, from Euripides and Homer to the present, artists have recognized the unity of the arts and drawn inspiration from wherever they found it.
Rather it is the dealers, critics, and patrons who have reflected their own insulation by choosing art manifestly cut off from American life. (Of course, some art will always be for minority tastes).
As Tom Wolfe pointed out in The Painted Word, the public is "not invited" when the art world decides what the next Big Thing will be.
The traditional function of the press -- specifically the New York Times as the Columbia study confirms -- has been to publish announcements from the art crowd in the same way it prints accounts of society weddings and charity benefits.
Wolfe's rebellion against this social norm produced his devastating essay on Radical Chic in New York Magazine.
To be fair, since Tom Wolfe wrote his essay on the art world, the Times has become more adversarial towards the arts establishment, exposing Nazi collaborators, corporate kickbacks, and even giving bad reviews on occasion. Even Michael Kimmelman seemingly cracked up in print under the strain of current events, and called Norman Rockwell a great artist. He then followed up by saying the same thing about Matthew Barney, an un-Rockwell figure if there ever was one.
Yet, the art that most Americans are familiar with and enjoy--Hollywood films, Broadway shows, dinner theatre, rock and roll, country and western, jazz, rap, television, video games, 19th century classical music, Verdi operas, Dickens novels, Shakespeare plays, Masterpiece Theatre, Monet exhibitions, Andy Warhol, Leroy Nieman, Leonard Bernstein, and so on -- is disdained by the arts crowd as mere middle-class entertainment.
The mass appeal of such work counts against its valuation by the guardians of culture.
Yet who could honestly believe that Bernstein's serious compositions are better than his Broadway scores?
Indeed, Bernstein's attempt to gain the acceptance of "serious" music critics probably harmed his output by diverting him from his true talents.
The problems facing American art today and American art reporting are not caused or by contamination from popular culture, by corporate influence, or by the failure of small-town newspapers to supplement local listings with essays on arts policy debates.
They are caused by an art world that has grown so hermetically sealed and incestuous, so sterile, perverse and repulsive, that it can not withstand honest reporting.
Not surprisingly, the public has taken matters into its own hands, whether through elected representatives such as Mayor Giuliani, or in the form of Jackson Pollock-like Action Painting as a palimpsest over Chris Ofili's Virgin Mary dung and porno decorated painting at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
The resulting public controversies over the sad state of American art have luckily done more to stimulate serious daily newspaper coverage of the Arts than the National Arts Journalism Project could have ever dreamt possible.
