A Plague of Bloggers? Really?

Recently, while perusing the pages of the current issue of Border Crossings--an edition I also recently gave a shout-out to on Twitter for its Lawrence-Weiner-penned tribute to the late Gerald Ferguson--I saw something a bit strange that I thought might be worth noting here, however self-reflexively.

The troubling points in question are written by Robert Enright in his review of the documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism.

Writes Enright,
What the documentary also shows is that in place of serious film critics, the Internet has facilitated (and I’ll have no trouble with the collective noun for this group) a plague of bloggers.

He goes on to state,
There are those in the film generous enough to view this development as a healthy democratization, a state where everyone is a film critic. They’re welcome to that opinion. What the film makes clear is that one Stanley Kauffmann is worth a hundred Harry Knowles. “What I see of Internet reviewing,” says Richard Schickel, “is people of surpassing ignorance about the medium expressing themselves in the medium.”

I guess what concerned me, mostly, is that any argument that posits "bloggers" vs "critics" seems kind of old and tired, and frankly I'm surprised to see it even being tossed out as a helpful dividing line in 2010.

The fact is--at least in my experience--that both print and online mediums provide forums to good writers and bad writers, thoughtful reviewers and unthoughtful ones.

Granted, I'll admit that the process of getting into print can, in theory, provide some measure of separating the wheat from the chaff. But this is less so in the art media, where jargon and poor writing tends to reign.

Also, there's a number of blogs (and let me be clear, I ain't talking about mine) that provide vital, engaging approaches to criticism. I'm talking about, to name just a few examples, Art Fag City, Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, Another Bouncing Ball, Modern Art Notes and C Monster. What's more, to be academic about it, there are newspaper critics who have their own informative blogs, like Roger Ebert and Jonathan Jones. Finally, whether some folks like it or not, blogs provide an often entertaining forum for discussion, perspective and information, a reason I regularly visit outlets ranging from Sally & Lorna Mills' blog to Simpleposie to View on Canadian Art.

Another concerning point of argument comes up when Enright writes,
The heavyweights are included [in the film]—Roger Ebert (The Chicago Sun-Times), A O Scott (The New York Times), J Hoberman (The Village Voice), Richard Schickel (Time) and Lisa Schwarzbaum (Entertainment Weekly)—as are the featherweights—Harry Knowles (aintitcool.com), Mike Szymanski (zap2it.com) and Scott Weinberg (cinematical.com). For the most part, this latter group has little to say about the history of film criticism, since they are its irredeemable present. They measure their success in website hits and the number of times they have been quoted. When Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Chicago Reader says that, “the best thing that can be said of a critic is that what he writes is so singular and interesting that you can’t turn it into advertising,” you are aware he has drawn a line in the sand and the boy from zap2it.com is decidedly on the other side.


The main criticism of bloggers that caught my eye here was "They measure their success in website hits and the number of times they have been quoted"--as if print magazines don't measure their own success in audited circulation numbers or in the number of instances their title was referred to in other media. (Magazine grant applications and advertising/media kits are, as I think all of us know at this point, replete with the results of this kind of intensively tracked data.)

The sub-criticism that's also worth noting is the implication that bloggers are more susceptible than print critics to becoming mere glowing-review/advertising-quote generators. The thing is, at least in the Canadian art world, print critics (myself admittedly included) write a whole hella lot more positive reviews than negative ones. And the more negative critiques in our realm tend to turn up on blogs (hello, Artfag!). But that's another post...

Overall, I respect Border Crossings, and I respect Robert Enright--as a result I find the logical leaps and judgment calls in this review quite strange indeed. Now it's duly noted. Thanks Internet!

Image from Pop and Politics

Read More......

Confessions of a Blantantly Belated Review Reader

Reader, I have a confession. Though I often write reviews and wish people to read them in advance of heading out to the galleries, truth is that I often find reviews most interesting after I've experienced the show/movie/book/album myself.

That is, I often don't read a review, or at least seek one out, or at least really really read them thoroughly until I've experienced the thing being reviewed. I love reading reviews as a form of mental conversation, of getting all the angles, of comparing and contrasting to one's own point of view, or honing same.

Case in point: This weekend I went to see the film A Serious Man. Now I had read some reviews in advance (these were hard to avoid, in fact, given the film's premiere at TIFF earlier this fall). But only after seeing the movie, being perplexed by it, and chatting about it with my partner did I go home and load up Rotten Tomatoes, where, as I'm sure you know, reviews from media across North America, from writers both big and small, are compiled for most major-release films. (Wouldn't it be great if the art world had something like this? At least for Venice and other shows seen and reviewed as widely as a single major-release movie?)

Via the roster Rotten Tomatoes had compiled for A Serious Man, I think I read about seven to ten reviews of the film--some positive, some negative. It was great to read some of these pointed opinions and know exactly what aspects they were referring to in the film as they asserted them. Whether I agreed with the reviewer or not, their review invariably made a lot more sense to me--and provided more that was at stake for me--because I had seen the film myself.

I guess what this post has ended up being, really, is a little rumination on the function of reviews, which tend to break down like this:

1) Service to the reader A -- primary -- "Why, IMHO, this book/show/movie/album is worth your time and money, or not."

2) Service to the reader B -- primary -- "If you can't get to this thing yourself, here's the broad strokes of what it's all about, IMHO."

3) Service to the reader C -- typically regarded as tertiary, but for me (and likely others) often primary -- "Hey, if you actually did experience this thing yourself, here's a foil/back-pat for your thoughts on the matter."

Of course, there is at least one other important function of reviews in most media contexts, which would be 4) Service to the publisher -- "Some editorial to accompany related advertising." But that's another post/total fact of writing for any media outlet.

Okay, one more "of course"--some critics are just damn fun to read no matter what they're writing about. So sometimes reviews are there just to give a good writer something to dance around, or, in terms of service to the reader, to give good writing.

Overall, I am very happy to live in the age of the interwebs when so many reviews can be accessed online from different critics, at least for some arts genres. It makes being a blatantly belated review reader a hella lot more fun.

Image from A Serious Man from the fansite Coenesque

Read More......

On Liking what you Like when you Like it: Or, why Art needs a dose of Literature sometimes

The longer I write journalistic art criticism, the more apparent it becomes to me that our response to art is often be highly temporal and situational—that is, we like what we like when we like it. Responses to, engagement with and affection for a given artwork are highly subject to change over time.

I mention this in part because I see this truth acknowledged a lot more often in literary circles than in more visually artistic ones. In particular, I found this passage from Michael Chabon helpful. It's excerpted from an essay where he describes being in his early 20s and how he started writing his novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh:

I went back out to my room and shambled irritably back and forth from the door that led to the hot tub to the door that went upstairs, mapping out the confines of my skull like the bear at the Pittsburgh Zoo. And my eye lighted on a relic of my stepfather's time at Boston University: The Great Gatsby.

The Great Gatsby had been the favorite novel of one of those aforementioned friends whom I had decided that, for reasons of emotional grandeur and self-poignance, I was doomed never to meet up with again in this vale of tears. At his urging I had read it a couple of years earlier, without incident or effect. Now I had the sudden intuition that if I read it again, right now, this minute, something important might result: it might change my life. Or maybe there would be something in it that I could steal.

I lay on the bed, opened the book's cracked paper cover—it was an old Scribner trade paperback, the edition whose cover looked like it might have been one of old Ralph's wood shop projects—and this time The Great Gatsby read me. The mythographic cast of my mind in that era, the ideas of friendship and self-invention and problematic women, the sense, invoked so thrillingly in the book's closing paragraphs, that the small, at times tawdry love-sex-and-violence story of a few people could rehearse the entire history of the United States of America from its founding vision to the Black Sox scandal—The Great Gatsby did what every necessary piece of fiction does as you pass through that fruitful phase of your writing life: it made me want to do something just like it.

In a less wordy, less poetic vein on the topic of changing assessments of books, art and other things, op-ed columnist Rex Murphy is quoted in today's Globe as saying "[I have] long since parted with the delusion that my opinions, because they are mine, are less hostage to fallibility or walk nearer with truth than those of many others."

I don't know if these types of expressions on the changeability of judgment and artistic experience are more common in the writing world because one can always--or at least often--revisit books and text in a way we cannot revisit individual pieces of art.

In any case, this truth is something I'm glad to see acknowledged, and one I'm going to try and remember--even as I hammer out my own critical opinions, positive and negative, as well as I can at a given time.

Image from Bookdaddy

Read More......