Critical Mess2
How and Why We Write
By: Charles Giuliano - Feb 23, 2007
During my youth in the 1950s one emerged from Sunday mass to find a fortress of newspapers piled up on the curb. Parishioners would grab their thick copy of the Post, Record, American, Herald-Traveler, Globe, and head home. There were several morning as well as afternoon papers. Many people read the Catholic paper the Pilot and there were strong weekly papers like our Brookline Citizen. The Herald, conservative and somewhat Republican, was our daily paper while the middle class and Irish read the Globe and Joe Six-pack perused the Record, the local Hearst tabloid.
On the way to and from Boston Latin School, quite a complicated daily commute from Brookline, I took to reading the Record. It was convenient to turn the pages while strap hanging. Back then it costs like three cents and then it went up to a nickel. Sometimes I bought the same paper in the afternoon because the newsboy was touting some sensational headline. Soon I caught on that it was the same paper I had bought and paid for earlier in the day with a replated front page. My bohemian uncle Freddy, who never graduated from college but read an average of a book a week and loved the Russian authors, strongly recommended the Christian Science Monitor as the only Real newspaper in Boston. For a time Dad set him up in a business Freddy's Music Unlimited in Newton Corner. I worked for him on Saturdays which is how I first heard jazz, but the record shop failed. Then he became a proof reader for the old Record and a union card let him float around Newspaper Row which was in downtown Boston behind Filenes's. Uncle Freddy was a card carrying Commie and when I announced that I wanted to become an artist his only advice was "Join a union."
Which I did actually from 1969-1971 when I was a staff reporter and the jazz/ rock beat writer for the former Boston Herald Traveler. I was a member of the Newspaper Guild and paid dues but it didn't mean squat when the Herald had its TV station taken away by the Supreme Court and the venerable paper was sold within days to Hearst's Record American. There was bathos in the newsroom and many a bottle of whiskey on the desks as we cleared out to make room for the unwashed Record American thugs. The editors that day didn't even both to stagger home from lunch at J.J. Foley's. I went home , cried all weekend, then lived on the dole that year and read my way through WWII, starting with Shire's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" followed by Speer's "Inside the Third Reich," Toland's, "The Rising Sun" and on and on till I was broke, started driving a hack, and went back to grad school to study art history and morph into a college professor.
But there was that thick, rich, black printer's ink under my fingers. How I had loved going below decks at the Herald and haggling with the printers on Fridays to get the proof of my Sunday features in the Show Guide. After we marked it up, took it to the rim where it got dropped down the shoot, you could scoot. But the printers were always drunk and surly on Friday. It was smart to grease them with Sack Theatres movie passes which we had in abundance. I had dozens of friends I sent to the movies back then. Or passed off unwanted vinyl to. Life was good hopping out to LA to party with Elton John or tour with Captain Beefheart who wanted me to join the band, and hang with Miles when he was in town. What's not to like about that life and it is hard to give up when you get a taste of the trough.
There were always music writing gigs but it was real tough to cover my first love the visual arts. It just didn't seem to matter. Nobody wanted an art critic and if they did they didn't want to pay for it. When I covered concerts overnight there was a midnight deadline. But the first edition, the mailbag, was on the press by then. So you put filler in the hole and that was pulled for the 1 am replate that is the home delivered morning edition. As a courtesy the drivers dropped off a bundle to the other paper. There was a legend that when the Herald got the Rose Walsh exclusive of Jackie Kennedy's marriage to Aristotle Onassis they held the story until the 1 am edition so the Globe had no chance to cover the scoop. There were a lot of laughs on Harrison Avenue about that one. Since I had to put in filler I asked my editor, Samuel Hirsch, if it was OK if I wrote my own copy to get pulled. He argued against it as a waste of time but that was how I get my art reviews into the Herald. I would call the artists and tell them to be at the newsstand at midnight because it wouldn't be there in the morning. One of those pieces was about the Smart Duckys a show by the humorous rebels Marty Mull, Todd McKie and Scott Brink (who left the group after that show). The Herald did have a couple of art stringers but they were stiffs who covered the Copley Society and other Old Boston crap.
Prior to the mainstream Herald gig I had sold papers for a living, twenty five cents a copy, as an editor of the underground Avatar. From there I became art director of Boston After Dark which lasted briefly. My assistant took over and I morphed into become the art critic with a weekly column called Art Bag. In one of my first columns I famously put out a plea to readers if there were any real live artists please contact me. Shortly after, I was invited to dinner by Andy Tavarelli and his then wife, Jane, now Hudson, and a contributor to Berkshire Fine Arts. After dinner we were joined by Liz Dworkin, Tony Thompson, Frank Phillips and Curtis Crystal. Shortly after that the Studio Coalition was formed and launched what I believe was the first ever Open Studios which I heavily promoted and reviewed. Kathy Porter emerged from the process as did Dana Chandler, Jr. an African American protest painter. Later that year curator John Chandler and I convinced Newbury Street gallerist, Phyllis Rosen, to allow a show of new Boston artists which John organized called Three if By Air including Porter, Tavarelli and Thompson. Andy revived that show years later for Boston College.
When Rosen's Obelisk and her partner Joan Stoneman (Sonnabend) merged with Portia Harcus and Barbara Krakow they opened a wonderful warehouse space Parker 470 across the tracks from the Museum of Fine Arts. Again I went to Rosen and suggested that the gallery host a series of artist talks. I presented one evening and there were several others. Out of these meetings the Boston Visual Artists Union was formed and flourished for a number of years particularly under the leadership of my friend and former Art New England colleague, Mark Favermann. The then director of the MFA, Perry Rathbone, Todd liked to call him Percy, was invited to speak and Tony Thompson, a particularly level headed artist, was asked to moderate. Perry was nervous as hell facing a packed house of hostile artists who, for the most part acted politely, although the official policy of the MFA was that the only good artists were dead ones. Until Joan Trachtman, the wife of artist Arnold Trachtman, got up and heatedly asked the obvious, when the hell was the MFA going to do something about contemporary art?
About a week later Perry called me at the Herald to personally let me know that he was hiring Kenworth Moffett as the first curator of 20th Century Art. That was 1971 and I scooped the news in the Herald. That really pissed off the publicist Clementine Brown as she usually fed those stories to the Globe. I would end up playing games with the MFA for years after that. Still do.
Over the years the rags came and went. Either they folded under you or there was a change of editors and you got canned. You live and die by relations to editors who come and go. There are the good ones like John van Scoyac at the Boston Ledger, Jon Lehman, at the Patriot Ledger, a stretch working with Sylvia Hochfield and Peggy Moorman at Art News, or Barbara Rose at the International Artpaper. There was a more than 20 year run as a columnist editor for Carla Munsat at Art New England but she was in Bali more than Newton and it went from monthly to bi monthly including a rough patch with a horrible editor, Miles Unger, who caused my colleague Dan Ranalli to quit. Carl Belz, the former director of the Rose Art Museum, took over as editor when his daughter became a partner in new ownership. That lasted briefly before all the columnists were sacked except Donald Kuspit. Significantly readership and revenue took a dive under the new owners and former editor Barbara O'Brien. Along the way I got hired and fired three times by different owners/ editors of Arts Media which is now defunct.
Out of the blue in the 1990s I got an answering machine message from editor Linda Tischler asking if I wanted to work for Microsoft? I thought it was a crank call until the third message said "Do you really not want to work for Microsoft?" When we spoke she informed me that I had been recommended to be the art critic for the Boston version of the new, national, on line Website "Sidewalk." It was a weekly gig for a 500 word piece, not a word more nor less, at $150 a pop. I replied sure but informed her that she had the wrong person because I didn't even own a computer. I did have one for a time but it never worked and I couldn't fathom DOS. So I was still typing. She said that would be ok and for about a year or so an intern retyped what I sent to her Fed Ex. For a year I bragged about being the longest running Microsoft employee who didn't own a computer. Until she got fed up and gave me like a week to get on line. Scared shitless I did. Somehow I got the thing hooked up, wrote the text with sweat busting out my brow, and good heavens, e mailed the sucker. Minutes later I called to ask if she got it and was floored when she said "congratulations you have now joined the computer age."
Writing for Sidewalk was a blast. My old buddy Jim Isaacs covered music and it was a really lively site. Linda proved to be my best all time editor. We would get together now and then for lunch even after Sidewalk folded and got sold to City Search which had a twenty something editor who knew dick and fucked with my copy. But Linda was great. A real newspaper person who had been a Herald writer and editor. She now is a writer/ editor for Fast Company has moved to New York and seems as happy as a clam. I learned so much from her about writing tight and tough. Everyone needs a good editor and she was the all time best. But, unfortunately, none of Sidewalk was archived so there is no tangible record of that important work.
By the time I was beginning to be computer savvy Sidewalk folded. The feeling of loss was terrible but I was hooked on cyberspace. How to get back on line? In September of 2000 I started Maverick Arts as an ezine. I scammed e mail addresses wherever I could find them. At the height of it there were about 900 readers. Mostly I enjoyed the freedom and the fact that it cost nothing beyond a monthly fee to connect to the net. During the 80s I had put out a fanzine Staple but it cost a lot of money to Xerox and mail an issue. By comparison I could reach readers and not acquire any debt. There was no reason to cease publishing because of money. And, more importantly, I wouldn't get fired. Plus I got to cover whatever interested me. At first I had no clue what I was doing but almost immediately there were responses. Within a day of writing something there were ten to twenty responses which I in turn replied to. That had never happened in all the years I had been writing. Some of these exchanges led to important new relationships such as connecting with the native artist Jaune Quick to See Smith or the artist Damian Loeb. I have written about and worked with these and other artists since then.
So many individuals were helpful and supportive. At one time I was discussing the small circulation of Maverick with MIT director, Jane Farver, an important friend and mentor. She wisely told me "It's not about the numbers." It's about doing good work. But the numbers did start to bother me and a couple of years ago I convinced the artist/ publisher Matt Nash (of Big Red and Shiny) to build the Maverick-Arts website. At first it was tough to give up that direct e mail link and I was afraid of loosing an audience it had taken time to create. But fairly quickly I matched, doubled and continued to expand that initial e mail subscriber base of 900. Shortly after posting Maverick on line I was asked by the Saatchi Gallery in London if they might link their site to mine. That greatly expanded international readership and brought a new audience.
Just over six months ago Jason Morin designed the Berkshire Fine Arts site. Even in the off season we are on track with an average of 300 daily readers and last month Maverick hit 6000. The readership is constantly expanding particularly coming into the Berkshire summer season.
All of which is why I take exception to the piece in the February, 2007 issue of Art in America "Contemporary Art Uncovered: A survey of major newspapers and weekly magazines suggests that visual art is steadily losing ground in the popular press even as its audience-and market-grows exponentially" by retired Newsweek critic, and artist, Peter Plagens. This is not the first time that I have been at odds publicly with Plagens although I have a great deal of respect for who he is and what he stands for. Mostly he does good work but there is a tendency to loose focus when he gets too full of himself. At times his opinions take on a self serving autocratic tone along the lines of "Good evening, I'm Chevy Chase and you're not."
The piece in question is a response to the important issues raised in the recent collection of essays by critics published as "Critical Mess: Art critics and the state of their practice" from Hard Press Editions. Plagens refers to the book in which he is included. So his piece is not a review, which would be a conflict of interest, but rather a thoughtful response that takes off on another tangent. For the most part I agreed with and was impressed by his research and information until I came upon this passage to which I took personal offense. "Â…More and more people in the audience for contemporary art would rather read Tyler Green snark somebody in his blog Modern Art Notes, than ponder the considered judgment of Michael Kimmelman on a MOMA retrospective. Many art writers have either added unpaid blogging to their activities or been squeezed into it from want of other traditional outlets- for which many bloggers don't have enough writerly inclination or discipline anyway. Each of these art bloggers has a following of fans and other bloggers, and each of these bloggers hasÂ…and so on. A growing form of art criticism consists of posting links to other people's criticism, which consists of posting linksÂ…and so on."
This seemed like a nasty aside and a hair over his ass in an otherwise thoughtful and useful piece. Arguably what we are trying to do with Maverick Arts and Berkshire Fine Arts either makes or disproves his point. That judgment is up to the reader. But it seems retarded of Plagens to dismiss out of hand the significance and impact of writing on the web. Clearly it is as good or as bad as the writers in question. Actually most of the fraternity of colleagues that Plagens appears to be so clubby with, like Kimmelman, Saltz, and Kuspit, for example, are probably read more widely in cyberspace than in print. As costs rise, while circulation and revenue decrease one does not need a crystal ball to see a time when print becomes all but obsolete. It was sad, for instance, to learn that the Canadian arts publication Parachute, which was founded in Montreal in 1974 and largely subsidized as a non profit, is ceasing to publish. At the time of its demise it printed 4,000- 5,000 copies quarterly. A successful art magazine prints about 10,000 copies per issue with not much more than two or three times that for the most widely circulated art magazines.
I don't know the actual figures but I dare say that the on line Art Net and mumble jumble New York Arts have circulations which greatly exceed that of, for example, the populist/ pulpy Art News. I wrote regularly for New York Arts and a couple of times for Art Net but not for a while. Of course they are not the New York Times, Time or Newsweek. Writers for those publications are reaching vast audiences. Or are they? The publishers of the major newspapers and magazines, as Plagens clearly states, do not appear convinced that a significant percentage of their readers turn to the art reviews. There have been serious cutbacks at the NYT, consider the anemic Sunday coverage and generally not very enticing articles, the fact that Robert Hughes has retired and not been replaced at Time, and that Plagens appears only occasionally in Newsweek.
What we are trying to do is create a dialogue and critical discussion about contemporary issues. One of the major problems for mainstream art critics is that they are confined to reviews of exhibitions and museums and art galleries. Even there they have to convince an editor regarding what they want to write about and don't always win the argument. So it is really the curators and gallerists who set the agenda for what most critics comment on. This has always bothered me on several levels. One response was to become a curator so I could work more directly with artists and plan individual and group exhibitions; to bring forth critical issues and present them in a more tangible and visible manner. Perhaps I am functioning as Plagens describes in Critical Mess as an Evangelist. For instance, my current show at New England School of Art & Design is "Native New Yorkers" including painting, drawing and videos by five Native American artists. I have also interviewed and covered shows by these and other native artists. So that is an advocacy that is important to me and I am trying to convey it over as many boundaries as possible. There are also important mid-career artists whom I have sought out, interviewed (the Beer and Burgers series), as well as worked with as a curator. A couple of years ago there was zero critical coverage of the first Boston show for the visionary artist, Paul Laffoley, in some 20 years. It was very gratifying a couple of weeks ago when Ken Johnson, the newly appointed art critic for the Boston Globe, wrote a massive Sunday piece on Laffoley and was kind enough to acknowledge that show which actually won an AICA critics' award. It is just such coverage that confirms commitment and effort particularly for neglected causes.
Boston is fortunate to have Ken Johnson the first truly legitimate and qualified art critic for the Boston Globe in my lifetime. Prior to that is a sad history that has truly hurt the growth of the art community. There is nothing worse to a healthy art scene than limited and inept coverage. The Herald, for a time had my friend and colleague, Mary Sherman (she ably runs Transcultural Exchange which will host an international conference in Boston in April) but a couple of years back the Herald, Boston's other daily paper, just stopped covering art. The Boston Phoenix over the years has employed me (when it was called Boston After Dark) and the distinguished writers Ken Baker and David Bonetti. They later left for San Francisco and Bonetti, a friend and colleague, now works in Saint Louis for the Post-Gazette. In recent years the Phoenix has been spotty under a conservative editor, Jeffrey Ganz, who occasionally turns out turgid scholarly pieces for the "alternative" weekly.
Most of all I miss the dialogue, the give and take. Back in the day, when I wrote for Boston After Dark, I enjoyed the lively competition with Jean Bergantini Grillo who wrote for the rival, Cambridge Phoenix (before they merged). Later Bonetti and I often had scatological tinged midnight chats about our coverage. David was always a hoot and had the latest gossip which he whispered into the phone like Deep Throat but never revealed sources. E mail has replaced the phone and I crave the constant feedback from readers. The Beer and Burger series has proved to be important just getting together with peers and colleagues and probing ideas. Recently I convened the knights of the round table to discuss the recent emergence of the new ICA. It included former Art New England colleagues Daniel Ranalli and Mark Favermann. Geoff Edgers, a Globe arts writer, joined us and took copious notes. He has been writing some terrific investigative pieces. Also chiming in were Raymond Liddell, a contributing editor and mentor to the current Art New England, the artist, Thad Beal, and Mary Sherman much protesting being the token female at the summit meeting. Not much really came of the meeting as it was too noisy in the pub to focus the dialogue. But peer meetings and critical exchanges are enormously important.
Again, I fiercely disagree with Plagens when he degrades bloggers. Yes, most of it is not worth following. But the format and medium is still in its infancy. It is a vehicle with great potential for growth and change. Here at Maverick/ Berkshire I really think we are breaking new ground. I wouldn't bother otherwise. One thing you hear over and over is keep it short. That people in cyberspace have little or no attention span. Linda always told me to keep to a single screen or you loose them. Microsoft had research to back it up. But it is too much fun to break the rules. If people are really interested, and a handful are, they will read all the way through, or print it out and read it. Or e mail it to a friend. And require their students to read it. All of which is actually happening. My word count right now is 3963 and still going. See you are tagging along. Or long since gone.
The Critical Mess piece by Arthur Danto states that he writes 10 pieces 3,000 words each annually. Here at BFA we do that about once a week. Not that we are on the same level as Arthur Danto. But we exercise the option if the mood hits us. We have been most fortunate to publish Michael Miller. He is a wonderfully entertaining and knowledgeable writer on serious music. I always feel I learn something in his reviews and I enjoy their intensity and length. But recently I was floored when he submitted 5,000 words on the Claude Lorrain show at the Clark. It took him a couple of weeks to write the piece. First he read the catalogue and then visited the show several times which he also advised the readers to do the better to understand the wonderful and rare selection of drawings. I read the entire text but told Michael that I wonder just how many people would make that effort. It is the kind of article one expects in a scholarly publication read by a handful of experts in the field of whom Michael is one. But he was writing for himself and that limited audience which no doubt is excited to read such an expert and challenging piece. The "blog" format, how I hate that term, allows for that kind of effort and a labor of love. That Peter, is the whole point of what we are trying to do. It is really unfair and inaccurate to state that we are lacking "writerly inclination or discipline." If anything we are pushing the envelope of those expectations.
But I would like to end with a quote from the Plagens piece which is actually a quote from Michael Brenson. "Art reviews are indispensable. They are ways of recognizing and following artists, of keeping in touch with the changing ways artists think and the ways artists, dealers, curators and collectors function, of bringing new institutions and alternative spaces to public attention and tracing their rise and fall. They are ways for critics to evolve new ways of defining and thinking by finding out where their areas of ignorance and blindness are and working on them." Amen.