L-R: DK Row, Lisa Radon, Jeff Jahn
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Yesterday, on artist Eva Lake's KBOO radio show, I was a part of a panel discussion about art criticism in Portland (which you can listen to here) along with writer/critics Lisa Radon of Ultra, Barry Johnson (formerly a longtime editor and critic at The Oregonian) and Jeff Jahn, critic-editor at PORT. The occasion for the talk was the recent announcement that longtime Oregonian art critic DK Row will be stepping down to take on a different reporting beat at the paper (on philanthropy). That means the only daily newspaper staff art critic in the Pacific Northwest is now gone.
But as architecture afficionados know, this is a slippery slope that The Oregonian and other newspapers have already been sliding down for years. Ever since the departure of Randy Gragg, for example, the paper has been without an architecture critic. Where will it all end, and how will the important issues and ideas and people in Portland's visual art and design worlds be given the attention they deserve?
One topic discussed on the show was the changing nature of a critic's role. Is it judgment, or something else? And how has the Internet and social networking changed things?
As Barry Johnson pointed out on the radio and Radon noted in her follow up post, Simone Weil has called culture “the formation of attention,” while John Dewey described the job of the critic being to "explain and explain some more". Perhaps today criticism isn't about giving a thumbs up or down to the general quality of something - passing an overall judgment on quality - but instead about sharing ideas and points of connection. It's not to say making a case and an argument for something isn't important - it is. But published criticism is today less of a final judgement than a conversation starter: a beginning, not an end.
Today newspapers are shrinking yet content online from other sources is exploding. More is being produced by blogs and social networking in terms of dialogue and conversation. One is also freer to write online in blog posts or on Facebook without any vetting or editing. Yet there is an important rigor that goes into actual journalistic criticism which is lacking from blogs. So in some respects it's a trade off: more volume of content for a smaller audience and less vetted editorial writing. It's not to say an unedited blog post can't be as good a piece of writing as an edited newspaper or magazine opinion piece; a lot of that depends on the talents of the writer. Yet it would be a shame if local and regional art and architecture coverage completely lost its generalist audience via daily newspapers and lost the opportunity to provide edited criticism and coverage.
On Lake's show, we also discussed the importance (or lack thereof) of a critic's training and involvement in what they're reviewing. Should an art critic be an artist, or collecting art? Must or should an architecture critic be an architect?
DK Row (who, in full disclosure, was formerly my editor at the paper) made a particular and deliberate point not to do become enmeshed in the art world. He possesses a strict personal code with regard to preventing conflicts of interest. It was a point of pride that he wasn't biased. Yet some found Row to be too far removed from the community he was covering. What is the right balance? Certainly the same question can apply to architectural criticism. Neither Randy Gragg nor I are trained as architects, for example, although certain acclaimed critics like the Boston Globe's Robert Campbell are. My sense is that we need both: writers and critics who's vision is shaped from being makers, and writers and critics who are more strictly observing writers. There should be no prerequisite written in stone, and if there was, it would reduce the diversity and spectrum of voices and ideas.
And besides, sometimes knowledge isn't everything. As I mentioned on Lake's radio show, just before I started writing criticism in the late 1990s as a movie reviewer for Willamette Week, of the paper's two existing critics, Kim Morgan had the much wider cinema knowledge but Dale Basye was the writer whose prose I liked best. (That said, I also liked Kim's writing better than any other critic in Portland not named Dale.) Which would you have rather read? Or should one have had to ever make that choice?
Although I'm not an objective voice on this, having previously written art reviews for the paper, if we're talking about criticism and arts coverage prompted by DK Row's exit as art critic, it's all but impossible not to talk about The Oregonian and arts coverage in general. Although daily city newspapers in America have all faced decline amongst dwindling advertising and subscription rates, I believe The Oregonian, despite having many individual talents on its roster, has been hurt as much by its approach as the challenges themselves.
Today any newspaper must have strength in its website, considering online coverage to be not a separate entity or animal, but an intrinsic part. If you go to OregonLive.com, however, it is not at all an online extension of The Oregonian. The site is broken down into sections differently than in the paper, so if you read something and print and go looking for the story online, it's not easy. And speaking of consolidation, I'd also like to see The Oregonian rid itself of the myriad names for arts coverage and simply have a section called "Arts". They could take away the names "How We Live", "O!" and "A&E" and move lifestyle and health stories to sections of their own.
A final topic of the radio show, and one addressed by panelists like Jahn on PORT, is how criticism differs, if at all, from other journalism. This continued online via the panelists.
"Overall, journalism and criticism have some overlap but they are different creatures," Jahn wrote in his follow-up blog post. "A strong critic has a strong internal compass so that friends, influential curators, gallerists and collectors have only marginal influence on them... Criticism is not so self-serving; it's a form of sharing why things do and so not work well. It's ultimately a civic undertaking. "
Lisa Radon took up the question as well. "What do we do when we write about art? We inform, introduce, invite the reader to consider something we’ve noticed. We notice. We describe so that you can see through our words and photos what we’ve seen. We question. We ask what is this trying to do and how well does it do what it sets out to do? We ask why is it trying to do that, and can the argument be made that it is a worthwhile thing to do? We provide context, engaging history and the contemporary with a kind of conceptual peripheral vision. We engage in a discourse that contributes to the meaning-making around the work by bringing whatever considerations of theory, of philosophy, that the work raises for us. And of course, let’s admit that we also misinterpret, misrepresent, miss the point, graft our own ideas and concerns onto a consideration of the work, etcetera."
Yet I like Lisa's conclusion later, which I could say speaks for me as well: "I can answer for myself that writing is a way of thinking. That writing is a way of working through to understanding. And that writing about work is a continuation of the conversation that begins when the artist hangs her work on the wall in invitation of response. It’s a conversation I want to have with you."
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