Pointless Pontification: July 2007 Archives
First, Jerome Weeks' excellent blog book/daddy should be in your RSS reader.
Next (and the point of this post): for some time, he's been covering the plight of the professional book reviewer as newspapers are forced to cut expenses due to dwindling readerships. Competition from the Internet and other information sources seems to be the common scapegoat when newspaper execs try to justify firing their arts critics and puffing up the Style and Celebrity Gossip sections in lieu of actual reporting on actual issues in which journalists actually have to get up from their desks and work [GASP] as hard as any other Joe Blow to earn their keep. I was a stringer for a while. I know how hard it is to be an old-fashioned reporter and how easy it is to slip into feeling that you've dug deep enough and you're probably not going to get anything substantive by sticking around and talking to people and having them unload their own grievances against the government and they try and get you to pass along to your editor those bogus, scare-mongering flyers (now nigh unreadable because they've been photocopied and re-photocopied and emailed and printed out and then photocopied again) about how the government is in a conspiracy to bring about the Anti-Christ and surreptitiously destroy the free world from within and when you don't just swallow it whole they suspect you of being a member of the conspiracy yourself because how could you not be scared to death that the government is out to destroy their own citizens just for the hell of it and strip away their freedoms and institute Gulags and George W. is basically Stalin.
I know of which I speak, and I feel their pain.
The point is: newspapers have made their own beds and now must sleep in them. They've alienated their own readers by ignoring what it is the Free Press has a responsibility to do in a Republic whose health is shackled to the relative perspicacity of the electorate. Chumming the waters with the arts critics in an effort to lower the bottom line is just a symptom of a much larger problem.
Unfortunately, some people aren't really all that upset to see book critics get dropped from the major newspapers. Despised by almost everyone, it's not a job I would stand in line to get. Academics hate book critics because of the juvenile arrogance that seems to be the prime qualification for literature professors in American universities (book reviewing and literary criticism are, according to them, most definitely not the same thing). Writers don't like them because they have the gall to report objectively on the relative literary merits of works their publisher demands the public take seriously. Publishers don't like critics because they call the publisher out on the carpet and hold them accountable for the appeals they make to the buying public in the form of bulky tomes of despair and nihilism. Readers…well, readers are about as apathetic about book critics as they are about just about everything, wandering around, as they are, in a SRI-induced stupor of flatness and colorlessness.
But book critics are essential. They are the reader's best advocates. They have a bully pulpit which they are unafraid to use, which is probably their single-greatest contribution to the world of literature. Academics are only important to other academics, with their impossibly difficult prose that waxes poetic about Foucalt and Derrida and Marx and sundry aspecta obscura. Book critics are men of The People (and they're mostly men). They evaluate and inform from a perspective that no one else can claim to have. They're not in the system, nor entirely out of it. They're neither writers, nor wholly readers. They have a familiarity with the industry that almost no other publishing professional can claim. Their expertise is overlooked, underpaid, and (like teachers) so important that we all feel ashamed that it's so. Critics are people too, so it's not surprising that some fall short of both our expectations (which are often unreasonably high) and their responsibility, given their position of influence. But all-in-all, critics fill a void that simply cannot be filled by anyone else.
It would behoove us as writers to be more sympathetic towards the plight of our publishing cousins. Their elimination from major news outlets is saddening for everyone because it takes away from us, as readers, an essential advocate and source of professional accountability. Just because Art is subjective doesn't mean that everything labeled as "Art" has merit. We already know this as consumers because we discriminate against what Art we choose not to support based on our own preferences, attitudes, and understanding of the Nature of Art. Critics help us develop these tastes and understandings that go on to inform our purchasing decisions and ultimately, they help us decide what artist gets the quasi-democratic nod of approval from the buying public.
Without critics, we are left virtually to our own devices and are swayed more by corporate marketing savvy than objective evaluation.
