Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Uncategorized Everyone's a critic? Less so, apparently
Posted by Jeremy Abernathy on Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 2:39 PM
NPR ran an extremely well-timed story on critics and the struggling print industry last week. At the beginning of the broadcast, director of the National Arts Journalism Program Doug McClennan defended the status of full-time professional critics:
The critic defines the territory, walks the perimeter of that territory and comes back and tells you, 'OK ... here's the interesting stuff I found.'
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that in the United States there are now "as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers," i.e., there are more bloggers than firefighters.
As Dylan once quipped,"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." … Or do we?
Comments (2)
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Well, you're not getting any weathermenz back, even if you needed one. Which, of course, YOU don't. (Sheep-like people who need arts critics to tell 'em what to like might; you don't strike me as that kind.) It's a roll-your-own-media world now, son. Grab a hoe.
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Now I'm flattered ... I think. Is this the SpaceyG who comments on PeachPundit? To be honest, you've put a spin on the Dylan quote I didn't expect (but makes perfect sense in retrospect ... 'doh.) I searched the video merely to express a vague sense of commiseration ... I suppose it depends on which group you identify with. That is, whether you identify critics as oppressors of individual taste or, in my case, if you feel the newspaper crash is eliminating a valuable forum for exercising and debating taste. Yes, in a way ... blogs are superior for the latter (e.g. the ability to comment and to answer in rebuttal, in relative real time). But the loss of full-time critics is certainly not something I welcome. If you ask me, it's not a fair trade -- I'd like to have both. If critics are our metaphorical "weathermen," then I'd rather keep them around. On a side note: I revisited my research from yesterday and found that the Weathermen (aka the "Weather Underground") adopted their name based on that Dylan song. Apparently, they used the lyric as "the title of a position paper they distributed at an SDS convention in Chicago" calling for the destruction of imperialism and for the creation of "a classless world." So, if your comments at all alluded to a world of "classless taste," your interpretation was right on the money. And, thank you, I've been "rolling my own" intensely for some time now, if "grabbing a hoe" means working the blog trenches. ::: )
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