End of art criticism

Further thoughts

A 2012 Gianni Schicchi production at the COC. Photo Michael Cooper.

Don’t think I’m not grieving Canadian arts journalism when I’m not writing about it. I think about it every day. I had a lot of time this year to ponder what factors led to its demise. The pandemic was the final chapter to the brutal internet disruption of every corner of Canadian journalism. If anybody ever writes a history of this transfer to digital, we’ll find out what was it that Canadian media managers prioritized in the process: content, i.e. what used to be called the quality of writing, certainly wasn’t it. Arts coverage disappeared, then Ideas, then Books, then longform in general, then a huge chunk of the in-depth reporting in other beats too. Staff were bought out, retired, laid off in waves. Diversity of opinion shrank. Permalancers were shed, freelance budgets thinned out. Of course the content will suffer – in the deprioritized beats in particular – and once you shed entire beats, deprioritizing will creep into other sections. We can live without X? Let’s try without Y. After arts and culture, off went foreign correspondents, regional and municipal news, media and tech analysis. The New York Times’ European Culture Editor Matthew Arnold recently said in an online master class that I attended that the paper has “about 25 critics on staff”. British media too have gone that way, and have not cut arts coverage nor criticism in print nor online – I think with the rise of the digital publications it actually slightly increased in Britain. The other night I was listening to an episode of the BBC Radio 3 show Free Thinking in which four people gathered to bemoan the disappearance of art criticism on television. How quaint, innit? During the pandemic I followed with not a small amount of envy how my overseas peers like the always interesting Alexa Coghland continued to review online performances for a bunch of British publications, major and minor.

The entirety of Canada I believe now has the grand total of two full-time critics – the Globe’s theatre critic and TV critic. I see the Globe’s Kate Tayor has added ‘visual art critic’ to her reporting beat (visual art, museums), so let’s count that as a .5 critic, although it will likelier be .2. Alex Bozikovic is the Globe’s .3 of an architecture critic; most of his writing is on urban planning, social justice issues, Toronto City Council, etc. What is so different in Canada, that we are down to 2.5 critics? Was it the mettle and the taste of our media managers? Canada is without arts and culture journalism today for the most part thanks to their decisions. The Globe is now on record that a bot runs its home page and social media, and is very proud that the paywall-cum-subscription-cum-bot-editorializing system has brought them new subscribers. “The Globe credits Sophi with helping it reach 170,000 digital subscribers and bringing in millions of dollars of revenue” is phrased in such a way that it’s not entirely clear for what percentage of those subs they credit the paywall-and-editorializing bot. Whatever the metrics, the Globe seems to be very proud of them. And that’s for the product which has evolved to a pale shadow of a national newspaper: no substantial (only occasional and random) arts and ideas, foreign correspondents, longform, but a lot of stuff taken from the wire, from the NYT, Bloomberg News, and so on. What are all those digital subscribers after? Business news and securities market info, I take it. For the annual Best Canadian Businesses list, which is decent and comprehensive. For the Wealthiest Real Estate Families List, which I did read the other day. They have a decent Retail reporter. Lots of Real Estate content. The pandemic revived the importance of the Health and Science beats, so that’s good, but without the pandemic, I don’t think they would be prospering today in the Globe. In an altogether different time, many years ago, a few of the Globe execs were cited as intending to go after the “$100,000-plus earners” and we were all WHERE ARE OUR PEARLS!? Well, that’s exactly what happened, but nobody bats an eyelid today. If what it takes for the Globe to survive is to turn itself into a business & securities gazette, that’s what’s going down. Unlike the Financial Times out of Britain, which is global in outlook, does significant amount of investigative reporting of international significance, and speaks to a wealthy sophisticate who knows her/his arts and demands top notch arts criticism, the Globe is I guess speaking to wealthy Ontarians who can live on Netflix and HBO.

I am trying to guess where the Star, another large paper that eliminated most of its former content, is going, and it appears to me toward the BlogTO corner. The BlogTO, but Woke, could be what they’re after. Time will, all too soon, tell.

So the role of the managers in gutting arts coverage in Canada is clear. But there is a harder question here for us writers: how did we contribute to this demise and are we entirely blameless? When I started blogging about opera in 2010 and writing in specialist media, I entered the final period of the era of the established critic: our dailies would usually have the sole critic per discipline, but no buzzing diversity of freelancers around the arts beats. Many of you will remember the last classical music critics standing at the Globe, the Star and the National Post. It can’t have been fun reviewing the Messiah and the same set of symphonies at the TSO year after year, for what, decades? The Star added a classical music blog to its music critic job description, but its digital game, as was the case with all the dailies back then, deer in headlights, was non-existent. Neither the blog nor its regular criticism was much promoted on its social media. The opera and pianist blogosphere was booming back then, and interaction in the comments was as important as the main article, but the Star blog creators were not interested in the interaction bit. I suspect they weren’t happy with the traffic and they eventually pulled the blog. The critic’s job at the paper was abolished, and the last Star critic is now in a different career altogether. His older, retired, indestructible predecessor still freelances for the Star’s Entertainment section. It’s an extraordinary connection that he has with the paper, which has survived multiple changes of editors and all the cuts. How? Perhaps he should give masterclasses on this.

But back to the early to mid 2010s. The writing from the Main Men at the Globe, the Star and the Post was quite tired. What we outsiders tried to do is to permeate the fortress so we can liven it up, diversify opinions – not so we can destroy the institution of the critic. But the managers decided to do that instead. The fortresses started to crumble and then those cracks let some of us in. Glass cliff? Glass cliff. The managers abandoned entire sections so they can move more swiftly (they reckoned) before the challenge of the internet.  

The Globe’s music critic would come to season announcements at the COC and always ask the same question (When will we see some opera by Canadian composers?) and write a report on that. When the COC started commissioning Canadian opera yearly, he had moved to the Quebec beat/retired, and the job was abolished, then inherited by a permalancer. Then the editor changed, an editor distinctly uninterested in the arts was appointed (I presume to gradually wrap up the section, because that he did), the permalancer after a few years left, and the final throes began. Which is when the departing permalancer suggested I take over. I lasted maybe three months. Another freelancer was then engaged, then would be engaged less and less, and then Covid hit. The wrap-up editor left, another one recently took over, but from what I can see, there’s even less coverage now. The Globe has no budget for arts freelancers outside movie reviewing, and wants to keep its Arts section slim and to 4-5 staff. Taylor, Nestruck, Wheeler, Lederman, Hertz, TV critic Doyle, and the editor Judith Pereira.

And what to say about the Post. I think it was the first one of the three broadsheets to abolish / buy out its critic, who then returned to write for the paper as a permalancer. His writing was livelier than the two critics’ above, granted, but his opera reviews had zest because he had a lot of beef with the management of the COC. A lot of beef. The Regie was the end of all that is true and good. I’d also occasionally read his reviews of recitals, and a surprisingly nasty streak would be in evidence (“why did Anne Sofie von Otter wear that awful dress” – that type of nastiness). So even though I liked his writing, I understood his judgment was weak. It’s a terrible conflict for a reader. You need stylish writing and sound judgment, not one or the other. I’ve abandoned reading him altogether when he did that self-pity tour of the media after the Post-and-the-COC scandal. The COC PRs carefully read my reviews! Sad violin.

The question I am trying to ask is: how much has the last lineup of music critics contributed, this is what’s hard to hear, to the end of music criticism in Canada? A lot of the writing was uncurious, kinda retired before its retirement time, enamoured of its fundamental assumptions. Too often predictable. (Not always; I adored that Robert Harris, the final Globe permalancer before the throes era, didn’t care for the new production of Louis Riel. I didn’t care for it either, but it was a politically correct production. There would be no such review in 2021. It just wouldn’t happen.)

And is the criticism that sees the light of day now helping the cause? A lot what we see published today in the form of criticism or journalism is a version of:

-         what’s the ethnic, sexual etc makeup of the director, producer?

-         what’s the ethnic, sexual etc makeup of actors?

-         what’s the ethnic, sexual etc makeup of the author? Is s/he allowed to write about topics in the play or novel by virtue of his/her ethnicity, sexual preference etc? Turn on the cultural appropriation detectors!

-         Is this work contributing in any shape or form to the Reconciliation? If not, why not?

Because, let me tell you something: I ain’t reading that. Few people will. And let’s not call it art criticism.