Should social media edit art criticism

Editing out opinion post-publication because it upsets a lot of people – that used to be a no-no in the media. [Factual corrections are a different thing.]

Disappearing the pieces that went through the editorial process and got published was also a no-no. Some of us in the old school of journalism and art criticism still believe that social media should not be the ultimate editor. It’s increasingly hard to argue this position, as one after another publication succumb to social media editing-by-mobbing.

I’ll leave aside the best known unpublished pieces of the last few years, a tasteless (but entertaining) attack on Pete Buttigieg as not gay enough in a mainstream US magazine, and an op-ed on whether Canada should rein in its immigration, published then unpublished by the Vancouver Sun, with a grovelling apology by the editor. The unpublishing is still rare, although demands for it are not. I think the unpublishing doesn’t give the mobs as much pleasure as the post-pub editing does. The list of demands usually grows after the editorial or the writer succumbs and concedes the biggest culpa. Which is why it’s not wise to apologize to an online mob; it’ll only start the avalanche of further demands for reparations. Organization should have a plan in place when these things happen, and that plan should include this item: This will blow over in 3 days. You just need to weather it, preferably off line. Do something else, stop checking Instagram. 

A few months ago, the CBC Opinion site was found to have edited several sentences in at least two of the already published opinion pieces because they upset some people. (Some of us spotted this as it was happening and The Line also reported about it a day or two later.) One opinion piece was by a trans woman who wrote very eloquently about why she’s disagreeing with much of self-ID trans activism and why the loudest TRA voices are not speaking for her. The second opinion pieces was by a young hijabi who wondered how she must be perceived in public spaces in Canada – she was fairly sure that an elderly ‘white’ woman who just said hi to her politely must secretly hate her and hate her religion. Two different mobs came after these two writers and their editors: one was the progressive TRA allies, and the other was largely, but not exclusively, right of centre, accompanying the vitriol with the hashtag DefundTheCBC.

And the editors apparently folded within hours. Writer No. 1 immediately got emails asking her to reconsider her own opinion (she anonymized and shared those emails on Twitter). Not sure if the other opinionator received similar emails, but edit her piece they did.

This used to not happen in art criticism and art journalism – but of course it does now. A pop star with many million twitter followers hate-tweets a reviewer and the reviewer gets swarmed by the fans: this is not considered dishonourable behaviour any longer. The Guardian theatre critic yesterday published a sensible response to Viola Davis calling the critics pointless after getting some less than enthusiastic reviews for her role of Michelle Obama. “Viola Davis says critics ‘serve no purpose’ but we do – and it’s not to sell tickets”. If I had a tenner every time a version of this piece has been published in the last five years, I’d be much wealthier today.

Everything is much worse in Canadian arts writing because it almost completely disappeared from the dailies and magazines and took its last refuge in specialist magazines. Next and Exclaim for pop music, Opera Canada for opera and Wholenote for several different genres, including classical and opera; C Magazine for visual (Canadian Art, RIP); Intermission and some blogs and podcasts for theatre criticism. I am tempted to explain this new era of ultra sensitivity by economic scarcity and precarity which are more acute than ever. There are fewer paying gigs for opera criticism than ever; there are fewer opportunities for opera workers, after two years of covid, than ever. So what do we do? We rip each other apart on Opera Canada Instagram. We are on a mission to eradicate racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia. We are the disciples in the church of EDI millenarianism. We are hangry for tempests in our little teapots.

This is what inspired this edition of Long Play.

I ran into this today, having missed the original blowup entirely. I inquired around what this was about and it appears that an opera critic in Calgary noted in a largely positive review that one of the (male) principals was quite large and that this large stature affects his credibility in the role. Something to that effect (it’s been edited out, so I can’t quote it verbatim – and I think the writer has gotten enough online traffic already.) This upset a lot of people. I glimpsed at the OC Instagram page (where apparently the opera blowups tend to happen these days… who knew) and of course the usual happened: the original pebble caused ripple after ripple of other grievances. It started with “talking about a singer’s physical shape is offensive, apologize” to become “we need to re-educate critics into better reviewing / we need to rethink what opera is / what opera magazines are / revolutionize how singers are auditioned / decolonize everything” business. A lot of people demanded the words be edited out. Some demanded that and an apology at the bottom of the review. Some of those people, I was surprised to learn, are people whose work I respect, people who are in the same industry, to whom freedom of ideas and expression, you’d think, mattered very much.

Now, I love OC; I want it to thrive into the digital age (it’s currently on a fairly painful transition from a purely print magazine to a largely digital brand/opera portal and it sometimes looks like it made itself vulnerable to political activism by the many young underemployed (key) but Very Online artists…) I’ve published for OC a lot in the last decade, and loved every minute of it. Both of its editors from last 10 years – and I know both of them read this Substack; hello, menschen! – always had my back. I once got into a pickle myself: long story short, in one of the reviews I wrote for the OC, I was the lone dissenting voice in this town on the topic of Sondra Radvanovsky and Donizetti, and got a bit of a monstering from the fans of both; we can laugh now, but bel canto fanatics are nothing to sneeze at. Nobody, I note, back then, demanded that the review be revised or unpublished. The editor and one of the board members if memory serves got a few disgruntled phone calls. The editor shielded me from all that; the online stuff did find me, but I didn’t go on Facebook for about a week and set Twitter to notify me only of tweets from people I follow. I can’t stand her bitchy tone, and men, always men, teaching me at length how to do opera criticism, was just about the worst of it. (I’m sure the editor took in much worse, on my behalf. Emails tended to go to him; it was the call-the-manager situation; few emails were sent to me directly.)

That kind editor is now in a different job, but while he was with the OC I would bet my shirt that he endured more serious swarmings than that Donizetti one, as the internet got swallowed by the social media. I noticed myself, just by following the OC’s online presence, at least three such occasions, which must have made for a tricky week at the office. A piece about a large art centre which rhymes with Schmanff made some people at Schmanff very unhappy. A neutral Instagram post about a forthcoming Canadian production of the American chamber opera As One, which is about gender transition, caused a lot of upset in the comments by the newly non-binary people because the singers themselves weren’t transgender. Another review, which found ‘cultural appropriation’ in a contemporary opera staging in Montreal, caused the upset among the people and orgs involved, who then called the editor to complain. [I think the cultural appropriation tack is tenuous and unproductive, but if a critic decides to take that tack, hey, they’re within their rights. I’ll fight for their right to be wrong and/or beside the point in their reviewing.]

And the recently edited-after-publication review of a Calgary Opera production caused upset because somebody very diplomatically (have these people ever encountered British press?) suggested a young male star’s size might become a hindrance for certain roles. Is it me or has the bar gone really low?

Weight of singers is an old topic in opera. Unlike spoken theatre and film, neither of which is likely to set an obese actor on a fast career track, opera allows for all kinds of sizes. The extremely obese, if they are say Wagnerian tenors, tenors who can sing Verdi’s Otello, dramatic sopranos who can sing Brunnhilde and Isolde, other rare and highly in-demand voices – can have excellent careers in opera. And what to say of Pavarotti, whom people didn’t mind at all in the roles of starving artists, such was his charisma.

This is, granted, becoming more difficult in the age of streaming, Met in HD and operas on DVD and Blu-Ray. Opera directors have changed too; approaches to opera directing have changed, singer training has changed, audience expectations have changed, and opera criticism has changed. You have to have some serious acting skills if you want a career in opera today; this wasn’t always a necessity. It really helps if you are fit or at least average size; and as in any other profession, it helps enormously if you are attractive. It helps if you’re game for wacky stuff: singing while fencing, singing while hanging upside down, singing from a pool of blood, singing in your birth suit. The total cultural dominance of narratives on screen, of movies and streaming services, has affected how we consume opera as well. Audiences, especially new audiences that everyone is after, are not likely to buy an overweight Violetta or Mimi, both of whom die of consumption. It’s not ideal, and people will notice it, if a young warrior-hero is played by a chubby 60-yo. A lot of the fragile young women in opera will have to be sung by thin young women. Opera is theatre, like any other theatre.

Yes it’s the female singers that have most often been at the receiving end of the size-ist sarcasm by the dweebish male critics. Some years back, a British critic described a young, not slender but neither really big mezzo who sang the role of Octavian (a slender, tall trouser role) in Glyndebourne as dumpy. Other (old, male) British critics have, independently, found similar words for her body in their respective reviews. That particular online war raged for weeks. Nobody was fired, no one’s copy was edited post-pub. But there was a lot of online criticism, shaming and mockery – at one point somebody posted headshots of all the critics who have described the mezzo as insufficiently svelte for the role, and fine, it was funny, they made their point, all’s fair in love and art criticism. 

Except for the post-facto editing, and memory-holing.

But that is where we find ourselves now. We’ve crossed into that qualitatively different level of this particular video game, and I dread where it’ll take us next.

I am not romanticizing the print era as somehow uncomplicatedly autonomous and immune to influence. I know large organizations that (used to) pay for a lot of ad space in papers can and sometimes do use that power to leverage the amount of coverage for its sector – and art organizations are no different. But for a writer, critic, freelance journalist, the recurring post-pub influencing is a different phenomenon, a tougher one to solve. Post-pub will seep back into writing and editing. We will write under the surveillance of the angel of the post-pub. And discovering that our editors don’t have our backs will be heart breaking. The reason for writing in the first place will dim. Why are we in this, we’ll ask ourselves? And we won’t have the answer.