Blogs with taste
Terry Teachout has been arguing for sometime that blogs are the salvation of arts journalism in America and now he brings his argument forcefully to his Wall Street Journal column. Among his interesting points is the rise of the practitioner-blogger:
The emergence of the practitioner-blogger has the highest potential significance for arts journalism. Many, perhaps most, of the greatest critics in history — George Bernard Shaw, Virgil Thomson, Edwin Denby and Fairfield Porter come immediately to mind — were also practicing artists. But with the growing tendency of mainstream-media journalists to think of themselves as members of an academically credentialed profession, the practitioner-critic has lately become a comparative rarity in the American print media. Not so on the Web, which is one of the reasons why readers in search of stimulating commentary on the arts are going online to find it.
Tags: Culture, journalism, Weblogs
November 12th, 2005 at 8:53 pm
[...] Terry Teachout just wrote a column in the Wall St. Journal about the impact of blogs on art criticism. This excerpt via Jeff Jarvis: The emergence of the practitioner-blogger has the highest potential significance for arts journalism. Many, perhaps most, of the greatest critics in history — George Bernard Shaw, Virgil Thomson, Edwin Denby and Fairfield Porter come immediately to mind — were also practicing artists. But with the growing tendency of mainstream-media journalists to think of themselves as members of an academically credentialed profession, the practitioner-critic has lately become a comparative rarity in the American print media. Not so on the Web, which is one of the reasons why readers in search of stimulating commentary on the arts are going online to find it. [...]
November 12th, 2005 at 9:44 pm
This is great. I put this together with Winer’s link to Harvard Law School’s new Admissions blog and the traveling surgeons of “So Now Child Must Wait” in a write up of serious applications of blogging. Blogging: It’s Not Just About Cats Anymore
In response to this in particular, in my line of work (blog consulting) it makes me wonder not why more writers aren’t practitioners but why more practitioners aren’t writers - in any field.
November 12th, 2005 at 9:55 pm
Wow, that is some serious trackback action. The first snip there got automatically posted before I finished typing my comment below it!
November 13th, 2005 at 1:40 am
[...] He is quite excited by this growing trend. (So is Jeff Jarvis.) The emergence of the practitioner-blogger has the highest potential significance for arts journalism. [...]
November 13th, 2005 at 6:21 am
As a “wingnut” fan of brilliant soci alist GBS, I must say that’s an *excellent* observation.
The sense of superiority that “real” reporters (and their current apologists on the left — recall the outcry and homophobic attacks directed at Jeff Gannon) have over the rest of us I think really is also related to the profession’s current shadow ethics (grandly pretending to have some in theory, but exhibiting little in practice).
November 15th, 2005 at 12:38 pm
[...] One may argue that the ignorance of sound art, or experimental art, or anything cutting-edge in general, is universal, which reminds me of this Wall Street Journal column by Terry Teachout (got the link from BuzzMachine). Mr. Teachout sees blogs about art as potentially more important a platform of art criticism than mainstream media. I don’t really care about what the guys in MSMs think about sound art but we do need more blogs for serious discussion/discourse about sound art, and I do hope GNO can contribute to this process. [...]