Units

A response to Richard Brody's response to Sia Michel's response to the labor of arts reviewers

RCA presented Elvis with his first gold record (“Heartbreak Hotel”) while he was in the studio recording his second (“I Want You, I Need You, I Love You”). With drummer D.J. Fontana, singer Gordon Stoker and guitarist Scotty Moore

New York Times culture editor Sia Michel recently made “some changes in assignments” for a number of the paper’s critics, removing them from the duty of daily reviews. These jobs are not necessarily being replaced – in a telling gesture, classical music critic Zach Woolfe was, according to Hell Gate, offered reassignment to the obituary desk. Indeed, no one seems to know what comes next for theater, television or music coverage in the paper of record – a pivot to video, which the Times was already busy pushing, doesn’t seem to be enough any longer. Michel’s internal memo to staff, leaked first to Variety and then published in full by Playbill, reads less like a directive than a call for suggestions:

"This department has already made major strides to adapt to this moment. Our critics have pioneered new story forms, examining masterpieces with the Close Read format, and helping people discover jazz and classical music with 5 Minutes. Recently, we began dissecting pop hits with the Song of the Week video series. We’ve also used video to cover dance and comedy in groundbreaking ways, anointed a new canon with the blockbuster ‘100 Best Movies’ project and explored the new Frick museum and the new Rockefeller Wing at the Met with visual-first presentations…

"Now we are at another inflection point. We need to meet it with even more change, in terms of what we cover, how to appeal to a growing national and international audience, how we approach criticism and how we set ourselves up for even greater success with our current and future audiences.

"I’ll be working with many of you on how to pursue the vision I’ve laid out here. I’m always eager to hear your ideas for new and more ambitious ways to cover culture."

New Yorker film critic Richard Brody responded to Michel’s memo with a full-throated “Defense of the Traditional Review.” Reviews do not safeguard the past but are instead, in Brody’s view (and italics), “the most inherently progressive mode of arts writing.” The mechanism is a writer’s engagement with a given work of art in the present, “with perspective on the history of an art form and an awareness of its current state — an awareness developed by the immersive diligence of writing reviews on a wide range of recent events.” The daily grind of reviewing itself, in other words, gives writers a tool to “see in new works their implications, their promise, the possibilities that they expand, the vistas that they open. They see it not because they’ve heard the artists’ claims but because they see the art dynamically, even prophetically.”

Brody’s assertion is a thrill for any arts writer to read, especially (I can only imagine) for those who are aging and suspect a significant portion of their work is headed for the ash heap of history. Unfortunately, his eloquent claim is built partly on a premise that I do not recognize as contemporary:

“When writing reviews, critics are in the position of the public: watching a movie, attending a concert, seeing a play, buying a record. Reviews are rooted in the most fundamental unit of the art business — the personal encounter with individual works (or exhibits of many works) — and in the economic implications of that encounter.”

The problem for me is not the idea that a critic takes the position of the public. It’s that the public, in the digital era, doesn’t share the position of the critic. The “fundamental unit of the art business” may well be, for the critic and for most artists, the individual work. But this “personal encounter,” as Brody puts it, no longer has “economic implications.” Given the realities of scale for internet platforms, a personal encounter with individual works – “watching a movie, attending a concert, seeing a play, buying a record” (my italics this time) – is valueless.

Let’s take the example Brody includes that I know best: buying a record. Yes, I am old enough to have been in meetings with labels when records were referred to unironically as “units.” But today these units don’t exist, economically, for those businesses that drive the music industry. Records are no longer fundamental to our economic life as musicians. And the personal encounter with an individual work of art that they represent is, alas, a description of a bygone time for most of the listening public.

Is it the same for film? That’s Brody’s expertise, so I take his word for it. But as an ordinary consumer of movies trapped in the world of streaming video, I would say it’s at least becoming more like streaming music than not. Which films I am able to see depends mostly on decisions from streaming platforms. My personal encounter with those films is, in turn, economically meaningless to those platforms, which function on a scale so large that my participation might as well not exist. When I stream a movie, I certainly do not feel like I am part of a fundamental unit of the film business.

I know I am not a part of a fundamental unit of the music business when I make or sell a record. Am I still when I review one? Sadly, I cannot share Brody’s confidence in that. Maybe it’s because I also produce this particular unit of art, which perhaps makes me a critic in the position less of the public than of the creator. And as all creators of records know, we’re fucked.

Brody’s description of what will happen if we lose daily arts reviews is apposite. It is, I believe, an accurate description of the music business not to come, but here in the present:

“In the absence of this, what’s left is the curse and the shrug of the ‘interesting’ — a nonaesthetic approach that puts art before readers as a curiosity, as a set of talking points rather than as a form of personal experience, of devotion, of passion.

“In downgrading reviews, publications yield to the temptation of corporatized impersonality… Arts coverage risks becoming a spectacle unto itself, the creative vitality of individual voices replaced by a smorgasbord of packaged samples.”

I don’t think Spotify would see any of Brody’s cultural dystopia as negative. To return to Sia Michel’s language, it is precisely how streaming platforms have “set ourselves up for even greater success with our current and future audiences.”

Listening to: Nick Drake’s demos for Five Leaves Left

Cooking: with fresh za’atar (origanum syriacum) from our herb garden