About Us
Tired of bland, love-it-all reviewers? Fed–up with the omnipresent gossip, the feel-good pap, and the knee-jerk boosterism that passes for arts coverage in the mainstream media?
Critical cotton candy is not a healthy long-term diet — neither for those sucking it down nor for those spinning it out.
The Arts Fuse is a site where provocative opinions about arts will be encouraged; the aim is to bring passionate intensity and intellectual vitality to evaluating all things cultural on the Web.
The challenge for serious discussion of the arts — commentary, news, criticism — in the brave new world of the Internet is formidable. Critics who want to reinvent. rather than degrade, their craft will have to balance the supersonic, interactive virtues of the new media with the analytic and stylistic values of traditional arts criticism. Meanwhile, column inches are shrinking for meaningful cultural coverage in mainstream newspapers and magazines. And, as the old media turns their attention to online publication, commercial pressures to snare the much-desired younger demographic leads to a lop-sided emphasis on pop culture rather than the fine arts. In a decade or so, thoughtful arts criticism will be a rare in most of the mainstream media.
Some critics will not accept this reality. There are campaigns to bring reviews back into mainstream publications, such as the recent effort by the National Book Critics Circle, to save endangered book review supplements in major newspapers. The idea is that preserving a quarter of a pie is better than losing it all. Some of these champions are blinkered by nostalgia, overlooking that reviewing has been dumbed down over the past couple of decades. Who wants the mediocre status quo back? Perhaps critics who relish what (little) power and cache publishing in the mainstream media gives them. We wish these efforts well, but they are a diversion, a waste of energy given the hard work that needs to be done to ensure the future of significant arts criticism, which will be online. Adding insult to injury, these advocates for arts criticism are pleading with an enemy that means reviewing no good.
The truth is that the traditional media are hell-bent on hastening the end of incisive arts reviewing – it is the triumph of the mealy-mouthed. Column inches for criticism are slashed, gossipy features routinely elbow aside reviews, and too many of the critiques that make it to print are a mix of diplomatic finesse and advertising hoopla. Seeing their comrades axed in publications around the country, the jittery critics who remain are driven by fear rather than nerve. The disappearance of reviewing exacerbates the triumph of the huckster and/or the soft-hearted. Reviewers give editors, advertisers, and arts institutions what they want to hear – the irreality of perpetual praise, features masquerading as reviews.
Thus today’s grotesque spectacle of reviewers fighting for existence while at the same time making themselves expendable. Mainstream critics are content to be boosters or salesmen with nothing compelling or inspiring to say. Who can blame readers for deserting mainstream arts sections and flocking to bloggers who at least have a point of view? Some well-known book critics, such as Joyce Carol Oates, openly proclaim that they will only write positive reviews. Is there a surer prescription for boredom and logrolling? Did any of the great critics of the past – Samuel Johnson, Bernard Shaw, Edmund Wilson – say something nice or keep mum?
The upshot of the race to the bottom line is clear: when criticism becomes nothing but a marketing tool it loses its credibility, which makes it more vulnerable to the forces that demand its extinction. What’s changed today is that, in the past, editors and reviewers at least paid lip service to the idea that criticism was about provocative and disinterested evaluation – it was viewed as the opposite of advertising. The danger is that this precious distinction will be erased for the generations to come, whose “gatekeepers” will see reviews as nothing but micro-bursts of enthusiasm or condemnation, an unholy amalgamation of sales tip, shout-out, and gossip.
The answer to the demise of arts reviewing in the mainstream media is, for better and for worse, the Internet, which provides critics with the independence to discriminate and the means to cultivate an audience (albeit small) that wants evaluation rather than delusion. As the fine visuals art critic Jerry Saltz puts it — “In the future everyone will be famous to 15 people.”
The signs are promising: young people’s tolerance for the burble of bilge on the web is limited; even the prolific Joyce Carol Oates, grinding out admiring notices daily, can’t compete with armies of web tipsters. Yes, there will be plenty of junk and conflicts-of-interest online. But the Internet also offers the opportunity for sites that welcome genuine critical dialogue. It is time those who care about criticism begin to shape the future rather than shore up the past. The Arts Fuse will be one of the places where that renovation and reinvigoration of cultural debate will take place.
– Bill Marx, Editor
– Ken George, Webmaster
