COMMENTARY ON WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA ARTS WILL CONTINUE AS ARTS SPECTRUM COLUMN MOVES TO THE WORLD WIDE WEB

For more than eight years, my Arts Spectrum column appeared each Sunday in the Times-News of Hendersonville, NC. Devotees are used to turning to page three of the Lifestyle section to read commentary on the creative and performing arts in Western North Carolina. For budgetary reasons, the newspaper will discontinue publishing my column as of the end of March. It is time to make a transition that is inevitable; Arts Spectrum has moved to the web at artsspectrum.blogspot.com.

Newspapers are in trouble because of revolutionary changes in the modes of information distribution. The Rocky Mountain News and the Arizona Citizen have shut down. The Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune are bankrupt. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the daily Christian Science Monitor are now available only on-line. It is rumored that McClatchy will close the Sacramento Bee, the Fresno Bee and the Miami Herald if purchasers are not found. The Washington Post is restructuring due to declining revenue. The New York Times recently raised cash by selling part of its new 2007 building in Manhattan, and in addition sold a $250M stake in the company to Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú in order to reduce debt.

In a blog entitled “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” Clay Shirky comments: “When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution...Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.” Shirky continues: “For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues.” (www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/)

Recognizing that the communication changes that began forty years ago are accelerating, and are as dramatic as the changes caused by the invention of movable type by Gutenberg in 1450 and the introduction of the octavo book by Aldus Manutius in 1501, Arts Spectrum will now become a very small example of those “special cases” to which Shirky alludes. Arts Spectrum will appear online and will rely on sponsorship instead of newspaper advertising revenue to continue its mission to Western North Carolina.

There are advantages to being digital:
• Illustrations can accompany commentary on visual art.
• Columns can expand beyond 560 words when needed.
• Publication frequency may become more than once a week.

There are also disadvantages:
• So long as it is a blog, there will be no supervising editor.
• Financial sponsorship must be arranged.

Discussions are underway to find a web home for Arts Spectrum where it might enjoy both editing and a not-for-profit umbrella organization so that sponsorship and contributions would be tax-deductible. Historically, Arts Spectrum has concentrated on Henderson, Transylvania and Polk counties, but coverage of Asheville and Buncombe County is likely to increase in the future if sponsors favor those important arts destinations.

Four hundred and twenty-three Arts Spectrum columns were published over ninety-nine months in the Times-News. One-third of these covered visual arts and fine crafts, another one-third covered music, and the rest covered literature, drama and film. That balance is likely to continue because in my mind the “spectrum of the arts” is broad, and Western North Carolina contains remarkable examples of every part of that spectrum.

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review (Jan/Feb 2009), David Hadju observed that arts criticism in nearly all American newspapers has become lighter in tone, progressively more commercial, and shorter in length. I give my previous employers credit on two out of three of those trends. I was never pressured to lighten my tone. Only once was a change requested to avoid offending an advertiser (a motion picture theater chain). However, a new layout that gave the Times-News a fresher look required more white space and my column’s word count shrunk by 20%.

Hadju quotes Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic as saying “Criticism has always been a mixture of opinion and judgment...now as the Web sites and the blogs have proliferated, we have entered a nightmare of opinion-making...(which)...has been responsible for a collapse of the distinction between opinion and judgment.”

For the nonce, while I am an unedited blogger, I shall try to guard against the sins of shallow opinion. For the longer term, I seek to become part of a digital world of responsible arts criticism. I welcome your continued or new patronage. 

© 2009 Edward C. McIrvine
Arts Spectrum column #424
March 27, 2009