highlights of the wind festival, Pt 1

Below are some of my favorite things said in the Critical Edge thing. God, it's good they don't organize this thing more often:

Far too much of what is published in traditional publications these days seems like rote and pointless space-filling.
Douglas McLennan

For one thing, newspapers and magazines are edited. For another, they are usually subject to standards of accuracy and basic fairness which are pretty arbitrary on the Web -- as in, the assumption that "saying it's so doesn't make it so." And getting facts straight, and correcting errors, are essential to a writer's credibility. (And, by the way, to a functional democracy.)
Misha Berson
[HA HA HA HA Thank God for Editors in our functional democracy !! ]

I appreciate that newspapers of diminishing circulation fear that ambitious criticism alienates readers. But writing that is boring is even more alienating.
Joseph Horowitz

I haven't the slightest interest in combing through all that stuff.
Anthony DeCurtis

The trouble is that something has gone terribly wrong in American journalism. It is bogged down in rules and traditions that are actually relatively new but are applied as if they were gospel truths. [...] Perhaps I am sadly mistaken and out of step with "young" sensitivities, but I read print journalism when I was "young" and got fired up by it.
Enrique Fernandez

[Parade Magazine much ?]
Caryn Brooks

I don't particularly care where those opinions are published, only that I have access to them.
Maud Newton

So the good news is that in the future there will be millions of art critics. The bad news is that only a handful will have impact and earning potential. There will be some [...] who will likely do much better financially than any current critic does (having surveyed their salaries, I know how paltry they are). But there will only be a select few who can build their blogging credentials into a full-blown omnimedia brand.
Andras Szanto
[WTF?]

For all the crowing of bloggers, I've yet to see one offer what a decent daily newspaper's arts pages -- and ONLY a decent daily newspaper's arts pages -- do. One-stop access to a wide variety of guidance to local arts. There are theater blogs, visual arts blogs, and so forth. But to be able to staff a full-range of local guidance generally requires, well, a local staff.
Jerome Weeks

So the big question is, who will be the people on the top of the pile up?
Caryn Brooks
[umm, Parade Magazine much ?]

The other matter is, ahem, getting paid for doing this work.
Anthony DeCurtis

Perhaps even more probative work on the questionable decisions in schools across America to value and fund sports more liberally than music and theater.The breadth of work to be done is wider than the focus taken on by the combined forces of all the arts journalists in America. Too much of that focus remains on criticism alone.
Chris Lavin

One of the most irksome aspects of critical disengagement, in all its forms, is that this “objectivity” business is something new and questionable, not something old and venerable.
Joseph Horowitz

It was rigorous but not "objective" and it argued cogent theses from the perspective of engagement. More of that, please!
Enrique Fernandez [Best wind so far - read this one]

What has cheapened the entire enterprise of cultural criticism isn't blogging but the cynical, corporate manipulation of the press: the networks' and movie studios' and record companies' use of blurbs from Any Critic Anywhere (even the creation of Phantom Critics), its promotion and manipulation of happy-face critics on TV and so on.
Jerome Weeks

Anyone who has had to explain to an editor why, say, Duchamp is not an obscure reference in an art review, knows how limited traditional print journalism can be as an environment that promotes critical (let alone historical) thought. [...] And without bloggers, we might not even be having this conversation.
Ruth Lopez
[Yeah - We'll all keep that in mind, Ruth]