The Times arts sections, including the listings, used to give a vivid sense of New York City as a *place,* where art was being made by active communities of creators in specific neighbourhoods and venues. That mattered to me as somebody who didn't live in NYC. It must have been even more valuable to locals. I get all the reasons why that ended. I've seen how reviews perform on online traffic dashboards: terribly. Any editor with a mandate to push coverage toward eyeballs would have made similar choices. But the Times arts pages today mostly cover cultural product that comes from nowhere. (They're also weirdly fixated on late-night comedy shows. Does anybody who didn't watch Jimmy Fallon last night give a rat's ass what he said about the campaign?) The idea that somebody might have done something interesting in a church last night would seem bizarre to today's editorial decision-makers. Again, I get the pressures driving this change, but it's a real loss.
>The Times arts sections, including the listings, used to give a vivid sense of New York City as a *place,* where art was being made by active communities of creators in specific neighbourhoods and venues. That mattered to me as somebody who didn't live in NYC.<
Yes, exactly. That was the same reason I always made a point of buying the Village Voice every week when I still lived in Houston: the combination of reviews, listings, and even advertisements brought New York City to life for me so vividly that when I moved here, I knew already that I had found home.
You make a great case for venues such as this when one is looking for that type of criticism: evocative, thick description that helps you understand and feel what it was to be there to hear it. Even so, I think a Times mention still carries a lot of cachet for artists and their managers, and the reach that a small organization or emerging artist can achieve with coverage like that is still hard to match, which is unfortunate, given all that you and the above commentator have written about the shifting culture of criticism in print. The pendulum is still in swing, though.
The Times arts sections, including the listings, used to give a vivid sense of New York City as a *place,* where art was being made by active communities of creators in specific neighbourhoods and venues. That mattered to me as somebody who didn't live in NYC. It must have been even more valuable to locals. I get all the reasons why that ended. I've seen how reviews perform on online traffic dashboards: terribly. Any editor with a mandate to push coverage toward eyeballs would have made similar choices. But the Times arts pages today mostly cover cultural product that comes from nowhere. (They're also weirdly fixated on late-night comedy shows. Does anybody who didn't watch Jimmy Fallon last night give a rat's ass what he said about the campaign?) The idea that somebody might have done something interesting in a church last night would seem bizarre to today's editorial decision-makers. Again, I get the pressures driving this change, but it's a real loss.
>The Times arts sections, including the listings, used to give a vivid sense of New York City as a *place,* where art was being made by active communities of creators in specific neighbourhoods and venues. That mattered to me as somebody who didn't live in NYC.<
Yes, exactly. That was the same reason I always made a point of buying the Village Voice every week when I still lived in Houston: the combination of reviews, listings, and even advertisements brought New York City to life for me so vividly that when I moved here, I knew already that I had found home.
You make a great case for venues such as this when one is looking for that type of criticism: evocative, thick description that helps you understand and feel what it was to be there to hear it. Even so, I think a Times mention still carries a lot of cachet for artists and their managers, and the reach that a small organization or emerging artist can achieve with coverage like that is still hard to match, which is unfortunate, given all that you and the above commentator have written about the shifting culture of criticism in print. The pendulum is still in swing, though.