IHT: “The sky is falling! Oh…nevermind.”
I picked up the International Herald Tribune today for my train ride after spotting a teaser headline referring to the artworld: “The latest status investment shows signs of a bubble.” I was eager to see what data Times art-market maven Carol Vogel could be citing. First surprise: It wasn’t Vogel, but Sharon Reier, whose name I didn’t recognize (turns out she’s an IHT business writer). Second surprise was the lede: “When Marta Guitart, an art teacher, lived in her native Spain seven years ago, she brushed up on the latest trends in contemporary art by attending art fairs like ARCO in Madrid and Documenta in Essen, Germany.” Given the fact that Documenta is a quinquennial exhibition (not a fair) taking place in Kassel (not Essen), this was not confidence-inspiring.
I didn’t spot any other factual errors in the rest of the 1,500-word piece. But then there weren’t many facts. Certainly nothing that justified the headline. Reier cites two art-market experts from academe: William Goetzmann of Yale and the ubiquitous Michael Moses of NYU. But neither one says the market’s ripe for bursting; their data, if anything, indicates it’s too early to call the top. And the one artworld source cited, Martin Guesnet of Paris auction house ArtCurial, agrees with them, saying conditions have changed since the early-90s crash.
Don’t get me wrong: The headline matches what you’ll hear if you talk to many active players in the field. Too bad Reier didn’t do that, which is why the article fails to make any assertions nearly as strong as the headline it sits below. In fairness, writers rarely have any input on the headline. So I blame her editors for overselling a story filled with generalizations that merely added up to make the point that many people are buying lots of art, much of it for the rather dubious purpose of investing their money. But her grasp of artworld dynamics was shaky: Perhaps the weirdest assertion in the story was that investment-worthy artists show with a “good” gallery, “good in the this context meaning one that has the recognition of Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the Macy’s and Gimbel’s of the international auction world.” The first part of that quote is nonsensical and in the second part Gimbels is a bizarre choice, given that the department-store chain went out of business in 1999.
Once again, I have to ask, would the IHT (a New York Times paper) run a story with the headline “Manhattan real-estate market shows signs of a bubble” without citing any expert cited or hard data to support the claim? There was however, one silver lining in this cloudy story - it featured a picture of Salvador Dali, whose name, as Andre Breton once archly pointed out, was an anagram of “Avid for Dollars.” So, points to the Times’ graphic department for a pitch-perfect illustration in this plutocratic period.
You are right, of course. There is a spectrum of inadequacy when it comes to journalistic coverage. All sectors are not covered equally well, and editorial staff, generalist by definition, are not always best qualified to select or vet submissions in specialised areas. And yes it is true that there are more market savvy people watching the real estate market than there are perusing art magazines or walking around the exhibition halls or galleries (at least amongst the commentators) but is it worth much comment? It has always been this way, though degrees vary, usually due to the arrival or departure of an inspired editor or a truly knowledgable writer. But I think it is sadly true that in all sectors today with mass production (for this discussion read multitude of news sources) the average quality, across the sector, drops. I therefore assume that all coverage will be poor. And am therefore heartened when I read the uncommon good piece. Or even scarcer, when I find a consistently good writer in any field.
But you have a right to feel more umbrage than most. It is your sector and you know what you are doing. My father, long time NYT foreign correspondent that he was, would feel the same about any poorly researched story on a sector with which he was famliar.
This issue is close to my heart. I fought for a long time on the barricades of arts-journalism advocacy during my years at the National Arts Journalism Program. The Holy Grail in that struggle was to get newspapers to move beyond review-based coverage. Adding serious fact-based reporting would elevate arts coverage — in newspaper terms — to a serious journalistic beat, or so we thought.
Be careful what you ask for. The NYT has admirably added positions in its newsroom solely dedicated to factual reporting on the arts. This was an important move, and one that only the Times was able to pull off (elsewhere, staff positions are going the way of lead type print). Reporting has been the flavor of the month in many dailies, to the extent that they could find people even remotely equipped for the task.
It is a cliché but true nevertheless that critics don’t like to pick up the phone. Most of them are temperamentally ill-suited to “straight†reporting. And there is a conflict of interest situation when a critic who just trashed an institution and its exhibition in yesterday’s paper walks in the next morning and tries to act as an “objective†reporter.
Well, we now have more straight reporting on the art world in the mainstream press, but has it gotten any better? Not really. The stories tend to be superficial, flat, and one sided. Anyone who has been anywhere close to a real art-world story can tell you that most press reports remain woefully out of touch.
And when it comes to the commercial art world, there remains a built-in bias. The dealers and the big museums are basically presumed guilty until proven innocent. Never mind facts. The cardinal rule of attempting to present two sides of an story (as in, fairness) seems to fall routinely by the wayside.
You’re both right that arts journalists get away with stuff that would be dismissed out of hand by political or business editors. But let’s not forget that we’re speaking about a domain of journalism where a third of the participants actively participate in the world they’re writing about (or so it was revealed in a critics’ survey I did some years ago). That may be good for informed and nuanced aesthetic insights, but it’s hardly a recipe for “objectivity.â€
Nevertheless, I wouldn’t lay the blame for bad arts journalism solely at the feet of the journalists. If the business world and the political world get more professional coverage, it is partly because they deal with the press more professionally. They write press releases. They hold press conferences. They actually stoop to talk to reporters. And where possible, they don’t hide facts.
The art world remains murky and devoid of transparency. When arts institutions are ready to share some real news, journalists will come running, like moths to the flame.