Art in America: Contemporary art, uncovered: a survey of major newspapers and weekly magazines suggests that visual art is steadily losing ground in the popular press, even as its audience—and market

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Contemporary art, uncovered: a survey of major newspapers and weekly magazines suggests that visual art is steadily losing ground in the popular press, even as its audience—and market—grows exponentially

Peter Plagens

"Why isn't anybody writing about art anymore?"--question put to me at an art opening a few months ago

Today's art world is bigger and wealthier than it was half a century ago, a generation ago, or even a decade ago. In 2002, more than a quarter of the adult population in the U.S. visited an art gallery or museum, a rate of what the federal government calls "cultural participation" (movies are not included) behind only the number of people reading books and visiting historic sites, and ahead of attendance at concerts by double; (1) since then, the menu of art shows has only gotten larger, the crowds bigger. Most cities boast at least one gallery district, while the biggest ones have several, e.g., New York's Chelsea, SoHo, 57th Street, Upper East Side, Williamsburg and Dumbo, and greater L.A.'s West Side, Santa Monica, Culver City, East Hollywood, downtown and Chinatown. Everybody who's got a Range Rover in the garage, a closetful of Armani suits and can tell the difference between a Medoc and a merlot is buying contemporary art. In the past few years auction prices for even mid-range famous artists (say, Richard Prince) have escaped the gravitational pull of prudence. Museums of modern and contemporary art--often glamorous and costly edifices designed by international "starchitects"--have sprung up in practically every American city with a neon bank logo hovering more than 10 stories high. All of this has naturally led droves of ambitious youngsters--many of whom only a few years earlier would have chosen careers in graphic design, screenwriting or public relations--to declare themselves artists. The enterprise of contemporary art is now sufficiently noticeable to Cineplex-goers and couch potatoes to earn it a recent movie comedy (Art School Confidential) and a reality TV show (Art Star). In absolute terms, more ink is probably spilt on modern and contemporary art today than ever before. It would seem that there's not only enough material around to keep art critics currently writing for daily newspapers and national magazines busy in the extreme, but enough to require even more writers, more column inches, more coverage.

Those of us within the burgeoning art world, of course, need art criticism. As Michael Brenson wrote in "Resisting the Dangerous Journey: The Crisis in Journalistic Criticism," a 1997 essay commissioned by the Andy Warhol Foundation:

Art reviews are indispensable. They are ways of recognizing and following artists, of keeping in touch with the changing ways artists think and of the ways artists, dealers, curators and collectors function, of bringing new institutions and alternative spaces to public attention and tracing their rise or fall. They are ways for critics to evolve new ways of defining and thinking by finding out where their areas of ignorance and blindness are and working on them. (2)

But in 2003, James Elkins, an art history professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and perhaps the Anglophone world's leading concerned citizen regarding art criticism, opened his Prickly Paradigm Press booklet, What Happened to Art Criticism?, with "Art criticism is in worldwide crisis." He goes on:

Its voice has become very weak, and it is dissolving into the background clutter of ephemeral cultural criticism.... So it's dying, but it's everywhere. It's ignored, and yet it has the market behind it.... In a sense, then, art criticism is very healthy indeed. So healthy that it is outstripping its readers--there is more of it around than anyone can read.

Elkins's "more of it around than anybody can read" refers mainly to specialist art publications, from the glossiest and most readable to the most hermetic and small-circulation "little magazines." But occasionally, one of the mass-circulation magazines offers what's called in the business a "package" or "takeout" on art. The December 2006 Vanity Fair, for instance, devoted almost 80 pages in what its cover designated "The Art Issue" to the contemporary art "universe." To be fair, the VF treatment did offer a platter of red meat--a symposium on the state of the art world with a prominent dealer, collector, editor, artist, auctioneer and curator, profiles of established and emerging artists, and looks back at the Warhol Factory and the dramatis personae of early modernism. But, in the context of a magazine that smells like a cosmetics counter, feels like a Christmas catalogue and looks like a runway show, art bottom-lined once again as a frou-frou for the trendy rich. In W's "Art Issue," which ran a month earlier, art fared no better.

Judging by the newspapers of many major American cities and some national magazines, the more straightforwardly journalistic popular press appears to be covering art with some thoroughness. Roberta Smith, Holland Cotter and Michael Kimmelman at the New York Times, Peter Schjeldahl at the New Yorker, Mark Stevens at New York magazine, Jerry Saltz at the Village Voice, Jed Perl at the New Republic, Arthur Danto at the Nation, Ken Johnson (now) at the Boston Globe, Edward Sozanski and Edith Newhall at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Christopher Knight and David Pagel at the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Baker at the San Francisco Chronicle, Robert L. Pincus at the San Diego Union-Tribune and several others produce a veritable mountain of words about art every month. And most if not all of their publications also print additional art writing by freelancers and stringers.

Some heartland dailies, such as the Kansas City Star (whose art critic is Alice Thorson), devote considerable space to art. In a few mid-major metropoles, pockets of atypical sophistication exist. Nancy Barnes, an editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, says, "We have healthy arts coverage in the Star Tribune, and continue to [have it]. We have a large staff with expertise in popular and fine arts and most of our coverage is done in-house, with some contributing writers. We also are lucky to be in a market in which good arts coverage is appreciated, indeed, demanded." (3) Thorson says, "I am fortunate that [my] newspaper will print as much news, commentary and criticism on the arts as I can generate, as well as weekly gallery reviews by our regular freelancers." Even the Contra Costa [Calif.] Times, circulation 186,000, employs a full-time staffer to cover the visual arts. (4) So there doesn't seem to be much of a shortage of art criticism intended for a general audience.

Nationwide, though, newspaper coverage of art is down, and not just over the long, long haul that Elkins indicates when he writes, "Newspaper art criticism is harder to measure, although it seems likely there is actually less of it, relative to the population size, than there was a hundred years ago." By most meaningful measurements--words, space on the page, the number of staff writers wholly or majorly devoted to covering visual art, etc.--the trend, over the last five or 10 years, is downward everywhere except perhaps at the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Such powerhouse newspapers as the Miami Herald (circulation 360,000 on Sundays) and the Chicago Sun-Times (333,000 on Sundays) employ no full-time visual arts writers. Dailies in Charlotte, Cleveland, Denver and Oakland do, but these writers cover art only half the time, splitting their beats with the likes of architecture and classical music. The national-average space devoted to the visual arts consumes but five percent of the total newshole for all of the arts, against about five times more for movies and three times more for books.

Owen Thomas, the unusually forthcoming features editor of the Christian Science Monitor, admits that art coverage in his paper--all written by freelancers who usually pitch their own stories rather than write on assignment--has indeed "declined" over the last decade. The Monitor is a national publication; at the Greensboro [North Carolina] News & Record, a perhaps more typical daily newspaper with a circulation of 100,000, editor John Robinson says, "We have what we call a visual arts columnist who writes for us about once a month.... Her columns--and our coverage--lean more toward features rather than criticism or reviews.... The visual arts get less coverage in the newspaper than any of the other artistic fields, with the possible exception of dance."

From writers' accounts, the situation is even more sharply defined, and it extends into "the arts," with an s. Here are a couple of typical comments, understandably offered under the condition of anonymity:

When I started at our newspaper [more than 10 years ago], I filled two positions: the art job and [another field's] as well. I am now covering [still another field] as well. I am the arts writer at a newspaper that used to have three.

In spite of the fact that I'm the only staff critic of my kind in the whole region, I could well lose my job next month or have it reconfigured out of existence. (I'll be an arts critic/ suburban police beat reporter/newsboy.)

National general-interest magazines haven't been doing any better. In what now seems like a golden age--the 1950s and '60s--the likes of Gene Baro, David Bourdon, E.C. Goossen, Thomas B. Hess, Barbara Rose, Harold Rosenberg, William Seitz, Alan Solomon and even Leo Steinberg wrote fairly frequently for glossies like Vogue about such artists as Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Bridget Riley and Ray Johnson. Although Life magazine famously ran a headline for a spread about Jackson Pollock that read, with what could easily be seen as sarcasm, "Is Jackson Pollock the greatest living painter in the United States?," the magazine did print a long piece under it. And at one time, it published the transcript--running into thousands of words--of a discussion about avant-garde painting among art luminaries who included Meyer Schapiro and Clement Greenberg. Art-friendly editors like Alexander Liberman at Vogue, Kermit Lansner at Newsweek and Dorothy Seiberling at Life established patterns that kept art coverage in popular-press magazines at a respectable level through the 1970s and '80s.

Then things started to change. Newsweek--which treated me most kindly as a staffer for 15 years and has treated me respectfully as an occasional contributor since 2003--and Time turn out to be subject to the same larger forces affecting daily newspapers in the heartland. Their subscriber bases, which account for more than 90 percent of total circulation, are aging. Younger readers are difficult to get into the fold. Competition from the Internet is forcing news magazines to morph even more radically than they had to when TV news came into its own in the late 1960s. Slender profit margins have become anorexic. Everybody must make do with less. When I joined Newsweek in 1989, writers more or less singly dedicated to their fields of expertise covered theater, music concerts/opera/dance, and art. No more. And while I don't know the inner workings of Time magazine, I do know that there's no full-time staff replacement for the retired Robert Hughes.

When I joined Newsweek, I went to work in the "Culture" section; by the time I left the staff, the section's name had become "Arts and Entertainment." A more accurate rubric would have been "Entertainment and Arts." Paired with the word "arts," the word "entertainment" has something of the same delegitimatizing effect it has when attached to the word "sports." Of course, all spectator sports are entertainment, but the overt addition of the E-word indicates that the contest in question, e.g., professional wrestling, is just a tarted-up facsimile of a real sport. The combat is phony and the outcome is scripted. When "entertainment" is caboosed to "arts" a somewhat similar adulteration occurs.

The situation is not much different with sections devoted to "Arts and Leisure," as in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, where art criticism has been eliminated in favor of soft journalism. In the current Sunday newspaper dispensation, art exhibitions, legitimate theater, classical concerts, etc., are valued mainly as "hot" items, preferably with attached scandals, gossip and statistics (production costs, attendance, salaries paid, popularity rankings, etc.). Whether the exhibition, play or concert in question is, in the considered opinion of a knowledgeable critic, any good or not drops to the bottom of coverage considerations. Whether or not the event seems to be a historically meaningful contribution to the field is regarded as entirely irrelevant. The atrophy in seriousness isn't limited to the popular print media, however. Here's what Cary Darling had to say last year in the Fort Worth Star Telegram about the gradual lobotomizing of the cable "arts" network, Bravo: "Symbolically at least, the poetic voice of Paul Robeson has fallen silent to the raspy ravings of [comedian] Kathy Griffin, and the groundbreaking works of Picasso have been masked in favor of the tattoo-shop shenanigans of [the show] Inked."

III

To help find out why such a disparity exists between a robust public interest in art (though not necessarily in the kind of art usually indicated by the adjective "contemporary") and the increasingly mingy popular-press coverage of it, I sent e-mail queries to managing and feature editors at about a dozen daily newspapers outside the major U.S. art centers. I also included my phone numbers for people who might rather not answer in writing. I must have hit a sore spot. In all but a few cases, the standard "repeated queries to his/her office were not answered" applies. One editor, finally replying to my third try, offered up the old excuse that my e-mails somehow "never arrived." My reply to her, which included the electronic trail of the previous trio (all of which had obviously reached their destination) prompted her to switch tactics and buck the subject of art coverage to a couple of the paper's writers who had nothing to do with the management decisions on art coverage I was asking about. "Stonewalling" may be too strong a term for the editors' aggregate response, but suffice it to say that newsgathering organizations don't look good when they try to fend off the gathering of news.

The Greensboro News & Record's Robinson, however, sets a standard for candor regarding the matter of art coverage:

There are a variety of reasons we don't give art more respect. We perceive that the audience for such coverage is small. It could be a self-fulfilling prophecy--we don't write about it because it's not that much in demand, but it's not in demand because we don't write about it.... Advertising has nothing to do with these decisions. I suppose that if a gallery said it would purchase a premium-priced ad along the bottom of a page focusing on the world of art, we would leap at the opportunity to expand our coverage. To my knowledge that hasn't happened, and theaters and symphonies aren't big newspaper advertisers, but we find the money to write about their productions regularly.... Contemporary art is often hard to understand. I dare say that, if asked, most of the readers I know would subscribe to the Tom Wolfe school of [opinions about] contemporary art.

While noting that almost all newspapers have made cutbacks in the coverage of "the arts" at the same time coverage of the effluvia of popular culture has "exploded," the Monitor's Thomas says that visual art might have some specific drawbacks. First, there's what he calls "the snoot factor"--the perception that modern and contemporary art is intelligible only to a rich, initiated elite. Second, he says, "there's no Picasso," no dominant figure around to pique the general public's interest. The same might be said for critics. The arch-conservative but astute and hilariously readable Hilton Kramer is long gone from the New York Times and recently absent from the New York Observer; Time magazine is bereft of the kettle drum of Robert Hughes who, even in retirement, is still the most listened-for voice in American art criticism. In recent years, these two were the only art critics whose bylines sold their publications, rather than the reverse.

Newspapers and, though to a much lesser degree, magazines, used to be owned by families and family dynasties, e.g., the Chandlers of the Los Angeles Times. Comfortable profit margins came more easily back before cable television and the Internet, and ownership cared less about big profits than exercising political power and local clout. They could cover a loss-leader like art if they felt like it. Though they often felt like it for reasons of quasi-philistine noblesse oblige rather than genuine interest, they covered it. Today, more and more newspapers have been gobbled up by publicly held national and international media companies. Profits and returns for stockholders have assumed prime importance. As a result, the editorial content of those newspapers has shifted. "News you can use," "'cope' journalism," "up close and personal" articles and the lowdown on Brad and Angelina have grown exponentially. Art coverage--supported by very little advertising revenue--has shrunk. The newer corporate owners of newspapers generally remain just as politically conservative as, and possibly more culturally conservative than, the family owners they supplanted. To them, contemporary art is at best a harmless, goofball amusement, at worst a threat to civilization as we know it, and on balance a cultural irritant. In their heart-of-hearts, they don't want to read about contemporary art in their newspapers and they figure their readers don't want to either.

Moreover, the operational structure of not only the popular press but also the media as a whole has changed radically. In the old days, says Stevens, "it was hard to have lots of pictures and a lot of layout razzle-dazzle. So words filled up more of the page.... Now, editors are constantly tempted to enlarge photos, add new ones, move this and that--the result is fewer words. That's happening everywhere in the press. Call it the 'USA Today effect.' No attention span. Nothing but tasty little gobbets. Fast-food press." And as soon as a television set appeared in every American home, weekly--even daily--doses of news were no longer frequent enough. Today's minute-by-minute Internet has, to understate the case ridiculously, increased the disadvantages of delay. The Internet has also democratized and "participator-ized" the media. Readers not only want to talk back onscreen, they want to see their back talk posted right next to the paid writers' stuff. Fewer people in the audience for contemporary art care what some allegedly august, published-on-paper critic thinks about a given artist or exhibition.

Exceptions exist--as with the lead critics for a few of the major dailies--but they don't abound. More and more people in the audience for contemporary art would rather read Tyler Green snark somebody in his blog, Modern Art Notes, than ponder the considered judgment of Michael Kimmelman on a MOMA retrospective. Many art writers have either added unpaid blogging to their activities or been squeezed into it from want of other, traditional outlets--for which many bloggers don't have enough writerly inclination or discipline, anyway. Each of those art bloggers has a following of fans and other bloggers, and each of those bloggers has ... and so on. A growing form of art criticism consists of posting links to other people's criticism, which consists of posting links ... and so on.

Meanwhile, says one art museum director, "The mainstream media have embraced and accepted the dumbing down of the American public; and the fact remains that contemporary art is an intellectual enterprise and thus not of interest for their coverage." A book critic agrees: "There was a time," he says, "when magazines felt comfortable ramming high culture down the throats of their readers because they thought they should. And they had profit margins that let them do what they felt like. Now they're scrambling to stay viable, so the first thing they do is panic and start trying to figure out what readers want, especially 18- to 30-year-olds. Which produces the sort of timid, pop-tilted coverage you see each issue."

Sure, some things have been worse in the past, especially in terms of enlightenment vs. philistinism. "At the turn of the century," Elkins writes, "Royal Cortissoz, the stubbornly conservative critic for the New York Tribune, fought everything modern except Matisse, and a generation later John Canaday, the backward-looking critic for The New York Times, battled Abstract Expressionism with a sarcastic violence that seems outlandish today." Christopher Knight (of the Los Angeles Times) finds, in fact, that much of the naysaying regarding the quality of current art criticism belongs, actually, to the art-is-going-to-hell-in-a-hand-basket school of thought personified in the previous century by Cortissoz and Canaday. "The declinist view lives on--only now it has turned away from art and set its sights on journalistic art writing," he says.

Alas, we art writers, too, are nevertheless part of the problem. To paraphrase an old friend of mine from undergraduate days, too often we "don't write so pretty good." Which is to say that too many writers fail to write about modern and contemporary art in plain English that the general reader can understand--sans neologisms and intramural patois. Although I consider myself a better writer than most (Newsweek has beaten some clarity into me), my clotted, parentheses-laden and semicolon-worshipping style is usually still not smooth enough for mainstream monthlies. As Stevens observes, "Most critics entering the field are not writers. I don't think it ever occurs to most critics that they should try to write well. Not surprisingly, no one outside the pond wants to read them." When that's pointed out to us, many in the art-critical fraternity bristle and argue that "clear writing" is code for Roger Kimballesque right-wing bah-humbugism concerning art any more adventurous than Fairfield Porter's.

They have at least part of a point. Twenty years ago, I participated in a sham National Endowment for the Arts confab (I didn't know it was bogus at the time) at which we were to discuss the NEA's individual critic grants and recommend whether, and in what form, they might be continued. (The decision to drop them had already been made, and our get-together was just retroactive cover.) The chief cudgel with which the already-dead grants were beaten into further oblivion was the complaint--voiced mainly by conservatives in on the fix--of unintelligibility. Still, it's a fact that the critics who craft the most limpid prose these days are esthetic, if not political, conservatives such as Hilton Kramer, Jed Perl and Mario Naves. On the other hand, critics like these gravitate to art about which they can write without stretching their rhetorical ligaments. Art outside their comfort zones they can dismiss with a few well-turned snide remarks.

It's also true that not enough art writers function well in both the art world and a corporate newsroom environment. Before I could be hired at Newsweek, the culture-section editor who recruited me and I were required to go to lunch at "21" with a higher-up suit. He told me that finding an art critic was "the most difficult hire" he'd had at the magazine, and he seemed pleased to find out that I didn't wear a green ponytail and could indeed eat with a knife and fork. But when we popular-press critics do pass Miss Manners muster, many of us still carry the debility of having other fish to fry. In "The Crisis in Journalistic Criticism," Brenson wrote:

... not one of the critics writing for a national publication wants to be known exclusively as an art critic. Peter Plagens of Newsweek is a painter. Mark Stevens, who took over as the art critic of New York magazine in the spring of 1994, is also a novelist. Robert Hughes of Time has written significant books on non-art subjects, almost all his ambitious articles appear outside Time, and for a good while now his primary energy has gone into a television series on the history, of art in America. Michael Kimmelman came to the New York Times as a full-time music and part-time architecture critic and has been writing regularly on music for Vogue. Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker has made it clear that he wants to be known as a man of letters.... In not one of these critics is there now the full commitment to being an art critic that the current challenges of art criticism demand.

Times and personnel have changed, but Brenson's contention is still largely true. Exceptions exist, of course, and primary among them is Roberta Smith at the New York Times. Week in and week out, she's entirely devoted to journalistic art criticism, mostly in the trenches of catalogue-free exhibitions of alive-and-kicking artists in commercial galleries. Nevertheless, many popular-press art writers are writers, and have writers' grander ambitions. They're not satisfied merely by keeping dutiful critical tabs on gallery and museum exhibitions, or by trotting along as Boswells at the heels of famous-artist Dr. Johnsons. Rather than compensating by lusting after the power to make or break artists' reputations in the manner of Clement Greenberg (who was much less of a kingmaker than his legend has it), they want to write books or poems untethered to the art world, which will give them status as writers per se--that is, as artists in their own right.

Then why aren't more art critics better writers? I don't know. Perhaps there's something about writing on art--as opposed to writing on food or movies or religion--that--cramps one's style. Or maybe the cause is a kind of do-gooder mentality that affects art critics in the popular press. A 2002 National Arts Journalism Program survey of 230 art critics writing for large-circulation newspapers and magazines discovered that simply describing art, as opposed to judging it, is their favored task. Only 27 percent of the critics polled put "rendering a personal judgment or opinion" at the top of their lists. Critics also cited predictably wimpy and borrowed sub-goals: the entertainment reporter's tipping readers to "what's in town," the schoolteacher's informing them about "different cultures and alternative viewpoints," the arts administrator's "opening a dialogue" between artists and readers, and the dealer's "motivating readers to see and buy art." The question of what criticism should achieve, and how--and of whether the success rate is holding steady or plummeting--has lately been the subject of a fair amount of consternation; witness, in this magazine, Raphael Rubinstein's "A Quiet Crisis" [A.i.A., Mar. '03], and Nancy Princenthal's "Art Criticism, Bound to Fail" [A.i.A., Jan. '06]. Rubinstein, who edited the new Hard Press essay collection Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of Their Practice, named reluctance to pass judgment a signal, widespread problem.

While art critics' editors and readers of the popular press may not have gotten any more intelligent over the years, they've gotten sharper. Stereotypes to the contrary, popular-press editors are pretty astute men and women who know their publications' audiences very well. What they see are newspaper and magazine readers who are deluged with writing, much of which they don't read carefully but rather semi-absorb through skimming, skip-reading, and just hearing the buzz about. To commit to thorough reading, people demand craft and at least a bit of entertainment--and they're mostly not getting it. And for art critics to take the huffy high road--"Readers would want to read my art criticism if only my philistine editor had the courage of my convictions"--does no good. They just get published even less frequently. Neither does it help for editors to say, "All right, if you feel like that, to hell with art." When editors do that, they ignore a bellwether sector of the wider culture ("the antennae of society," etc.) and, in the longer run, shortchange their readers.

What about the culpability of art itself? The majority of contemporary art still consists of one-of-a-kind art objects. That fact alone puts contemporary art at a disadvantage regarding coverage. Simply stated, tens of thousands of times more readers see the movie or hear the CD or watch the television program than view the art object(s) under consideration. The popular press's editors and readers much prefer articles about things they themselves have experienced than about things they haven't. Museum exhibitions that run two or three months and then hie off to venues in other sections of the country do better than gallery shows as subjects for coverage, but compared to movies, pop music and TV, they're still relatively arcane. Exhibitions in commercial art galleries, which are short-lived and almost never travel, have another drawback. Ninety-nine percent of the audience for gallery exhibitions arrives with an internalized knowledge--sometimes conscious, sometimes not--that they are, in the real estate agent's phrase, mere "lookie-loos." They're really not potential customers for the goods on sale at the galleries (the better the gallery, the less it depends on walk-in traffic for sales); they know that to a certain extent they're bystanders to commerce being done, a little like those tour groups at the New York Stock Exchange. My guess (and it's only my guess; I know of no scientific surveys on the matter) is that this audience cares a lot less than, say, the movie audience about checking their opinions of the art they see against critics' opinions in the popular press.

These circumstances, plus the audience's presumption that modern and contemporary art require some kind of initiation, a baptism in the waters of esoterica, make the field a niche market. And--in the view of many of the uninitiated--it's a niche of mainly overprivileged, even decadent, white people. As Douglas Wolk, an alternative-weekly arts writer in Portland, Ore., says, "Contemporary art seems like a super-rich person's game, like polo or something. Mainstream media don't devote enormous numbers of column inches to polo ponies, either, and with good reason." Andras Szanto, former director of the now-defunct National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, offers a fuller version of the hypotheses: "The relentless professionalization of art has meant that art is becoming more theoretical and complicated and by its own volition positioned at an ever greater distance from the average educated viewer. I mean, we're not talking about pretty landscapes. This specialization is at odds with the daily newspaper, and indeed it is the number one arrow in the quiver of the antagonistic editor: 'Our readers don't care because this is way too specialized."' Accessible or not, to many readers contemporary art is an ugly downer when it's trying to be serious, and insufferably self-satisfied and ironic when it goes upbeat. In either case, it's not terribly appealing as mainstream media fodder.

Contemporary art is also the victim of its own ancestral success as modern art. Simply put, contemporary art isn't underground and radical anymore, like its early-modernist great-grandparents were. It survived an abusive childhood, grew up, got rich and became the putatively transgressive arm of the entertainment and fashion industries. At this writing, the most popular television program in the art world, hands down, is the fashion "reality" show, Project Runway. Matthew Barney may indeed be a deep and disturbing individual artist, but the School of Matthew Barney (it's out there, folks, breeding like tree frogs) is about as genuinely "alternative" as an alt-rock FM station that plays a lot of Radiohead. With artists like Spencer Tunick now occupying the Robert Mapplethorpe daring-photographer slots and the Pipilotti Rists of the world posing as our current Jack Smiths, such "reality" TV shows as the boob-implant series Dr. 90210 and the surveillance-camera festival of adultery, Cheaters, seem more like the real deal. They're a hell of a lot more crisply produced than most art, and refreshingly less pretentious in the bargain.

No wonder that scholars of contemporary art ensconced in academe have, in large numbers, deserted their cognate field. They've become convinced that art--you know, Art--is either not so special after all or doesn't even exist as a distinct cultural entity. "Visual culture"--that is, signs, symbols and images from throw-away graphics to satellite surveillance photographs, presented on everything from cheaply printed matchbook covers to 4-foot plasma screens--is where it's at. "Art" may be buried in there somewhere, but who cares exactly where? A "common thread" that runs through visual culture writing, says Elkins, "is the assumption that fine art has become thoroughly entangled in popular culture, and from that observation it sometimes follows ... that it is old-fashioned or misguided to engage in special pleading for 'high' art." These days, ambitious young artists tend to follow academic theoreticians rather than lead them, and consequently, they make art that deliberately and often ironically looks more like just another kernel of corn in the succotash of "visual culture" than it does like that ol' sour pickle, fine art.

Oddly, this puts contemporary art in a double bind in regard to being considered newsworthy in the popular press. While it still suffers in the morning editorial meeting from being thought too arcane, its new wrinkle of engaging in pseudo-obviousness renders contemporary art simultaneously blah as well as mystifying. "Man-bites-dog gets noticed," says Knight. "[But] art is a multibillion-dollar industry promoted by corporate titans, civic leaders, commercial developers, public relations firms and tourism agencies in even mid-size cities. Art is just part of the churn."

Can anything be done about the situation of art coverage in the popular press? The first thing art writers can do is, to quote Elkins, "engage the reader without recourse to ambiguity, technical language, or hyperbole." And with, I would add, some poetic flair--that is, a little art of their own. In a recent piece in the Village Voice, Jerry Saltz gives perhaps the best analysis ever of the desirable ingredients of art criticism:

My only position is to let the reader in on my feelings; try to write in straightforward, jargon-free language; not oversimplify or dumb down my responses; aim to have an idea, a judgment, or a description in every sentence; not take too much for granted; explain how artists might be original or derivative and how they use techniques and materials; observe whether they're developing or standing still; provide context; and make judgments that hopefully amount to something more than just my opinion. To do this requires more than a position or a theory. It requires something else. This something else is what art, and criticism, are all about.

Only when the popular press's predilection for fluff is corrected by writers standing up on their hind legs and exercising their right to make informed and unapologetic judgments, and by editors realizing that with art, considered opinions have news value that can pique readers' interest and start lively arguments, can one of Elkins's other wishes come true. "Newspaper art criticism," he says, "[is] there as a guide, but never as a source to be cited unless the [art] historian's subject is the history of an artist's reception in the popular press. ... I would love to see art criticism from The New York Times, The New Yorker, or Time be cited by art historians in journals like the Art Bulletin, October, or Art History." Not that editors in the popular press would be impressed by citations of their staff critics in specialist publications, but it would make the critics feel better--make them feel they haven't cut themselves off from the insider part of the art world just because they write mostly for the uninitiated.

Beyond these two purloined suggestions, though, I don't have much to offer. As much as I'd like to say the problem of diminished coverage of modern and contemporary art in the popular press could be effectively addressed by organized cheerleading efforts--critics shouting for themselves, critics shouting for art; promotion of "awareness" of artists and exhibitions among the general public through town meetings and symposia; and art-criticism curricula in art schools and college art departments--I can't. Even Elkins--who, while not quite an art critic himself, eats, sleeps and breathes other people's art criticism--ends up telling me in an e-mail, "I thought it was at least possible that there was no problem: that the U.S. media reflected the U.S. public fairly accurately. Basically people don't care, and they get the art-world coverage they want."

Of course, there's always the hope that the two most amorphous and uncontrollable parts of this three-part interaction--art and the public--could change. Artists could quit being so pretentiously arcane, and/or cutesy-pie pseudo-pop, and start making more heartfelt art that attracts more interest from, to use Stevens's phrase, "outside the pond." And the public could try weaning itself from the fireball-and-car-chase taste of the Cineplex, try looking at more difficult fare more contemplatively, and try reading something more demanding in the A&E sections of their newspapers and magazines than the movie reviews and advice columns. But those are improvements too vast for any small group of people--e.g., art writers--to implement deliberately. Besides, the problem of the lack of interface between modern and contemporary art and, as the British say, your average punter, may be historically intractable. As one newspaper arts writer puts it, "I'm still not sure if your typical Tuscan shepherd ever gave two hoots about Piero della Francesca."

(1.) National Endowment for the Arts, "2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts," Research Division Report #45, available online at www.arts.gov.

(2.) This essay is reprinted in Maurice Berger, ed., The Crisis of Criticism, New York, New York Press, 1998.

(3.) Unless cited otherwise, all quotations come from e-mails and telephone calls between my sources and me.

(4.) Most statistics and many other facts in this story come from Andras Szanto, Daniel S. Levy and Andrew Tyndall, eds., Reporting the Arts II: News Coverage of Arts and Culture in America, New York, National Arts Journalism Program, Columbia University, 2004. Nominally, the three-year-old copyright might indicate that much of its information has passed its sell-by date. But since 2004, things have probably only gotten worse.

Peter Plagens is a painter and critic who lives in New York