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The Culture Beat and New Media

Moderator: David Thorburn
Bill Marx Douglas McLennan: November 12, 2009; Running Time: 1:49:32

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Celebrity culture and the brutal economics of print journalism have conspired to kill arts criticism, but it has begun migrating to the web, where it just may survive and even thrive. Panelists discuss the field’s colorful history, current decline, and possibly vibrant future.

Arts criticism went through a Wild West period in the first half of the 19th century, recounts Bill Marx. Literature critic Edgar Allan Poe “routinely reviewed his own works anonymously,” and accepted the five dollar bribes publishers sent him with their books. In his day, a vituperative piece might leave a reviewer bloodied, bruised or worse. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that critics developed an evaluative approach to art, providing reasons for people to read a book, attend a symphony performance, or visit a museum. Big-city culture pieces were syndicated for publications around the country.

What we’ve come to see as the “golden age of arts criticism,” says Douglas McLennan, defined as robust writing staffs on newspapers and magazines, really only emerged in the 1970s. This coincided with the rampant commercialization of culture, so the role of criticism shifted toward providing consumers with advice, “becoming more thumbs up, thumbs down, pure recommendations.” Fascination with celebrities, particularly in the movies, only narrowed the focus of criticism to Consumer Reports-style advice. Some coverage even began blurring reviews and feature coverage, including interviews with artists and producers.

The good news is that even as print journalism shrinks, decimating the ranks of critics, arts discourse may be reviving. McLennan notes the presence of 300 thousand arts blogs on the Web, “people who may not all have something to say, but at least desire to engage in conversation.” He sees a revolution in the “ways people are using culture, and their expectations for how to get it.” The “broadcast model” of theaters, music performances, print pieces, is giving way to an interactive form, where “people have access suddenly to the entire world” and are demanding to participate in and react to rather than merely watch art.

In this transition, Marx hopes for new modes of the “evaluative act,” where people express why a certain performance or poem is important to them, in ways that go beyond words. His online venture, ArtsFuse, experiments with technology to create a community of artists and audience. McLennan imagines a musical response to music, or a graphical response to a graphic novel. He also believes the cumulative power of voices online will create astonishing possibilities for real-time storytelling and arts discourse (recall the Twitter explosion around the Iran uprising). The big challenge to this online arts revolution, panelists agree: a business model that works.

Lecture Details

Location: 66-110

“I find this an incredibly exciting time ... We’re coming upon a golden age of arts journalism, partly because a lot of ways in which we have discussed culture in this country have been stunted. We haven’t had much public discourse on culture in this country in 30 to 40 years. ... People are diving in and wanting to talk about culture now. ”

Douglas McLennan

About the Speakers

Moderator: David Thorburn

MIT Professor of Literature
MacVicar Faculty Fellow Director, MIT Communications Forum

David Thorburn has published widely on literary and cultural subjects and is currently completing a cultural history of American television, called Story Machine. He received his A.B. degree from Princeton, his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford and taught at Yale for 10 years before joining MIT in 1976. He has edited collections of essays on romanticism, and on John Updike, as well as a widely used anthology of fiction, Initiation. He is a former Director of the Film and Media Studies Program and of the Cultural Studies Project.

Bill Marx

Editor, TheArtsFuse.com

Bill Marx is also a lecturer on American arts criticism at Boston University. He serves as an editor of the "World Book Page" blog for the PRI/BBC Program, The World. He was previously a theater critic, and online arts editor at WBUR-FM, in Boston.

Douglas McLennan

Editor, ArtsJournal.com

Douglas McLennan previously served as arts columnist and arts reporter with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Seattle Weekly. He also worked as a music critic in the early days of Salon.com,, and wrote for Newsweek, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. McLennan is currently acting director of the National Arts Journalism Program.

ArtsJournal, founded September 13, 1999, is a digest of arts and cultural journalism in the English-speaking world. Each day the website features links to stories culled from more than 200 English-language newspapers, magazines and publications featuring writing about arts and culture.

McLennan holds a Master's degree in music from the Juilliard School, and performed in Asia, Europe and North America. He spent a year as artist-in-residence at the Central Conservatory in Beijing.