| [an error occurred while processing this directive] |  |  |
 |  | |
| ||
| |||||||
| |||||||
|
| ||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
 Recent commentary from National Journal: On Books: Gift Wrap It for a Bushie (May 31, 2001) A review of John R.E. Bliese's The Greening of Conservative America. By Margaret Kriz. Legal Affairs: Does the Death Penalty Save Innocent Lives? (May 31, 2001) Abolishing capital punishment could lead to an unknown number of murders. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: War of the Sun Belt Giants (May 31, 2001) White voters' social values send Texas, California in opposite directions. By William Schneider Social Studies: The Widening Marriage Gap: America's New Class Divide (May 23, 2001) What afflicts America is no longer mainly a poverty problem or a race problem, but a marriage problem. By Jonathan Rauch Media: This Year's Model (May 23, 2001) Maybe C-SPAN's approach suggests how the quality news media can avoid being left in the dust. By William Powers Legal Affairs: Medical Marijuana and the Folly of the Drug War (May 23, 2001) The most obvious proof that marijuana alleviates some patients' pain is that so many of them say so. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: Government by Gender Gap (May 23, 2001) The elements of competition and risk in Bush's policies appeal to men. By William Schneider More from National Journal. |
Media 
Insane HonestyThe other morning, a New York Times critic did what most critics try hard not to do—he let his guard down, fell for something he thought was terrific, and unashamedly praised it. It was great. by William Powers ..... I almost always remember not to like The New York Times. As I shuffle down the front walk each morning and reach for the blue bag, a stern little voice in my head admonishes: No fun in here, not a thing to enjoy, savor, relish, groove on. In the game I play, media criticism, it pays not to groove on The Times. The more fault you can find with the paper, the better. The public likes to see powerful media outfits taken down a few notches, and nobody has more notches to be taken down than The Times. Say something stinging about The Times, and the world beats a path to your column. It has happened to me more than once. So, when I was at a little gathering of Washington Post types not long ago, and one took me aside to observe, somewhat morosely, that The Times is in the midst of "a real golden age," naturally I changed the subject to something more profitable. Friday, May 18, looked like a bad day for The Times, and a good day for me. Practically the entire front page of the Weekend fine arts section was devoted to a piece about a new museum show on Frank Gehry, the architect. As it happens, I've been thinking about Frank Gehry lately. (Column Idea: The Times and Mind Control—The Danger Is Real). Ever since his design of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao wowed the world a few years ago, the man has been everywhere, and, it seemed to me, absurdly overpraised. Nobody should be allowed to get that big. It's time we journalists did one of our trademark turnarounds and put a lid on this excessive success story. Imagine my joy, and how my critical heart vibrated, when I saw that The Times piece was not just another Gehry rave, but a rave in the literal sense, as in raving insanity. The first paragraph resurrected an old John Cheever lament about "the evil eyes among us," people who are so negative that they can't "respond to the inestimable greatness of the race." What can you do with such people? asked The Times writer, architecture critic Herbert Muschamp. "Here's what you can do," he continued. "You can send [them] out there to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 'Frank Gehry, Architect,' a full-dress retrospective that opens there today, goes far toward dispelling the anger that has restricted our age from acknowledging artistic greatness in our midst." That was the lukewarm section. The rest of the piece read as if Muschamp had walked into the show and fallen into some wild delirium, like the pink-elephants dream in Dumbo, except the elephants were all Frank Gehry and they were god. "You want the best? Here it is," he wrote, noting, among the show's many qualities, its "astonishingly chic ambiance of black, white, and aluminum silver," its "wall texts of impeccable clarity." Gehry has a recurring fish motif, Muschamp reported, which may come from the architect's childhood memories of gefilte fish. But that "doesn't matter now. Rather, the fish form stands for the idea of projecting subjective meaning into public space.... A fish, unlike a consumer product, is elusive, and so should its meaning be." The next paragraph begins, "Slip and slide, slip and slide." To fully appreciate the show's climax, Muschamp writes a bit later, in what emerges as his own mad climax, we must each bring along our own tape of "Thus Spake Zarathustra," the Richard Strauss riff on Nietzsche. "But if you ask very nicely and think happy thoughts, I may show up and hum the first four notes." This is rich stuff, and, to any media critic worthy of the title, aching for a rip. Just one problem: I loved it. I put the paper down and thought about Muschamp's ravings all day. Why? First, the piece is one of the purest expressions I've ever seen of that flushed, light-headed, I-have-found-true-genius conviction we've all felt on leaving a certain kind of museum show. More broadly, he does just what most critics try hard not to do—lets his guard down, falls for something he thought was terrific and unashamedly praises it, holding nothing back. And Muschamp had good reason to show restraint here: He's drooled all over Gehry before, and has been bashed in some quarters for it. I know what you're thinking: But it's a critic's job to rise above mere enthusiasm. He should address every subject dispassionately, and coldly apply the most-rigorous standards of judgment. Otherwise, he'd not be a critic at all. This is inarguable, if all we expect of a critic is intellectual honesty. But there's another kind of honesty that I think should play a more prominent role in criticism, and in journalism at large, than it now plays. Human honesty. If you walk into a museum and have an intense personal experience there, why should you suppress that experience, keep it from your readers? The only reasons I can come up with—self-defense, ego, professional strategy—don't hold up. And if you pick up a certain newspaper most mornings and find yourself immersed in an unusually intelligent world of news and analysis, a world that runs from the happy zeal of Muschamp to the dark crabbiness of Dowd, a world that's far from perfect and has well-known tribal leanings, weaknesses, and failings, but is, more often than not, remarkably strong ... isn't it dishonest not to say so? To tell you the truth, some mornings when I pick up the blue bag, I hear another little voice. "You want the best?" the voice says. "Here it is."
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2001 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
|
Home |
Current Issue |
Back Issues |
Forum |
Site Guide |
Feedback |
Subscribe |
Search
| ||||
