The Brooklyn Rail

Years back, when I was an NEA Dance Critic Fellow at the American Dance Festival, the leader of the group, Suzanne Carbonneau, impressed upon us the tale of a dance critic who’d slammed someone’s work and destroyed them.

That story—and reading the review—reinforced my notion to not be a critic, but to do features on artists and art. It’s not that I don’t have opinions. I’m more judgmental than I’d like to be for a happy outlook on life, but that judgment ends when I pitch an editor a story that I think is good stuff and significant for others to know about. That’s my work as a critic, and it ends there.

I was a gallery brat and knew I wanted to be an arts journalist by the time I was fourteen or so. Though I majored in studio art at San Francisco State, it wasn’t to become an artist. I always knew I wanted to write about art, not make it. But lots intervened, mostly in pursuit of making a living.

I moved to Alaska, where I was the first ever art teacher in an Inuit whaling village above the Arctic Circle: otherworldly, like living on a moonscape with polar bears. Inevitably, I learned more than I taught. Subsequently, I went to grad school in anthropology, deciding that a degree in studio art wasn’t relevant to working in the real world with hopes of making a difference.

And that’s what lead to art journalism at last. The skills of anthropology, however—of participant observation, of learning the physical and spoken language of the people you’re “studying,” of parsing what matters to those folks rather than oneself—are the same skills of a good journalist. I’ve never taken a journalism course in my life, though I’ve taught at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and elsewhere.

NPR read about me in a magazine published by the National Endowment for the Arts. I was evidently a rising young producer/audio artist, having received fellowships from the NEA. They called the radio station (I had neither electricity nor a phone; no running water, either) asking why I wasn’t doing pieces for them. So I did stories on dog mushing, Inuit language, the annual Indian-Eskimo Olympics, radio dramas based on Indigenous tales, and sometimes artists, and my beat morphed over time into arts and culture.

Eventually, I moved from my running-waterless log cabin to Manhattan, to be among a community of folks who did what I did for a now entirely freelance living and who sustained life, liberty, and a pursuit of low-income happiness. I had a grant to work on, there was NPR who gave me some space to work in the NYC bureau and an introduction to the rigor of real journalists, smart ones—and to the differences between salaried them and those of us who freelanced.

I’ve always written grant proposals and had outside projects rather than rely solely on arts reporting to sustain me. I’ve been an academic, a consultant on podcasts and radio programs, hosted and produced a branded podcast, did online and print, all while identifying as an arts journalist. And oh, yeah, there were fellowships, ones with enough money such as the Fulbright to support my work and my life for a time. Glorious.

As for what effect any of my work has had on artists or arts audiences, likely overall a piffle.

I’m no longer regularly filing for Morning Edition or All Things Considered, now that my long-time editor has retired, and what matters to me—exposing emerging and underknown artists to new audiences—doesn’t seem to matter to the newbies.

My work and my words matter a great deal to me, in the same way artists’ works matter to them. I care a lot how the text sounds and looks; I talk to the computer as I write. It’s a conversation with the listener, the reader, and the subject, too. I dislike much of the awful permutation of language that is artspeak and for which the writer is likely getting paid a whole lot more than I ever have. When I was regularly on the air, there were times I’d get an email or someone would recognize my voice and comment on something they’d heard and what it meant to them. That mattered to me.

I’m looking at what I want to do now, what makes me happy. Yeah, that. I am doing a multimedia performance project about What Matters? in these fraught times. That makes me happy. And if I can also eat, so much the better.