Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

It's been an interesting day. Now I know you've probably had your fill of the Peter Gelb/Metropolitan Opera/Opera News story as have I. But I realized something about this story that I still thought was worth mentioning here because I think everything that has transpired in public says something about the state of arts journalism. I don't know if you noticed or not, but this entire story arc from Dan Wakin's original repost in the New York Times that Peter Gelb had convinced the Met Opera Guild's Opera News to stop reviewing its productions to the Met's eventual recapitulation of the confirmed policy took place in less than 24 hours. And it took place entirely online.

Pay attention to that last part. Wakin's original report, which appeared in Tuesday's print edition of the NYT, showed up on line in the late evening on Monday. The story was carried via Twitter instantly everywhere and within hours there was already a cacophony of responses of concern about the change from authors including myself. These voices were enumerated on sites including Lisa Hirsh’s Iron Tongue of Midnight and Parterre Box. By the next morning, the story was everywhere on Twitter and it inspired parody accounts from @FakePeterGelb and @FakeOperaNews lampooning the decisions. Arts journalists used to seeing their work in old-fashioned ink and paper didn’t wait around till the next edition to comment with the likes of Alex Ross and Anne Midgette jumping into the fray. Both writers, and many others, posted reactions on their own online spaces whether sponsored by their primary big-box media employers or not. None of it in physical print and all of it at the speed of the Internet. Not long after lunch time on Tuesday, the Metropolitan Opera announced that Gelb and the powers that be had changed their minds due to the public outcry via Facebook, Twitter, and blogosphere. After a good old fashioned press release emailed and posted on the Met Opera website, Wakin posted an update to his original story on line. Now while there may have been some old school phone calls and dirty looks mixed in here along the lines of real world experience, this “outcry” didn’t involve killing trees, and took place entirely in the electronic world of posted comments, Internet blogs, and social media.

I doubt this is the first time that an entire news event or story unfolded and resolved almost entirely within the context of the virtual world. However, it’s not an everyday occurrence when it comes to the arts. What strikes me most about how this happened, though, is that as I sit here and write these words, I can still think of numerous arts journalists who view the world of social media and on line existence disparagingly and somehow removed from what they do. These folks imagine their world as solitary writing after reasonable calm reflection in the spaces between their tete-a-tete’s with artists and administrators cultivating their sense of an insiders world of the arts and delivering their missives from on high. This is no longer an sustainable way to do business. Now I’m not trying to argue against arts journalism as it has been practiced well into the past. On the contrary, if it wasn’t for tried and true basic practices, Wakin’s report wouldn’t have existed to begin with. But this story was born, lived, and resolved itself online and in social media, and if you weren’t there in some fashion, you were just waiting for someone else to fill you in after the fact.

Writing about the arts today means knowing what’s happening on line and ignoring it means you aren’t getting the whole story. It’s not everything one needs to do, but staying on top of this activity is no longer optional for people who are relevant in the world of arts journalism. Media organizations (Are you listening Los Angeles Times?) should know that by now, and they neglect it at their own peril.

Labels: opera rant