Arts writer Theodore Bale is moody about the lack of arts writing and criticism in Houston. ALT attention was caught by opening paragraphs in his blog Texas, A Concept at www.artsjournal.com:
A Town Without Critics
Many years ago in Cambridge, I had the pleasure of meeting the esteemed former New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff. The lecture she’d delivered that night at Harvard was so inspiring that I decided I was going to become a critic as well. In a hopelessly naïve gesture, I went up to her after the talk and asked if she could explain my next move. “Well,” she said with a sigh, “the first thing to remember is that you’re going to have to conduct your education in public.”
Many decades later, that advice continues to ring true, and it’s particularly applicable to the contemporary blog. Gone are my fact-checkers, my editors, my copy desk, my headline writers and photo editors. Or rather, now I am all of them. This isn’t big news to anyone who started in print publications and moved to blogs. In my case, I continue to play both fields, writing for newspapers and trade publications as well as websites.
The theme of this week’s blog is so unwieldy that I couldn’t possibly cover it thoroughly within the “confines” of this ever-scrolling page. “Don’t write in a way that forces readers to click for too long,” I’m learning that lesson. With this delayed lede, however, I’ll proceed and try to convey a current crisis in Houston’s critical culture.
Read more at www.artsjournal.com . . . .
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