I have an appreciation for those who toil in the cultural spheres but who were raised in places far out of the orbits of those cultural spheres. Of course, one reason for this is that I was raised in such places, and I know something of the oddball status of being excited about de Kooning or David Bowie or “Last Tango in Paris” in a hardscrabble town where the price of wheat and the summer softball tournament and the all-too-frequent random acts of violence were the paramount topics of discussion around me. I’m always amazed at how a life invested in culture emerges out of such tough soil.
I’ve mentioned the critic Terry Teachout here before. He writes criticism for the Wall Street Journal, has written biographies of H.L. Mencken and George Balanchine and is presently at work on a bio of Louis Armstrong. Teachout’s blog is a regular feature on artsjournal.com, where he often mentions his visits back to “Smalltown,” which is his pen name for his hometown, Sikeston, MO.
Teachout has also written one of the most informed pieces about the blog phenomenon for “Commentary.” Many of those who work in the “old” media of newsprint take a scornful look at the proliferation of “amateur” bloggers out there taking over the critical terrain. Much of that scorn comes from the fact that newspapers across the country, in an effort to save money in the midst of dwindling profits, are cutting their arts coverage. Teachout observes, quite sensibly, in a recent WSJ column, “Newspaper circulation is declining, driven downward by the rise of the new Web-based media, and many papers are trimming their staffs to make ends meet. Whenever times get tough at an American newspaper, fine-arts coverage gets thrown off the back of the sled first -- and that's what's happening now.”
But Teachout won’t blame the bloggers, as some old-media scribes would have it. He recognizes that there is some fine and lively criticism out there in the www. But he isn’t one to dismiss the shriveling up of arts coverage in local media. “… blogging, valuable though it can be,” Teachout writes, “is no substitute for the day-to-day attention of a newspaper whose editors seek out experts, hire them on a full-time basis, and give them enough space to cover their beats adequately. The problem is that fewer and fewer newspapers seem willing to do that in any consistent way. I don't care for the word ‘provincial,’ but I can't think of a more accurate way to describe a city whose local paper is unwilling to make that kind of commitment to the fine arts.”
It takes someone who grew up in Smalltown, U.S.A., to know what the word "provincial" can really mean.
