 This is a live arts criticism panel hosted by Arts Boston, front porch arts and Boston Center for the Arts. Thank you all so much for coming out to have some conversations about the industry today of criticism as well as art reporting and how the Boston art scene has been changing. Yes, so welcome and thank you to our friends at the Boston Center for the Arts for this creative space. Thank you for the one, and thank you for all the good things you have done. Thank you to the second. Thank you to our friends at Arts Boston. Thanks to those of us joining us remotely from the hall around the live stream. Sorry, we're a little late. And that video article footage will be up a couple of days after this event, so please be sure to share with your colleagues. But other than that, our sponsor will like to thank our sponsors, the Mexican Cultural Council, and make America and specifically the support of the network. So the network reports administrators of color each time in 2016. Our program is also a sponsor on this event so I'm going to show you guys some of the high arts administrators of color who work in the around Boston either for arts organization or on their own consulting freelancing system. So if you are interested in color in arts, please feel free to come talking if you're interested. And if you're not interested in color and you're working in an organization feel free to talk to me about how your POC coworkers and employees might benefit from the network. So you can skip that whole part when we read all the amazing athletes our channel is behind us. And now I'm going to hand over to the class girl who's actually moderating. I can't do a better person tomorrow at this panel. Let's do it. Are we ready? We'll thank you so much to our parents who are able to join us tonight. I'm going to give them an opportunity to go down the line, say their names, tell us a little bit about themselves and I've got plenty of questions for us to start with. Hi, I'm Maria Garcia I'm the senior editor of The Artery. The Artery is WBB's arts and culture team and it includes full time arts and culture reporters as well as over a bus full of computers and we do both arts reporting enterprise stories on the arts as well as vision about different art. It's the old I retired about a year and a half ago and it's over to Maria and still she left me right occasionally before that I was television theater critic Hi there, my name is James Johnson I'm the founder and editor-in-chief at Boston Art Review. We are currently Boston's only different publication committed to facilitating dialogue around contemporary visual art in Boston. We are a volunteer run team and community supported so you can find me afterwards if you have any questions about how to get involved. I'm Zoe Bidama I write about music mostly classical for the Boston Globe I'm Catherine Bolland I am a dance writer I'm from Bansom Karma currently and I've written for Bansom Karma Thank you all so much So the way the panel is going to work tonight is I have about like 5 6 questions to ask the panelists and we'll have a conversation and then we'll say the last like 15-20 minutes to open up to the audience so if you have any questions that you like or some conversation that you start we can go for a minute. Sound good? Awesome, alright let's get started So can you all tell us who everyone wants to go can you go? What brought you to writing a criticism and your first introduction to me? Well I was when I was at Boston University I was the editor of the VU News which was a radical weekly newspaper and I thought that when I graduated that people would just be knocking on my door come right where I said and it was a long wait and while I was waiting I started watching a lot of television and went into my slacker phase and one of my housemates said to me you watch so much TV why don't you write about it so I called up the editor of the Phoenix which was the alternative, the main alternative weekly at the time and I said you don't have anybody writing about TV you want to do it? Yeah That's my argument story I've enjoyed Washington University and it's been a traditional path it's going to be all that's safe for me and then I'll do what I want like a dance major and I wanted to teach yoga but I thought that's just degree to be good something a little more stable so I ended up in Boston because I got my degree in dancing and therapy from Muslim University and mostly graduating with that really hit me I don't think I'm interested that's not where my interest lies so I transferred things for yoga again and in fact that didn't really hit me at all talk to yoga instructor if you have questions about that and I just remembered I blogged where I knew about dance as a graduate from Washington University I got a little away from the dirt was a kind of place anyway a lot of contemporary issues and historical context I got an award way back when I was much younger put something together, found some old reviews I'd written in college, sent it to an editor at Dancing Karma and she said sure, join our team and it kind of took off from there I reviewed it from shows I also started as an undergrad I went to Oberlin College and there are too many concerts for anybody to ever go to on that campus because the college had a conservatory so there's students ensembles there's visiting guest artists or there were at the time that's going through a few changes that I haven't really kept up with so don't quote me on that if you know anybody who's interested in Oberlin College guest artists but in any case I started getting into classical music shortly after I stopped playing it because I was trained as a pianist and then I kind of lapsed as soon as I didn't have to play it I started liking listening to it a lot more it was my good fortune that in my freshman year in the month of January I've pictured January in Ohio it is cold, it is bleak there are not formal classes on Oberlin's campus at that time usually people do intensive courses or they do their own projects and the course that I was taking it wasn't really holding my interest for whatever reason but there was going to be a bunch of free concerts on campus all I knew is that there was Cleveland Orchestra was going to be playing basically in my backyard and Alex Ross whose book The Rest is Noise I had just read was going to be giving a lecture before that so I'm like of course I'm going to that so I go and after that David Spell who's the Dean of Oberlin Conservatory has a fun stage and says that all those 13 students up there in the balcony they were all lofty upperclassmen who I knew were all competing in this inaugural institute for classical music criticism for a $10,000 prize but all you audience members which included me can also compete for $1,000 if you write a review and submit it by 7am tomorrow morning and I am nothing else to those who started out in three nights that I was that were eligible I did not win that prize but I knew that I was interested in writing criticism from then forward and I did not seriously pursue it at that point but it was something that I knew that liked so when they offered that class again my senior year that class on music criticism I decided to take it that's what kind of came about I was super bored at my job I had lunch breaks into my afternoons writing newsletters to my friends 600 people on the list that I didn't know and need to do that for them so I made my own and now fortunately I do most of that writing but most of the time so my background is I was in commercial television for about 12 years and sometimes and I did it for different television stations across the country and also for the network occasionally and then I kind of grew out of it I don't think you're the same person you are when you go into your career than you are when I woke up and I said, you know, I don't want to be a political reporter anymore I think I think this has ran its course and so I sort of inverted my life and I went back to grad school and I went to Columbia journalism arts and culture journalism so while I was an investigative political reporter it was so funny because I was like doing this hard recording but like all of the journalism that I found myself consuming was arts journalism and I just decided that it was time for me to act upon my position so I sort of pivoted in journalism I went into arts journalism and then I heard about this recording job at WBUR I came in as a reporter as last year working at WBUR and you know when I walked into WBUR General Manager Charlie Kravitz's office and I accepted the job it was really because I knew the kind of arts journalism I wanted to do and it was one that traded flow objectivity for radical transparency and it was one that I wanted a kind of arts journalism that allowed me and people like me and people unlike me in their full self and that doesn't mean you are pying on every story but that means you're incredibly aware of the place in the world that you occupy and the lens from which you look at the world and from which you look at the art and it allows you I think when you bring your whole self to like be really cognizant of your blind spots and your biases and your privilege and your marginality all at the same time and so I came to Boston and I met with Charlie and at the time I said this is the kind of arts journalism I want to do and they were like great what do you need to do it we'll give you the tools and it's been wonderful ever since I mean it's I can honestly say that you know I've worked with really really committed people I have a great team of both full time staff my arts journalism story thank you thank you all so much it's one of the reasons why I wanted to ask you all that was just to really see the different pathways it takes to get to this field I mean there really isn't a clear like this is how you become a printer this is how you write about art and I've always been interested to understand like how we come to those places so thank you all so much for letting us know how it came to that place how was writing and covering the arts and arts criticism changed since you all began I know we're in a time now where Boston is really changing as an arts scene and so is the rest of America but how have you seen the arts arts change as well as the way we talk in this game well I think the way that I what I've changed is that I was doing the TV criticism half time I had started working at the Globe as an editor half time and the Globe job turned into a full time new job ultimately I was an assisted winning arts editor and I spent a lot of time thinking about criticism while I was watching people at Globe and elsewhere and one thing that struck me was that they were not there were a lot of critics who weren't being really honest but they were reviewing things based on what they thought they should like farm movies for example and and I think that I had been a little guilty of that myself when I was writing about television and at the same time I've read this one piece that really changed my focus on criticism which was a piece by Andrew Saras in the Village Voice who wrote about the return of the pink panda a movie that I had no desire to say and talked about it in terms of Peter Sellers' genius that Peter Sellers was the modern equivalent of Charlie Chaplin and that this movie was a perfect example of that I called my sister and said return of the pink panda and the two of us went and we just laughed ourselves sick about it and it made me think that Saras who had written another who had written a lot of about a lot of criticism of himself that I deeply admired or you know just just focusing on the art and not worrying about whether you're making a fool of yourself or just being totally honest about how you approached the work of art and what it had to you so I think that when I went back to writing criticism for the globe I was really quite different and I really saw my politics for example that that a something like the neo-wera news hour which is now the CBS news hour had no interest to me whatsoever because it was just talking against basically where there's something like the CBS morning news brought the full extent of the television artistry to the stories that it was covered and so I think that a switch from a content only critic to someone who really kind of took a look at the form itself and tried to vary the form I think there's two big shifts that I see one shift is in the art itself which is reflecting the world and our world has changed and is changing I think our culture is shifting at like a rapid pace obviously to our interconnectedness and the way we consume culture now I think like one like the art that we review has changed and thus I think the way like that I think that criticism sounds is a bit different and that's simply because both I think cultural institutions and art makers and journalism I think they're both having a reckoning I think they're both having a reckoning with their legacy, with their history with the people they have excluded with the voices they have elevated at the expense of others both we're seeing that both in culture and with producers of culture and the critics who are reflecting it and so there's this reckoning both within journalism and within the actual art so I think that's happening but also like adjacent to that is I mean just like the industry of journalism is just like an ever changing competitive landscape and so simply like the landscape of art criticism chums is an ever shrinking like complex ecosystem right and so you know I think at that time we we saw like that there were a number of critics positions we simply the model of modern day journalism with the exception of some legacy newspapers just does not really allow for full time for many full time critics especially for specific genres so you'll have like a cultural critic or an opinion writer but it's very very hard to find like a traditional journalism institution that has a full time dance critic that has a full time theater critic that it's just it's just hard to find I'm not saying that those positions exist but I'm saying they're much more scarce because the journey of the model and so the question is how do you address these two changes right how do you reckon with yourself as a journalism institution and face as a journalism institution voices you have left out from what points of view have you practiced criticism from what points of view have you reviewed art and is it time to change that right and is it time to be intentional about changing that and prioritizing that in your editorial mission right and while at the same time like working within this very complicated competitive media landscape right and so I think organizations are grappling with that I think every journalism institution that provides criticism is grappling with how to deal with both of those changes and I think there are different models it's interesting I to to talk about journalism model this is like the phrase nowadays and how do we make journalism work in this online world where there are fewer people by print newspapers now the whole 45th president era has changed like this but essentially news is moving to online so that's our world and if arts criticism does work with that it's not going to be great for arts criticism itself what it does and I wrote my senior thesis and I remember this was again financial crash down in 2007-2008 on this topic about where dance criticism was moving where it needed to move and a few years before that I think this key example also what you're thinking about about identities of critics and who they're lifting up and who they're not lifting up well it's put in a journal called Plumgate where Alston Macaulay at the New York Times said a sort of unnecessary misogynistic comment about Jennie Ringer who above her age, she had had a dance and she had been very public about it and I think she stood up and there were people who supported her and that was I think that you could see that shit she felt like she could speak up against this critic who basically in free reign since retirement she could say whatever you want and she went on all these morning shows and said this has been my history and it's cool to talk about my weight interview and felt so unnecessary so I think that's an example of where dance criticism is and I think too you see that focusing on different identities and how they can speak about trauma and use the way in how they sort of evolve in conception of trauma and then the other thing I was thinking about and that shifted to the online world I know in DIY Dance this one location which I write that I live kind of on the forefront of this what kind of criticism do you want to like and can we be open to different things that are kind of full time and it also relates to not having full time critics and do they get payers and how much time do they devote they actually need to put a shorter and use that on Instagram so there's a you know nice photo taking swipe and then there's the review and also sometimes we go Instagram stories so there really are these ways that you can think creatively you could debate is that good for the field is it not, is it the effect of that but these things are possible if it is just interesting to know thank you chef on that the same thing with critics well older white male critics as we were all commenting on the appearance of people who are not older white male is also something that's very much been a part of classical music criticism so as long as classical music criticism has existed basically and only now we're starting to see a shift if any of you know of the pianist Yuja Wang who is performing the L.A. film on Saturday a few critics so flamboyant costumes that are often very short and sequined with very long flowing bandage dresses are an essential part of her on stage presence and a bunch of people have felt entitled to comment on that and only now in the past few years I think since around the time when I started writing people actually started pushing back and I think that the role of that social media plays and is growing to play has been an integral part of that especially twitter there is a large contingent of younger very vocal classical music fans or hit classical music listeners and composers and musicians on twitter and also these musicians can so easily also it's a double edged short sometimes you say something that a musician does not like or that an artist doesn't like they can mobilize their fans against the right that also happened also I think I don't remember what was the review of Lizzo's album but with Robert Mears album so it puts critics in a bit of a tenuous place sometimes like on one hand these social issues are being talked about but on the other hand if an artist has a large base of very devoted fans and that artist calls for them to attack journalists that dare to say something that wasn't 100% laudatory about them it can have a chilling effect it might have a chilling effect I don't know where it's going to go but it's a complex new development for an artist's criticism I also wanted to move back on some more of the online shift I think that shift has largely happened and actually does coincide with the economic recession there's a lot of independent publishers especially in visual arts writing that was there kind of shutdown time that became sustainable to continue producing something in print I think now we're ten years beyond that and print objects have become something of like a special object I know many of us were here just last week for the Boston Art Work Fair which was the humongous room of the cycle around them filled with print and physical objects and art and arts writing art books with Boston Art Review we have also wanted to create something that can exist in a physical format because physical text has such a different life cycle than something online I've seen these two Instagram stories that disappear in 24 hours if not less having a review put on a platform like that it might be helpful for getting views but it's not ultimately helpful to the artist or the institution or the gallery or the writer that has contributed to that work than the online so we have tried to kind of combat that in creating a print object it's so expensive it's totally daunting and any fundraising that we are able to do goes directly to printing this publication twice per year and a lot of people like with me straight in the eye there why are you doing this why are you just publishing online and then on the flip side of that artists with come up to the object and the magazine comes out crying because they've never had their work in print before and that to me is those are those moments that are so important and make that work worthwhile so I think there's like the potential in that swings and we're kind of in the middle of it right now where print is being treated like a precious object to kind of feed that cycle we are forced to do things online and on Instagram and Twitter so it's kind of like these two competing things happening in the same room and it's confusing I can also jump on the end of that for something I completely forgot to say first time around I was just in a meeting today with my editor and Jeremy Eichler who is the other classical staff writer at the Globe and we were talking about headlines and the difference between print and web headlines so writing headlines aside from transcription is probably one of my least favorite part of the job especially writing headlines for web because for web is when you're reading the newspaper you're opening it you're paging through it if something catches your eye like there's many things I could catch maybe it's the headline, maybe it's the photo maybe it's just a straight word somewhere there's more room for like spontaneous discovery something that's in print but online you're competing for clicks and you're competing with every single other tab whoever has opened in their browser so it's more inclined towards a strong emotional language that maybe you don't even really mean in your headline just so you get those vital clicks and you save the more poetic and maybe not even poetic but more descriptive more accurate to what your true intention as a writer is for print it doesn't, cheapening feels like too strong of a word but it definitely feels different it has an impact on the way I think about writing it's starting to have an impact on the way that I write knowing that I'm writing for somebody with intention I have to beg for Thank you all so much, one of the things that I've been really interested to talk about and understand more about the criticism is how it has evolved and how it's changed and what are the things that we in this industry are hopeful for that change and what are we interested in seeing and one of the reasons why I have this panel was I started a program last year called the Young Critics Program with the Front Courage Arts Collective to incubate and foster the next generation of critics because most critics are of a certain age and are normally white and male and I really wanted to give us an opportunity to train young people so they have an opportunity to see what this career could be like and that's the change that I'm hopeful for in this you know of the criticism world and the arts and I'm wondering what is the change you all would like to see within this industry and especially for the specific different kinds of arts that you all are talking or what you're talking about Well, more money Yes, eight months have it I'll take that, yes You know, when we talk about criticism moving online we still want to have some kind of system in which people are paid for their work and I think that with everybody being critic online there's a certain amount of death of expertise I mean for all that you might want to say about legacy critics and there is a trust that I have in the reader review by somebody who you know has been given a certain informatory from The New York Times or WBUR or whatever I I know that they are getting paid a fair amount of money for their work and that the people who have hired them have done a certain amount of betting have signed on to that person as a critic when I just read Facebook posts you know I don't have that kind of confidence So I think that there is a criticism as with everything else in life you could get what you pay for and so I would like to see a system created in which people in which there is funding for to pay people to become professional critics and I think that you're on the right track and that it is on the right track of the order in that there is I mean Zoe was hired through a certain process and so I would like to see that become a new I would like to see this development for developing critics I would really love to see more support on mentorship programs for developing critics because no critic of any genre appears like Athena rising has already thrown out already knowing everything about their area that they're covering there's always maybe something that they already know some things but there's some things that they're going to end up learning on the job whether that's in journalism whether that's things about whatever artists or art form movement that they had never heard of before and they're always going to be learning and they are going to mess up like I'm going to mess up but I think that for a number of critics it's harder to take sometimes it's hard to take what you know you messed up it's harder to take what you know you messed up and you need that kind of guidance and that kind of encouragement that like hey it's okay you're human you're not supposed to be this all powerful voice coming out of a high tower even though that's I think that that's kind of what the popular portrayal of critics sometimes is so knowing that someone's got your back when you're new I may have not continued as a writer if I had the support of Steve Smith who was the assistant art senator of Boston Globe at the time I was a freelancer because I made a bunch of screw ups and he was always there to clean up the mess that non-house-trained critic left I was just a baby and also just like look me in the eye and say that this did not mean that it was all over picking up on that but just the three of us have been talking about mentorship programs so what that might turn into but it is something that's very actively going on yeah I mean I think what I'm always asking myself is to what end right like of course I'm always thinking about the pipeline I'm always thinking about how to get how to get new voices and how to get like a reflection of what Boston looks like on the artery but then I think like okay I have to remind myself to what end what is it that I ultimately want this work to do and ultimately like what I care about is disruption I mean what I care about is to provoke conversation to engage collective civic dialogue that can along with a confluence of other forces catapult social transformation I mean that's ultimately what I care about and like that is where my heart is like that is that's my priority is to expand the range of voices that we listen to and we read so that they more accurately reflect the population in Boston and so lead to uncomfortable conversations that can disrupt inequity and that can create and catapult change also that a conversation about really the purposes and I think it's the purposes of arts criticism to educate, to inform sometimes that every piece is in the mirror of time into the Washington Post and I come away thinking I know your theories of the word was but I can't really see or I can't really feel and I come to this with humility I'm a young writer I've been doing this for four years but what I know when I write and I've been told I accomplished this to release a sub degree giving the reader a sense of what happened if there's historical context like this happened in the dance world and then you can see that reflected in this work those shifts of time in the historical context but at the same time when my experience as a viewer is meaningful to what this work is and keeping in mind who I am as a writer I was just thinking before when you were talking about the different ideas of writers I recently read a work in New York City right now of this, of this this game perfect but let me it was all about her experience being a lesbian in this world and it was hard it was dark and I said I wondered if some sort of trigger warning would be apt but I said I come to that with humility with my heteronormative privilege I'm not going to tell a queer woman that she's a a trigger warning I just sort of presented the question here's who I am coming to this question with humility so what are the purposes and we are coming to it what are our experiences is contextualizing we are we work with the very important things to discuss I think there also can't be criticism without readers and an audience sometimes it feels like I'm writing into the void and other times it doesn't so I think in terms of the original question is about where do we see arts criticism going yeah I think dialogue with readers is so important I run a platform that unfortunately does not have the capability for comments or things like that but when I get a note in my inbox that's the best thing ever so audience who's here you often just care about and then writing engage with the writers that you read let them know what you think I mean maybe I shouldn't speak for everyone but I love when we get feedback in our inbox or thoughts or hey did you consider this or check this out it's helpful and it makes it feel like we're writing for a community and not just for a long page more people doing this work because I have a lot of dance artists having their shows and I'm one person and I feel that way every time I have to say oh do they know what matters for when they're applying for grants for their otherwise visibility out there and I've also had a friend say well if everyone was doing this how much of it would be read but these are more people doing this work I think would mean a lot for all these different artworks yeah I hear that all the time you know from different critics there's so much happening now these days it's our first to split our time and you know that's something I wonder about too how can we make this kind of work accessible so that people can see as an avenue for them so it's not the same three or five people going to yes it's the money right it's the money so can we give the money please but you know I totally agree with you and I think that's one of the reasons why I started this program to give that kind to give that pipeline or that opportunity for other people to see this as a possibility and so it's not just on the two or three people who are so seasoned and have been doing it for years so that it is a it's a more of a pool that we can really diverse the different kinds of perspectives and those things that they can bring to the table that maybe those people who have been doing it for so long may not be able to so one more question until we open up to the audience how do you think arts criticism in Boston slash New England differs from other cities I'm not from Boston from Miami so for me moving here creating a life here has been so has been so different than what I expected and I've been wondering how that is changing from Boston to all the other places in New England and to other big metropolitan cities that have robust arts and I wonder what you all think about that well I do think that Boston is a robust city but it's not an overwhelming city so that one when Laurie Anderson has talked about how in New York you almost have to specialize in one because it's just so much of that think that you're interested in that you can't do anything else and in Boston I think that even though there's a good theater scene there it isn't so overwhelming that you can't do it you can't go to the movies did you eat that piece today? I did I was freezing you know there's there's a robust music scene and the same thing but you don't have to you don't have to just specialize in classical music if you're a New York particular you're a British New York you almost can't do anything else except the one thing you specialize in so I think that Boston is a really nice mix of a city like New York on the one hand and a city like I've often liked the fact that you're in the Berkshires that everything is messed up particularly in the off season because there's nothing else but I mean that also exposes you to things that you wouldn't see otherwise and I think that you have a breadth in a small town and you've got a depth in a place like New York and Boston it's a really nice mixture of the two did you read Murray White's article about Frank Stella in Boston I thought it was a really great article but it was a great article about like how Boston reacted to abstraction in the 60s and 70s and in the 80s and how it's like the particularly with visual arts the curatorial decisions that Boston made at the time were very tradition bound and so there was sort of like this prevailing attitude like abstraction is a fad we don't have to collect that I do think that it was one slice of Boston art life that Murray was able to unpack and say okay people talk about Boston being so tradition bound and here's an example of how that happened over the decades the decisions that were made both in like institution levels but also just like that shaped the culture here that shaped like the art culture here and like I just thought that was interesting and like I think it's an example of sort of the tradition bound that you hear about Boston but also like I read like Ed Stuff back in the day and like Caroline placed up and I'm like moved by the rigor of their work and by like the lineage that I feel like they have left to like other younger grads you know and like the richness that is there like the expertise, the institutional knowledge like you know I still call I still get emails from people like can I need your counsel can I do about this quote and so I see both sides I see that yes I think Boston has had a reputation of being like incredibly conservative in some artistic genres and I see why that's the case but I also see a lot of like rigor and a lot of like other sort of big cultural lineages in different disciplines here and they yeah I just I'm excited to see like where they go in the future not just to mention one thing that I said when I said the three of us were talking my role as a member of the LA Board of Works it's not just the three of us yes yes to talk about that I didn't ever heard that put it pretty well Boston is a very provincial city yet at the same time there's a spirit of innovation and I think when the journalism here does work like that in this environment we're in and there's this tension there I think being you know darkly aggressive and you want aggressive ideas but there is that provincial influence and so what do we do with that having to capitalize on that being a strong tradition and a traditional base but what do you think is a useful free thing about how we look forward for a long time and I can see it a lot still people kind of talk about Boston's arts and culture seen with like an asterisk like well you know it's not New York or it's not like yeah you're right it's not it's a great punk album called this is Boston it deserves a reference and you know I'm starting to see more of a shift I feel like that asterisk is getting dropped a lot more often and that's great and I think it's up to all of us and to all of our peers and colleagues who write as well to ensure that the way that we're speaking about Boston is honest and without this kind of contextualizing of like oh we are this smaller city or this shadow city it does the only thing that does is help like that speaking about Boston with pride for our community and the art and things that are happening here helps all of us but more specifically it helps the writers and the artists who are being spoken about and that's something with Boston Art Review we've been really committed to whatever we put something in print we work really closely with the artists and I know that's unconventional for a critical journal and publication but if we're going to be putting something in print and that might be the only print object that they're going to have for that whole year we want to make sure that it's going to do the best job for them and you mentioned earlier that there's not enough writers to cover things that writing might be helpful for an artist who's applying for a grant or a residency just actually earlier this week someone from the BCI said can you send us that article that you guys wrote on shock addending because we need it to ask for, I don't exactly what it was for but we need it to ask for something like yes awesome that's what we're here for so anyways long grant, drop the asterisks this is Boston not anywhere else great way to segue to audience questions great yes I'm going to ask unfortunately I'm going to have Audrey and Seraphine tap in because I've got to go to tech thank you I love the promise thank you great we are proud to present but thank you all so much for coming most this part Seraphine is talking oh my goodness hi I'm here I write for the artery and as a designer I'm going to go through the day there's no such thing as a full time writing job anymore so my question or maybe my thought that I'd love the panel to kind of tease apart with me is I kind of want to go back to the part of the conversation where we were talking about the changing landscape of not just how we're writing but how that writing is shared I felt this and no one was overtly feeling negative about section media but there was a sense from the panel of you know we feel like we're forced to post on section media or we feel like we have to bet for the attention of people we're dealing with and the reason I want to push back on that a little bit is because I think that's something that for me personally has made me love working for the artery is the fact that there's a very critical eye to not just what we're writing but who we're writing for I think that a big theme over the past few years in Boston and I even think of my first experiences writing about theater so I'm Filipino and there's a Filipino playwright named Ray Kamatma who came to Boston a few years ago and wrote several plays that produced Hunts and 10 and here but the writer is coming out of Globe and the Herald writers who are career critics who's opinion are supposed to trust when they were writing about these plays they weren't writing about Kamatma's plot skills they weren't writing about the acting they were writing about I mean I still remember to this day quoted lines from these pieces saying things like why are there brown for the Panas on stage not talking more about their culture why are there brown for the Panas on stage not talking about the food and it was impossible for these critics to imagine an American play that wasn't about white people and the reason I'm bringing this up is because I think about artists that I've covered for the artery in the past artists like O.J. Slaughter and Alish Naly and folks that shocked at me and without Instagram without Twitter, without Facebook these artists wouldn't have the plot for them I think as journalists it's also our responsibility to think less about the medium about friend dying or who's reading the work and think more about the people who were writing the board how can we reach them because they don't trust us right now to tell their stories and they look at us sometimes feeling though as though where we're writing from is a place so Craig does that we can't even fathom what it is that they go through and who ought to be to validate their part and so I guess why wouldn't a web article cause an artist to group off the tears you know that should feel just as important as being important because that's where the readers of today are they might not be able to access those those outlets so I guess I just want to kind of come back to that a little bit and perhaps hear more about where those anxieties are rooted and how we can come together and try to meet the needs of the contemporary Boston reader I think in general in culture I have a little I fear this sort of it's so cliche about loss of attention and the sense of being able to stay with a say two thousand word piece I really dealt with the critical thinking and stay with this and ask questions and probe and this because we're so getting so used to read the headlines, share it on Facebook read like retweet this so that's kind of the idea I have there but I definitely I so hear everything you're saying about meet people where they are meet the culture where it exists where we're all Thank you so much for sharing that I guess I kind of wanted to clarify cause I was kind of flying by the scene with my hands especially especially when I was saying about social media so I love the fact that it is so easy for me to reach an audience that cannot afford to subscribe to the print edition of The Globe just by tapping a few characters on my phone and sharing an article and I love the fact that I can share music with somebody and share another writer I admire's article it's great but the other thing that I think was making me more anxious was the fact that I guess that the barrier between has a lot more power and more cloud to give you write up something negative about them and the writer themselves is getting much thinner with the advent of social media like I brought up the review in pitchfork of Lizzo's album where Lizzo's fans I think were sending harassing messages to the writer who was also a woman of color and as I said it's a complicated situation there are some really wonderful things about social media and about the fact that it's so easy for anybody to find these artists that deserve a bigger platform and elevate them but also it's a space where a lot of people can be extremely nasty and face their consequences not that those spaces have never have always been present especially for people from marginalized groups Joyce? Yeah I just I had two thoughts about social media when we talked about it and it deals with what you're also bringing up about social media that is where the audience is and that is the growing place and that is where we need to go when we're talking about headlights for example when we've got to get a snappy headlights people are going to see it and that speaks to the business model that has to do with social media because you're evaluating something by way of clicks it's supposed to be newspaper which can provide a paper and sign up a full paper so whether you read this poetry or art or whatever you've already signed on you're already committed and there it is the other piece to social media is that because it has to be something and sent by the expertise and this is hugely crucial to media I think to everybody in this room you know if you're going to have critics you want to know that these critics are important that they can write, that they can speak that they can form thoughts that they can have a reaction that we can't that's intelligent to some extent it's always such a what's the word it's so open to everybody that everybody's a critic everybody can have a voice the question is how do you make a particular voice is heard or how does one how do we value critics online as opposed to just people who have a lot of followers so that's an issue with social media people who have big voices don't necessarily have the best voices if I may McDonald's sells billions of burgers but that doesn't make it ordinary food so I mean we have to deal with that there's a certain kind of evaluation that people have to be willing to make and who gets to do that evaluation exactly and who gets to do it I'll tag off that but I do sometimes it's very interesting but like people come to this work a lot of people have seen it who am I it's like I remind myself I have a master's degree in dancing and therapy I've been doing this I have sense of the body and what symbolizes what movement means professionalizing and dance history but it's an interesting question about where does our authority come from and how do we show that and again I do come back to this is how experience will work and this is what the work was to my trained eye this is how I contextualize the work in the world today the world for the world of this art and how you can defend a point of view make a case in your point of view in writing but in the painting argument I also think that there is this that there's this sort of reactionary stands that sometimes we'll take with social media all of those young reverse that you know like social media that's just like you know you know like making things worse or like really diminishing our product or making us paper plates but really like what we're selling is thought I mean what we're selling is idea what we're selling is like incisive informed commentary about our shared humanity from the lens of art from the lens of a cultural artifact and if the writing is good if the writing is good if your thoughts if your thoughts are cutting and incisive and revelatory people will click of course they're not just best practices sure but that's been changing all along the platforms have been changing all along what matters is like the work, the rigor of the work and if that is there then the people will come and the other thing I would say about social media is for us it's been a huge asset you know because for us we're reaching people who don't listen to WBUR who don't like get up and like WBUR.org but that who we're speaking to in a specific cultural cadence an authentic cultural cadence that's resonating with them in a platform that feels native to them that feels natural to them and so it's been a huge asset for us not just to build readership but to build community like a community of writers a community of readers and listeners who did not engage with this before and also what it allows us to be humble to exercise community because you're out in the open on social media and people talk a lot about call out culture and the toxicity of call out culture but sometimes people gotta get called out you know what I mean sometimes that has to happen I'm a believer in calling in but I'm also a believer that if I'm called out I just have to accept it with humility and I have to think about that and process the criticism against me and then try to figure out how much of it is rooted in truth how much of it is rooted in ego and then respond humbly I just what I'm saying is social media doesn't scare and the line before you were saying there's also a dialogue that I don't think really existed at the globe when it was just me giving my opinion in the newspaper maybe I'd get a letter, maybe I'd get two but now if I were to say something like that I'm not mad then I would expect somebody like you to say the hell are you that's awesome I can say that the comment section the comment section at the globe is still absolutely a dumpster fire but it definitely allows me to engage with readers and hear from them in a way that, well, I mean sometimes I get emails too but in a way that maybe you didn't have what you were there no, no email is for this one I mean from the middle ages in the break right now you call me? yes, oh in black shirts so my question is I think it's relevant for audiences we were talking about cultural critics and the critics of art talking about who their writing is for but it's also relevant to the pipeline in the sense that writing about cultures I think this is particular for film and TV which is what I'm interested in but if you're trying if you're like me and you're trying to become a critic, you're trying to talk about culture I no longer get to just watch like whatever is on TV, like if I want to talk about a show I have to have stars but I also have to have showtime and I also have to have HBO Go I have to have Hulu, I have to have Netflix and I can't keep up with all of these different platforms oh the new hit shows on this platform they're like okay, sign up for free child for a month and then and so all of these shows are accessible either to or films or existable to people who either have that platform already but especially as someone who's trying to get into that industry, it's so long like oh I learned movies and there's maybe one movie that everybody's talking about or one film I am actually watching Madden for the first time because I have Netflix and everyone was talking about it 10 years ago and I'm like oh now I have enough money to have Netflix so how do we deal with this decentralization of content which is critical for would be cultural commentators to actually access and then comment on but then also if you're out there writing about these different shows and only whoever happens to have access to HBO Go needs to actually read that what does that do for the audience and what does that do for the audience I was almost like if you're already you might be able to do that but like oh I want to write on medium because no one has ever heard of me before you know maybe you can borrow someone's password or something but over time it's just not sustainable so I was wondering if maybe had any comments about that I would just say I mean to pick up on what Danielle said that just try to get some quips together so that the audience can send you stuff so it's not as difficult as it sounds and so I think that you have to establish yourself to a certain extent in order to be able to get onto those lists but once you do then you'll get probably more than you want I will say she'll be helping us but we're not giving you access no matter how big or small your platform has and I'll show you that just that I guess like two main pieces of advice for that I think the one thing I would say is just in terms of mechanics and like getting there is just start like get on medium or or whatever you don't start small just start doing it just start doing it but don't think about doing it perfectly don't just like you know get excited about it if you want to continue in film start a blog or start writing on medium and then have a few pieces of criticism under your belt that you published on your own from like a show that you're excited about watching your film and then pitch it to an editor not what you've already written but say hey I'm an aspiring critic like these are this is like my writing that I started and then you know pitch it to to an editor you might not get accepted on your first pitch but if you keep trying you might but like the second that's sort of the mechanics that's sort of like how to get there but this the most important thing I think is find like what you love to unpack find the thing the cultural artifact that like makes you the most curious that makes that makes your head spin that makes you want to like unpack it and then like and then study that canon of that specific art form and like and develop an expertise and a voice like that's I think what's going to set you apart is like if you've done the rigor you know what I mean if you're like it's just your voice and don't worry about being psyched you know it's no more possible today with TV than it is with books I mean when I first started writing about TV there were four channels it was very easy to be encyclopedic but it isn't now nobody really expects even Matthew Gilbert being encyclopedic about televisions to tag off that just write I mean now it's a little bit easier with wheel walks to say everything they write just stays with the wheel walks but when I wanted to get into this work and I had this magazine that I have written not to write for them from college because I saved these things I had it to go ahead and say this is what I could do and also just to comment a little bit on this idea of you can access the art you know what I'm saying about the art it's receiving it and all these questions the dance world has been grappling with that for a while and sort of a long and postmodernism moving to more interventional spaces questioning who audiences and who the makers are and how they can access it the pristine convention questioning that and I was just thinking you were talking about TV and how you access these things the dance world is talking a lot about dancing to stars and you can dance and it's like is that really dance art well it's a lot of tricks is that really concert dance and it's interesting we've been talking a lot about the masses and what the art is then or commentary on who has already so those questions are definitely how we dance so we are at the second and we do actually want to make this room because there's no rehearsal now and we love to be seen in our space so I want to thank all of you very much for being here there is still food and drink in the lobby so if the panel is good enough to stick around and have some conversations you can ask