Well, Ho Hum, what's new!
I'm gonna repeat what I said earlier: the magazines/papers/whatever themselves create the type of context that basically allows for nothing other than "Lagging Coverage"... lagging behind to what or whom exactly?
Just the previous issues and The New York Times? How odd to compare the rest of the mags/papers to NYT, considering that the NYT is located in a so-called cultural capital.
Something sneaky is being suggested here: "If you other mags/papers don't have any local art of your own, just come over to NY and cover NY art, and be like -surprise surprise!- the NY Times. Even though this NY art might have no relevance to your own local context, you can't afford to "lag behind" on the NYT. Just make sure you advertise the city of NY as a cultural capital in your art-pages.".
The result is of course homogenization of arts coverage. Not to mention arts coverage becoming an urban gentrification hoarding.
This has happened to the Dutch newspaper Het Parool, which now mostly covers the *center* of Amsterdam (obviously not the banlieus) as far as the arts are concerned, supposedly because this is the "cultural heartland" of Holland. The real reason is that Het Parool readers are mostly Amsterdam (wonnabe)yuppies living in that same city-center, who are not interested in indepth coverage but mainly in which tickets to buy to whatever "cute" Holland Festival shows are out there where they can meet all their friends from the hood, who bought the same tickets.
There have been several surveys in the Netherlands which have shown that Dutch arts-audiences are incredibly homogenized and incestuous; obviously *that* type of data on the homogenization/ghettoization of audiences is hardly ever correlated to the homogenization/standardization of arts coverage. Do I need to point out that these two things *are* related?
As for that other vague description, "shrinking arts coverage"... something tells me that there is more "shrinkage" going on in the arts in America than merely shrinkage of coverage; something tells me that shrinkage of budgets might have something to do with this.
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This IMO is the real reason why a critic would even *think* of posting the same article twice, and assuming that no one would bat an eye: because the homogenization of the media has lead to a situation where papers/magazines are barely distinct from one another, because they lack any defining character (read: political framework) which would require the critic to write his review in accordance with the overall philosophy behind the magazine. Pierre Bourdieu is the one philosopher who has written a lot about the homogenization of the media, for those of you who want to know more.
I feel that the paper-media involved here, really need to look at *themselves* and the homogenization of their content, because it is that media-mediocrity that leads to such practices.
Basically, the homogenized papers are blaming their writers for not providing a distinctive or unique "face" for the paper, whereas it is the homogenized content of the papers that makes such distinctive/specific writing impossible. This is why you have a situation where it suffices to "find enough ways to say it's pwetty, and we're satisfied". Is it any wonder that this is an uninspiring environment for writers to write in? Might as well reproduce the same thing times X... who's gonna notice anyway...
http://forum.criticaldance.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=11;t=002232;p=2 Tex.
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