Ever notice stories in newspapers or newsmagazines about art exhibitions or artist retrospectives?
Only rarely do the works discussed in the article and the works shown in the pictures coincide. A cool picture catches your eye, you think “What’s up with that?” and scan the article to find out more about it. Not a word. Or you’re reading along, and find a description and analysis of a painting that sounds really interesting. So you look for it in the pictures. Isn’t there.
I had noticed this over many years in Time and Newsweek, and saw it happening again the other day in the Financial Times, about a new exhibit in London which looked really cool, but I’m not about to hop on a plane for London just to see it.
Don’t the text writers and the art inserters coordinate with each other? Don’t editors care? Is it the article writers themselves who choose which pictures to display, different from the ones they wrote about? Why do so many do this?
I used to be the arts & entertainment editor for a weekly paper, and I did a few of the art reviews, although I usually had a guy on staff was more of an expert, so he wrote most of them.
We were pretty low budget, so the artwork that accompanied the reviews was whatever was submitted by the artist or museum or gallery doing the show. Often, the art reviewer wasn’t all that impressed by that particular piece or two, so he would write more extensively about the pieces that really left an impression.
If I’d had the budget to send a photographer to each art show, there would have been more consistency between the review and the artwork we printed. Alas, we just had to rely on whatever the museum or artist sent over. Due to deadline constraints, I often wouldn’t have had time to get a photographer out to the exhibit after the reviewer had written his piece. I tried sending the reviewer out with a digital camera, but I wouldn’t bet on a good reviewer being able to take photos of good enough quality to reprint in a newspaper. Mine sure couldn’t.
Plus, some pieces just don’t reproduce well in black and white on newsprint. We had to take that into account, also. Maybe we had a photo of a spectacular piece that when reprinted, would look like a gray blob.
In my ideal world, whoever is promoting the exhibit would send over a lot of pics. That almost never happened, in my experience.
Obviously, I can’t speak for the bigger market publications, which presumably have better budgets to handle this sort of thing.
Sure, I’ll cut you slack in your circumstances, MissGypsy, but when it comes to the big time publications, what’s their excuse? The arts get short shrift?
Basically, yeah, that’s my suspicion. Especially when you’re talking about Time or Newsweek, fine art is not their main editorial focus, so they’re probably not devoting a lot of resources to that area.
I am curious as to whether the same occurs in artsier (that doesn’t look right… artsy-er? more artsy?) big city publications. I’m thinking along the lines of the New Yorker, or L.A. Weekly, or even the Village Voice. Those are more oriented toward arts and culture than newsweeklies like Time or Newsweek. (I’ve not really paid much attention, myself, because I’m always too busy picking apart the editing and reporting.)
Often, the reporter and the photographer go to the assignment separately.
They may meet afterward to see what the other has, but by then, the photos are already shot and the reporter already has an angle. Sometimes those two don’t agree. The reporter usually has some say in which photos get used, but often it is up to an editor to make the final selection from choices provided by the photographer.
There are times, too, when the photos are sent or e-mailed by the gallery or artist, and sometimes they are too small or are saved improperly so that they cannot be reproduced. You just use what you can.
(I was a newspaper editor for about six years at small and medium-size papers.)
It might also be that certain art reproduces better on paper or that the editorial staff find something else more compelling or accessible to the masses.
About the only publications that I’ve seen do a decent job of this are Harper’s and Vogue. Seriously, Vogue has better art coverage than the fricking New York Times.
You might argue that it’s easier for monthly publications who are planning things well in advance, and that could be the case. But I think that, especially with regard to the NY Times, it’s a matter of the writers’ egos. The jerks who discuss art for the NY Times do a lousy job. They value their words far above the artist’s image.
This is one of my pet peeves. I’ve written to the NY Times, complaining about their reviews, and they actually published one of my letters. Why on earth aren’t visual artists given the same leeway as writers? Visual artists are all expected to be breaking new historical ground with every outing, writing the latest chapter in art history or reinventing some wheel in another. Authors don’t have to do this. The NY Times devotes page after page to what’s been published, acknowledging that people write books for a number of different reasons. They show authors respect by having their work reviewed within its own context, not in comparison with the most freaky-deaky thing that’s come out in the past two weeks.