Increasing restrictions could silence culture critics

Opinion

A bit of inside baseball, if you’ll permit.

The Free Press was supposed to review Deftones’ concert at the arena on Wednesday, but in a move that’s become more and more frequent, the band’s management demanded that all photographs be pre-approved (on a leisurely 72-hour timeline) before we could print them, and claimed the rights to our photos for their own use in perpetuity.

If they failed to approve our photos, they would provide other options from a concert date earlier in the tour.

So we pulled our request, and there was no review.

Reviews are news. A concert (or a ballet, or a play) is not a gas leak or a fire or a murder or a corporate scandal, but it is something happening in our city that thousands of people care about.

How we handle concert reviews, specifically, is especially newsy. They are written in real time, from the press box, while the show is happening. Our copy will arrive on our website while you are driving home and appear in your newspaper the following day.

We wouldn’t run photos of the Jets from three days ago. We wouldn’t be OK with a politician requesting photo pre-approval. So why would we accept Deftones’ management’s terms, especially when there are already restrictions on concert photography? (“First three songs, no flash” is the boilerplate.)

And if we agree to using photos of a live event provided by an organization with a vested interest in how that event is portrayed, it’s a slippery slope to using illustrative images created by AI.

It’s getting harder to see where reviews and other forms of cultural criticism fit in the current media ecosystem.

It’s getting harder to see where reviews and other forms of cultural criticism, such as meaty essays wrestling with a specific work, fit in the current media ecosystem. Full-time arts writing positions are being axed at outlets all over North America, the victims of newsroom “reshuffling.”

The Associated Press announced it is ending its weekly book reviews as of Sept. 1. The Chicago Tribune recently eliminated the position of film critic, as did the Chicago Sun-Times, which means the city that gave us Siskel, Ebert and their influential thumbs no longer has a full-time daily newspaper film critic.

News deserts include criticism, too. Just as no one is being held to account at the proverbial school board meeting that’s no longer being covered because the local paper was shuttered, a landscape of all influencers and no critics means all promotion and no journalism. It means less access and more out-of-pocket “approvals” dictating coverage, such as the one from Deftones’ team.

I mean, what’s next after photo pre-approval? Copy pre-approval?

A landscape of all influencers and no critics means all promotion and no journalism.

That so few daily papers even do concert reviews anymore has no doubt affected the way the role of cultural critic is understood and valued.

Even the idea of being a full-time arts critic at a newspaper feels like a job from the ’90s, a relic of a time long past.

If art is important, then surely discussing, considering and contextualizing art is important. And that’s not to say that this can’t be done — and done well — on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or other forms of social media. A lot of the cultural criticism I consume these days comes directly to my inbox via newsletters.

But so long as there are newspapers, there should be criticism in them. Criticism is uniquely important to a newspaper — and, I would argue, to the market that newspaper serves.

Again, reviews are news. Criticism is journalism. What is a newspaper if not a record of a place and time? Reviews tell us what we were watching, reading, listening to and eating, yes, but also what we were thinking, feeling and experiencing. They capture the zeitgeist.

Before, when critics could have decades-long careers covering a beat, they could establish themselves as authoritative, trusted voices on a subject because, when you do something long enough, you become an expert.

And the best critics are sharp writers and thinkers. Their whole job is to consider something at a depth most people won’t or don’t.

The critics I personally seek out are the ones whose brains I like spending time with for 500 to 800 words at a time. They make me a better thinker and writer, or they inspire me to consider something — a painting, a musical, a trend, whatever — in a different way. I don’t need to always agree with them. I don’t need to have the same taste as them. I just need to respect how they think and like how they write.

Reviews tell us what we were watching, reading, listening to and eating, yes, but also what we were thinking, feeling and experiencing. They capture the zeitgeist.

I read criticism because I want to be informed and inspired, not influenced. I also read it because I am curious; I want to know what other people think about this concert, this TV show, this book or this movie. It’s like being a part of a great big conversation.

It can be hard to convince people to care about something, whether it’s art or a review about the art. And maybe in a few decades there will be no one left to tell you how that big show at the arena was, and how it fits into the zeitgeist.

There will always be content about content, of course, but you’ll have to sift through it all and it might not be edited, or factual, or even created by a human being.

But for now, we will continue to capture the zeitgeist and push back when people tell us how to do our job. After all, that’s what you, the readers, trust us to do.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca