Robert Tobey photo

A Jon Whitney piece from the exhibit

Well, of course we're going to cover an art show that argues that newspapers are not covering art shows. In fact, we're going to review it twice: first to assess the validity of the premise itself, then to examine the artwork that purports to illustrate the premise. The show in question, Cover Me, assembled by curator Mo Ringey, just passed through the Hampden Gallery at the UMass Fine Arts Center.

First, the premise—a bit of a provocation: local artists and their art do not receive adequate coverage in the available publications. It's an assertion that calls up a nettlesome swarm of necessary questions: Is there currently less coverage of the arts than in earlier decades? If so, why? What's a fair and adequate quantity of coverage? With a plethora of shows to cover, which should get covered? What kind of coverage are we talking about—promotional or critical? Answers are elusive.

Is there more or less coverage? Compared to what, and when? In my opinion, that answer is more and less.

The tradition of covering the arts in the way we do, to the depth we do, in local publications, is fairly new, a '60s phenomenon that really got rolling in the early to mid '70s. If someone out there has a Gazette from 1964, let me know how much local arts coverage is in it. The reason publications suddenly started jumping all over the arts was because in the '60's and early '70s the arts really seemed to matter. They were seen as being able to change your life and change your mind, and were a driving force in "the revolution." Besides which, Dylan and Warhol and Godard and Pynchon made art irresistibly cool, and brought to it, let's not forget, the sweet whiff of profit.

The riveting romance of those days has pretty much evaporated, leaving a husk that usually goes by the name "Lifestyle" or "Out On The Town"—the aroma of collateral profit, in the form of cultural tourism, remains.

Nonetheless, and allowing for that significant caveat, the volume and quality of arts coverage in the Daily Hampshire Gazette has been pretty impressive over the last 30 years—a bit soft, maybe, and flatly descriptive, but respectably thorough, thoughtful, informed, well-written and conscientious. The Greenfield Recorder, it seems to me, has been a little behind that standard, but not by much. The Valley Advocate has been great at times—its early energetic and more critical coverage of the arts provided a wake-up call and a role model for the dailies—and at other times, in its more profit-minded, mission-muddled stretches, less so. I haven't followed the arts coverage in the Union News/Republican as closely, but it's apparent the Springfield daily makes an effort to at least keep up with its competitors. The recent loss of talented critic Gloria Russell from the Springfield Republican's pages is unfortunate, and has been keenly felt. In all the publications, there's been a shift to previewing shows, rather than reviewing them, which saves money and serves an obvious promotional purpose—to further the commercial aims of arts tourism. As an owner of one of the bolder galleries said to me: "When are we going to stop measuring the value of the arts by how many meals it sells to tourists in local restaurants?"

Is there less coverage now than at its peak in, let's say, the early '90s? Probably—but not so much because newspapers are less interested in local art, but because print journalism is in the midst of a dire, decades-long freefall; there's less coverage of everything, and less staff to do the covering. The editors and writers laid off in the downturn would, I'm sure, love to have their jobs back, and would gladly return to beef up the arts coverage. That, it seems fair to say, won't be happening anytime soon—not in the Internet age, not in this economy. There may be periods when publishers deem it safe and economical to tap into syndicated news sources, but those are usually followed by periods when they deem it necessary to hold onto their readership by boosting local coverage. Modern publishing is characterized not so much by any particular movement favoring local or national coverage as it is by general shrinkage and waves of strategic desperation. The Boston Globe, which has announced it is laying off 100 employees, covered Cover Me in a chatty piece which, for me, was an example of the kind of coverage we don't need any more of: superficial regarding the issues involved, useless in terms of judging the quality of the show. And last week the New York Times, held up as a role model for arts coverage in one of the Cover Me pieces, announced the layoff of 100 reporters, a full eight percent of its newsroom staff, meaning less coverage there all around.

Are newspapers duty-bound to provide arts coverage? What is a right and fair amount of space allotted to news, sports, comics, movies, Britney and Lindsay and Paris? This is murky turf, as murky, approximately, as human nature. In a sense, newspapers are inherently contradictory—we expect them to inform and enlighten, act as a kind of cultural compass, help us guide the ship of state—but we expect them also to entertain us in basic and even lurid ways. There's a common-denominator quality to the enterprise that's just about as charming as it is questionable—and is most likely inescapable. But when it comes down to choosing between the eminent doctor's judicious commentary on bioethics and the meat-cleaver murder of the lady therapist, what do you read first?

That the Valley's newspapers cover the arts to the extent that they do is admirable and a little surprising, and an indication of our liberal progressive heritage—I would guess we've got it a good deal better here in that regard than in many mid-sized burgs across the nation. Given the weak and wheezing condition of the newspaper business, I'd say there's enough arts coverage. My problem is that the coverage we get tends to be safe and predictable and isn't deep enough, sharp enough. I wouldn't mind if there were half as much, as long as it were twice as good and undertook to bring attention to the more unorthodox and daring productions.

How much work warrants notice and attention? An anecdote: an accomplished local artist was stopped on Main Street by a camera crew from one of the Springfield TV stations, and asked her opinion on the lack of art space in Northampton for artists. She answered, curtly, that maybe the problem wasn't too little space, but too many artists.

It might not be nice to say, but a lot of bad and pointless art gets made, sometimes by people who feel their expressions are special and worthy of attention. Every day, local publications receive reams and oodles of promotional material from scores of artists and entertainers seeking a place in the pulpy spotlight of newsprint, only a small number of whom are doing anything new or surprising or elucidating. The arts carries around it an aura of specialness, but really, why should it be any easier to find a good artist than a good plumber or carpenter? There's a large quantity of (mostly representational) art of the Beautiful Object school in the more successful galleries. It's well and even exquisitely made, and for sheer skill of handiwork, it's worthy of appreciation and admiration, but it doesn't warrant much thought or comment. The apt response is to buy it and locate it prominently in the home. Then there's the kitschy, touristy tchotchke school of art—you know, tea cups in the shape of heads with goofy faces on them—filling the shelves of the craftier stores. They speak loudly enough for themselves.

A very thorough listings section is perhaps the best answer to the overall complaint of gaps in coverage and attention. Having observed at close quarters what it takes to produce such a definitive and accurate catalogue week after week, I know it's not easy—in fact I'd say it's not humanly possible to get it absolutely right and complete and satisfying to all concerned. And it isn't made any easier by the spaciness and vanity of some of the attention-seekers—artists often do live up to their bad reputations.

What's the purpose of arts coverage? To provide uncritical promotion, or to deliver honest critical insight? Preview or review or both? Why and when one and not the other, and vice versa?

If reviewing offers a clear-eyed investigation of why a piece or show of art works or doesn't—commentary which, from an astute critic, can benefit the artist by pointing out weakness or inconsistency—how does a reviewer offer honest unvarnished or occasionally negative opinion when he/she is likely to encounter the wounded subject at The Haymarket Cafe? There's no easy answer to this dilemma. But it's a tightrope the critic needs to boldly step out on, keeping tact and balance in mind, if only because the alternative—meaningless flattering jabber, redundant descriptive verbiage—is useless and misleading. Just as the arts should tackle uncomfortable subjects in eye-opening fashion and be a muscular exercise of the right to free speech—the reviewer should be brave and forthright as well in reflecting upon them.

The Show Itself

The show itself has the feel of a funhouse mélange, 15 pieces in a wide sampling of styles and media: painted, printed, and drawn flatwork, electronica, sculptural assemblage, found-object and interactive works. It runs an emotional gamut from sitcom frivolous to abattoir grim. The aim is scattershot in addressing the topic at hand: given the mystical vagueries of artmaking, it's a little hard to tell, but I'd say less than half the work was made with the issue of arts coverage in mind, and only—sometimes only barely—obliquely relates. If this were a homework assignment, a lot of these people would flunk for not following the assignment. Which—to indulge in double and triple negatives—is not to say that some of the off-topic work isn't good, and some of the on-topic work isn't not so good.

Anila Zaidi works with witty and accomplished lines to produce two newspaper layout pages comparing arts coverage in the New York Times to that in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, with the Times page filled with numerous stacked boxes representing a plentiful quantity of coverage, and the Gazette page piteously bare, with only one little cowering rectangle in the bottom left corner. Zaidi's articulation and packaging are fine, but her logic is faulty: surely the Times, given the millions of residents in its area of coverage, ignores a far greater amount of art than does the Gazette. No question the Times maintains a very high standard of arts coverage, but that's a matter of quality, not quantity. While the math is a little hard to pin down, my bet is that Valley artists have a far better shot at coverage than the Manhattan variety. It would be a more accurate representation, I believe, if the newspaper names in the piece were reversed. (Oddly, on the day that I visited the show, the names really were reversed, and I wondered if an offended Gazette reporter approached this particular artwork a bit more interactively than intended).

Larry Slezak has been on the art scene in the Valley for decades—he was one of the principals at the late great Zone Gallery in Springfield. With a piece entitled "News, Weather, and Sports," he sinks his teeth into the topic with a vengeance and a bitter cry of rage. It's a five-foot tall box built of four red-painted window frames. Pasted to its exterior are fripperous, weightless headlines taken from the recreational and celebrity-oriented departments of Republican newspapers. The interior of the box bristles with a swirling tangle of barbed wire. What does it mean? Well, red is the signal color of advertising. It's also blood—a reference, I take it, to the principle: "If it bleeds, it leads." The windows represent a false transparency to (and access by) the public—the pretense that one's local newspaper if of and for the people, when in fact it serves other less noble, power-based and mercenary purposes, with a closed and prickly internal logic. A tad over the top, that barbed wire, but this is the 3D rant of a man who's spent years of public-spirited energy in an effort to bring art into the common sphere, a genuine expression of what it feels like to have one's best intentions thwarted again and again.

With concise imagery (two rifles) and a delicate palette (wan blue and pink), Jon Whitney's photographic C-print "Freedumb" deconstructs American journalism's propensity for certain subjects (violence and fluff), and, by implication, the avoidance of many others (corporate welfare, a grossly engorged military). He uses a pop-art, Warholian format to make a politically engaged point. Cool in its delivery and shrewd in its economical collapsing together of aggressive symbol and passive color-temperature, the piece calmly succeeds as a cutting indictment of mass-market publishing. What exactly it has to say about coverage of the arts isn't clear, except to assume that's one of the subjects being chronically avoided. The piece is a minimalist broadside, and the viewer is compelled to jump into the realm of blind assumption.

With "Nimby," Mike Karmody has produced a carnivalesque interactive joyride, a lawnmower-like machine and machine gun for firing violent blasts of air at a stationary, tattered globe of the world. It comes complete with a suburban white-picket fence. A wicked sense of humor is at play here, and a solid point about how compulsively, comfortably—and aggressively—humans, from their privileged perches, make play with miniature realities. Valid and true, but again one can't be sure how this relates to inadequate arts coverage, except as an imagined side-reference.

The show's curator, Mo Ringey, who, in her artwork, often covers household appliances in an effusion of glued-on bits of colorful shattered glass—takes a more modest approach with her contribution, "Such Are The Dreams of The Everyday Housewife." It's a vintage 1950s salon hair dryer, complete with ghastly green vinyl chair. The only glass bits pasted to it are found, ominously, inside the hinged helmet. On the seat sit art and technical magazines, whose covers have been appropriated by the artist to feature her own work and visage. It's an ironic double fantasy, imagining a world where women have the time and inclination to read elevating periodicals like ArtNews, and the artist's imagining herself the object of interest for these high-brow publications.

The best thing about Carey Ascenzo's video installation is its title, "Money Graf Banger." Otherwise, it's a queue of men and women appearing front and center on the TV screen saying—for the most part with the self-conscious awkwardness of people unused to being in front of the camera—"Let's put this baby to bed!" The backgrounds in front of which they endlessly repeat this clichéd newspapering exhortation are scenes from old newsroom movies, one of which is All The President's Men. Given that the investigation of the Watergate break-in is an acknowledged high point in the history of American journalism, evidence of a truly free press, it's a strange choice for satirical counterpoint. There may be other movies employed in the piece, but if so, I couldn't identify them, and the artist didn't bother to spell it out. Shouldn't it matter what the references are? Or are newspapers and journalists so obviously and inherently suspect and silly that any old newsroom movie will do? You know, they're all corrupt anyway.

Holly Murray, Maggie Nowinski and Lisa Scollan offer mordantly effective work—using, respectively, oil and charcoal and ink—that seems to have been made with other thoughts in mind. They pursue worthy themes: how artificiality has entered our lives in disturbing and intimate ways; the distress and disorientation that result from the disparities between our inner and outer selves; the allure and invasive fear of crossing erotic boundaries. But it's hard to see how they relate to the stated subject of the show.

Line Bruntse and Greg Kline make large three-dimensional sculptural objects. Bruntse's "Medonna" is a take-off on the Bathtub Mary phenomenon (statues of Mary, mother of Jesus, in a propped-up white ceramic bathtub, as often seen along the rural roadside). Bruntse's is made of a welded frame of heavy steel wire, over which is stretched gauzy fabric, and in place of Mary, wittily, a mammoth bar of soap.

Kline's piece, "Chariot," is a shapely naked cast-iron lady, rusty and bewigged, on large spiky steel wheels more fit for carrying a cannon. Both of these are good, but again, not, it seems, pertinent to the subject at hand.

Ian Burns, in tiny text and a patched-together recording, has appropriated the tendentious truisms of conceptual artist Jenny Holzer in "Proven Authority." While Holzer's aim with her truisms is to reveal, in assertive and very public ways, hidden or suppressed truths, Burns, in a conceptual counter-move, makes them once again small and discreet. It's a mischievous, contrarian questioning of the artist, who has become an authority on the questioning of authority. This is satisfying, sophisticated, niftily circuitous, but again, strangely off the mark when it comes to addressing the stated theme of the show.

And finally one has to wonder if the show, drifting off-topic as it does, is in fact better for that reason. Whitney's poofy pastel rifles are wonderful—and one can make a connection to the general nature of newspapers, the mass media, the human psyche—but his polemic is sweeping, a revelation of terrible archetypes, from a larger realm, really. The one piece that wrestles most directly with the issue of local arts coverage—Slezak's "Sports, News, and Weather" succeeds because it's a passionate disputation by someone who's doggedly engaged the media from the trenches—it's the wounded, strangled war cry of a radical idealist. Mo Ringey's hairdryer chair succeeds also, but more cosmetically, floating as it does—a weighted soufflé—between the unrequited yearning of the artist to be seen and taken seriously, and the petty vanities of the hairdressing, Us magazine-reading public. Jon Ascenzo's video and Zaidi's layout pages address the subject, but have little traction because they haven't substantially engaged the question. They come off as flip, presumptuous, dismissive, easy put-downs from outsiders making inside jokes. Much of the best work in the show is only peripherally related to the question at hand, and allowing for that caveat, much of it is good. The wild variety of styles and media employed is a recommendation in itself. For some reason, the premise failed to grip the imagination and interest of many of the artists, and among the half who did address it, only half of them did much with it. One has to wonder what that says about the premise.