The News: A User's Manual

Culture

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Los Angeles Times

1.

WE LIVE IN an era of unparalleled cultural richness. Every year, humanity produces some 30,000 films, 2 million books and 100,000 albums, and 95 million people visit a museum or art gallery.

Given the constraints of time, in this realm like so many others, news outlets have an essential and prestigious role to play in shaping our sense of what we should attend to. It is cultural journalism’s task to sift through the torrent of creativity in order to direct us to the best works of art of our time. Cultural journalism is entrusted with nothing less than the brokerage of a set of contented marriages between art and its audiences.

2.

THE PROFESSION OF evaluating and recommending works of art for a living seems straightforward from a distance, but in order to be carried out with any measure of ambition and coherence, it requires a news organization to ask itself a large and notoriously slippery question: ‘What is art actually for?’

The modern world tends towards unanimous agreement that art is extremely important, something close to the meaning of life. The trappings of this elevated regard include considerable state and private resources devoted to its funding, countless individual sacrifices made in its name and a vast amount of attention accorded it in public and private life.

Despite this esteem, the reasons behind art’s special status tend to be assumed rather than explicitly explained. Its value is taken to be a matter of common sense. To ask why we should bother to read books, listen to music or admire paintings is to risk sounding either impudent or pedantically stuck on one of those questions to which all clever people seem to have secured satisfying answers long ago.

Yet it shouldn’t be possible to describe the latest film as a ‘must-see’ or a new book as a ‘masterpiece’ in the absence of a well-reasoned thesis – and one, moreover, somewhere clearly articulated – about the purpose of art.

3.

ONE POSSIBLE THEORY runs like this: art (which here is taken to include literature, music, film, theatre and the visual arts) is a therapeutic medium that helps to guide, exhort and console its audiences, assisting them in evolving into better versions of themselves.

Art is a tool to help us with a number of psychological frailties which we would otherwise have trouble handling: our inability to understand ourselves, to laugh sagely at our faults, to empathize with and forgive others, to accept the inevitability of suffering without falling prey to a sense of persecution, to remain tolerably hopeful, to appreciate the beauty of the everyday and to prepare adequately for death.

In relation to such flaws and many others, art delivers its healing powers, offering us, for example, a poetry book that delineates an emotion we had long felt but never understood, a comedy that shakes us from self-righteous indignation, an album that gives us a soundtrack of hope, a play that turns horror into tragedy, a film that charts a saner path through the difficulties of love or a painting that invites us to a more gracious acceptance of age and disease.

4.

THIS EXPLICITLY THERAPEUTIC theory of art in turn hints at a purpose for cultural journalism: that it should direct our lonely, confused, scared and stricken souls to those works of culture most likely to help us to survive and thrive.

The cultural journalist should act as a kind of chemist, picking out from among the myriad of available works those most likely to be able to help their audiences with their inner travails, treating the storehouse of art as if it were a gigantic pharmacy.

At the end of reviews, one might find discrete tags, comparable to the labels on pill packets, that would specify what sort of situation a given work might be for – and why. Reviewers would realize the importance of orientating their analyses in relation to the inner lives of their putative audiences and would deliver their verdicts as versions of psychological prescriptions.

A therapeutic approach to cultural journalism would increase the number of occasions when moments of personal difficulty could be assuaged by art, moments when we had the right novel to help us over an emotional trauma, the right painting to restore a sense of calm, the right film to pull us out of a mood of negativity or frivolity – and a corresponding decrease in the still strikingly high number of times when (despite the millions of artworks in existence) we nevertheless find ourselves with nothing in particular that it feels resonant for us to read, to listen to or to see.

Assisted by a more ambitious cultural journalism, we might at key moments have a new capacity to be a little less mean and unhappy.

5.

THAT WE SHOULD have problems finding our way to the necessary works of art is both peculiar and poignant when, ostensibly, we have never had better access to culture. We pride ourselves on the technological inventions that have made millions of books, films and images available to us almost instantaneously and often at low cost. But access to a dizzying range of works turns out to be very different from knowing which of these works might be right for us. We have up until now done everything to make art available; we are still at the dawn of knowing how to unite people with the works that stand the best chance of mattering to them.

Journalism is in part to blame for this disjuncture for it sits at the head of the sluice of culture. Here, as in many other areas, the information it presents to us can be confusingly random, because journalists are prone to define their reporting priorities not according to any well-thought-out psychological agenda, but in deference to the promotional calendar of the publishing, film and museum industries. Review pages end up dominated by bestseller lists or charts of cinema attendances, as though popularity alone might be the most productive criteria by which to decide on what to read or see next.

Furthermore, an unhelpful amount of cultural journalism is dedicated to attacking works of art that critics deem substandard. Though this may be a diverting spectator sport, it has little to do with the more useful mission of trying to unite a time-short and suffering audience with works that would be of genuine benefit to them. It hardly seems a wise expenditure of effort to inform the public of works of art whose existence it had heretofore never suspected, only then to insist – often with considerable brio – that they should ignore them completely.

In any case, a work may be legitimately worthy and still not resonate, should we encounter it at the wrong moment for us. We can end up in the company of a ‘great’ book, film or exhibition whose merits we objectively recognize, but which nevertheless leaves us cold, bored and guilty – because critics have not sufficiently or subtly specified, as good pharmacists should, for what condition the work might be a fit corrective. An awkward truth is that a large, even critical, part of the possible value of any work of art depends on the psychological situation of its audiences. Art can only come truly alive on those precious occasions when its content is in sync with an inner need – occasions that cultural journalism should train its intelligence upon trying to identify and make known, taking on the role of the dispensing pharmacist of mankind’s most powerful therapeutic medicine.