Behind the Times (55 page)

A number of people, inside and outside the
Times
, singled out Pareles, et al. too, though not necessarily for praise. The Polish Tea Room crowd joked about the
Times
’ newfound fixation on pop-culture stars such as Madonna. Gerry Gold cited one weighty, postmodernist decoding of the feminist sensibility in the singer’s rock videos. “We do all these pieces on pop icons, as if they’re important ‘artistes,’ ” Gold said. “In fact, they are creations of the big record companies. Yet we try to intellectualize them; we treat this material as if it is coming out of university graduate departments.” Gold’s words were mild compared to the flame-thrower prose of the editor and art critic Hilton Kramer. Kramer was for seventeen years a member of the
Times
’ cultural news staff, though never part of the Tea Room crowd. He left the
Times
in 1982, to nurture along
The New Criterion
, a high-culture periodical that regularly viewed with hyperbolic alarm the alleged decline of intellectual life in America. In the years immediately before he resigned as the chief art critic of the
Times
, Kramer said he had become increasingly appalled by the
Times
’ strategy of
“reaching down” in its cultural coverage: The editors, he claimed, “wanted a larger, less informed, lower-level readership.” Since then, in Kramer’s neo-con eyes, the
Times
’ complicity in the debasement of culture has only worsened. He thundered against the views of Michael Brenson, one of the writers who succeeded Kramer as art critic for the
Times.
In the summer of 1990, Brenson stirred up the cozy world of cultural criticism with a major article in the
Times
suggesting that the idea of quality in art was elitist, divisive, and passé. Kramer took Brenson’s rather mild maunderings to a parodic extreme; the former
Times
man dismissed the new
Times
man as just one more politically correct apparatchik railing against the “hegemony” of white European males.

Kramer reserved his sharpest scorn for Jon Pareles. Kramer called Pareles “the
Times
’ most important critic … and that isn’t meant as a compliment.” Reading Pareles on rap music, he said, “always leaves
me feeling the way that thoughtful people must have felt in the latter years of the Roman Empire, just before it all came down.” (After some of Kramer’s comments were published, Pareles sent him a postcard with a depiction of ancient ruins; on the back of the card Pareles wrote, “You don’t know the half of it.”)

Dick Shepard, Gerry Gold, Grace Glueck, and the rest of the Polish Tea Room crowd reacted more mildly; they found the paper’s emphasis on rock and pop somewhat misplaced. Gold granted that the new publisher, Arthur Sulzberger and his editors, Frankel and Lelyveld, were “very devoted to finding a younger audience: They think that’s where the action is.” But: “In my own view, the people who buy rap records and listen to that music just don’t read. They watch TV.” Gold paused. “I suppose I’m an old fart, aren’t I?”

Pareles’s preeminence may not have signaled the decline of the West, but he did present
Times
editors with a challenge. Pareles championed rap in one after another of his daily reviews and Sunday critic’s features. For example, explaining the appeal of 2 Live Crew and Public Enemy (both black male rap groups), Pareles noted approvingly that “rappers live by their ability to rhyme—the speed of their articulation—and by their ability to create outsized personas with words.” He deflected some of the shock of these outsized personas, as well as the arguments that many rap groups were racist, misogynistic and obscene, by quoting the Harvard professor and post-structuralist Henry Louis Gates, Jr. According to Gates, “The rappers take
the white Western culture’s worst fear of black men and make a game of it.”

The
Times
displayed these Pareles stories prominently on the culture pages. His two-thousand-word essay, “On Rap, Symbolism and Fear,” appeared on page one of the Sunday Arts and Leisure section of February 2, 1992. In it Pareles described rap “as the epicenter of popular music and a significant influence on fashion, visual arts, and language” over the past decade. Rap, he acknowledged, has created a generation gap: While young people dance to it, their “otherwise well-informed” elders vilify and fear it as outlaw music—black “gangsta” rap. Pareles wondered how much of the American mainstream’s opposition to “the rhetoric” of rap really had to do with “the larger tensions of race and class.”

It was a finely attuned, modern
Times
ian analysis, locating as it did the larger “social issue” in the pop-culture particular. But there were two major omissions. Pareles left out the dirty little secret about outlaw
rap: that its chief packagers were white-owned Fortune 500 companies and that its biggest customers at the record stores, where these things counted, were white, suburban male teenagers. This voyeuristic white audience, the record producer Hank Shocklee has explained (though not in Pareles’s essay), basically sought “safe” terror: rap records gave listeners a sense of what “gangsta” life might be like on ghetto streets without having to go there. The rap record was similar to an amusement park’s roller-coaster ride: Consumers can experience the thrill and turn it off when they want, something quite different from, say, taking the subway to 125th Street and actually getting off. Pareles’s second omission was equally substantive. Nowhere in the Sunday article, or, for that matter, in any of Pareles’s day-to-day rap reviews, did the critic or his editors permit themselves those quotes from the rappers’ rhymes that would illuminate what had agitated square, elder America, and produced all the fear and loathing. As a result, the otherwise well-informed
Times
reader was deprived of such examples of articulation and metaphoric symbolism as “Forget the salad, just eat my meat,” “Suck my dick, bitch, and make it puke,” and “I can’t be pussywhipped by a dick sucker.” As the
New Republic
pointed out: “The chanting about (children, cover your parents’ eyes and ears) ‘cunts,’ ‘dicks,’ ‘pussy’ and ‘cocks’ knows no end. The lyrics drip with contempt for women, especially black women.” Pareles and the other
Times
rock critics not only endorsed this genital madness, the
New Republic
concluded, “They are regularly laughable in their polysyllabic prettifications of the primal and the obscene.” Worse, the bowdlerizing was a measure of just how far the
Times
’ pop critics were willing to bend reality in the course of wooing the target “hip” demographic cohort (an audience probably non-existent to start with).

The Polish Tea Room crowd heard another sort of complaint, from classical musicians, dancers, and other performers. These artists of the high culture believed that their work was being neglected by the
Times
’ reviewers. “These changes are causing
a lot of artistic pain out there,” Gerry Gold reported. If the idea of quality was passé, as Michael Brenson had proposed, then many artists and performers were in trouble; without mention in the
Times
, they didn’t exist. Aggrieved cultural organizations began remonstrating privately to the
Times
, and in some instances, made their cases in public. During the 1990–91 concert season, the staff of the 92nd Street Y, a vital center of music and
recitals in New York, did an analysis of the
Times
’ cultural coverage, and formally presented its findings to the
Times
during a meeting with managing editor, Joe Lelyveld. Of 120 concert dates in Merkin Hall, the Y staff reported, the
Times
had covered sixteen. The percentage of reviews of events held in the Y auditorium was slightly higher. One of the Y program directors, Omus Hershbein, an accomplished classical pianist in his own right, told Lelyveld—politely—that the
Times
apparently no longer cared about serious music. Barbara Rose, editor in chief of the
Journal of Art
, offered a similar analysis in a 1991 editorial decrying the “
centralization” of American culture. Her general point involved the long-standing complaint that the major museums and institutions enjoyed special access to the
Times
; more immediately, though, less well-connected arts groups now were competing with the new constituencies for
Times
column space: “Suffice it to say that the paper’s average of less than ten gallery reviews per week hardly gives a fair indication of what is happening in New York City alone.”

Times
editors had sat through such lectures before. Between 1971 and 1981, the Museum of Modern Art offered a “Projects” program of contemporary art, essentially one-person shows by unknowns or semi-knowns. According to Riva Castleman, then director of the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the museum, fifty-seven gallery exhibitions and thirty-eight video programs were sponsored by “Projects”; the
Times
ignored most of the ninety-five presentations. Beginning in 1982, “Projects” began publishing books by the artists; review copies of the first five Artists’ Book Project volumes went to
Times
critics. “They too were ignored.” Castleman blamed the victims to some extent: The artists hadn’t made their reputations yet. She didn’t fully grasp the bigger picture: Her “Projects” series was among the first casualties of the shifting ground in the
Times
’ world of cultural coverage. The youthquake was only one manifestation of the underlying changes in the
Times
’ approach to news.

The modern
Times
was not trying to encompass all that was happening. In part, it couldn’t, given the dozens of cultural events every day. More important, the editors no longer wanted the
Times
to be the Paper of Record, whether for quality culture or anything else. The record was regarded as boring, Warren Hoge had declared. His successor, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who was appointed
cultural news editor in 1990, at the age of forty, distanced his pages still more from “the boring news.” Goldberger gathered an extraordinary amount of authority at the
Times
; he ran the daily arts and leisure pages, the Weekend section on Fridays and the Sunday Arts and Leisure section—in addition to retaining the title of chief architecture critic and continuing to write a monthly column. When Goldberger was interviewed a few months after he took control of the cultural news report, he spoke about his intentions to scrutinize arts institutions, and “to do bottom-up and not just top-down coverage.” He said that he felt “no more obligation to turn out the ‘standard’ feature—the aimless PR piece, the slight feature, the feature tied to a show opening. We’ll only do that when there’s something new to say, or if the story is well written.” The
Times
reader, he explained, “is an intelligent observer of society who cares about culture, and about what the
Times
has to say. The audience wants to be enlightened and it wants some consumer guidance.”

Some seventy staff reporters, critics and editors—including a dozen contract writers—were under Goldberger’s jurisdiction when he became cultural news editor. His initial priorities reflected the
Times
’ broad, up-to-date definition of culture. Goldberger wanted to add a second cultural news reporter in Los Angeles, where there was, he said, enough work for three people. One reporter would cover the motion picture industry full-time; “the other reporter would be assigned to the more creative side—not just films, but all the visual arts. I’d add in Los Angeles before I’d add in New York City. For all my passion for New York”—Goldberger was born across the Hudson River, in Nutley, and his parents still lived in New Jersey—“I am not one of those New Yorkers who disdains L.A. It’s central to American culture. We ignore it at our peril.” Goldberger’s biggest plans centered on the
Times
’ critics: “We will play up their work. They are our calling cards. They’ll always have pride of place.”

The Polish Tea Room crowd understood the message. In the summer of 1991, Dick Shepard took up management’s offer of a cash buyout. So did Gerald Gold, Gerald Fraser, and Grace Glueck. Fraser, who was among the first African-Americans to work at the
Times
as other than an elevator operator or production employee, unhesitatingly applied for the retirement package. “They were offering me a bundle of money, and I was quite clear and fast in accepting.… It’s a chance
to do other things.” As for the
Times
’ new approach to cultural coverage, “We’re not doing what we did best: the paper of record. We’re trying to be something different. Maybe we had to change,” he said, sounding not at all convinced. None of the crowd stopped working. Shepard and Fraser continued to write free-lance articles for the
Times
and other publications. Shepard also became a columnist for the
Summit News Times
, an “instant newspaper” published in connection with a United Nations conference on the environment held in New York City during the winter of 1992 (at seventy-one, he at last had the column that the
Times
never offered him). Grace Glueck’s “retirement” was the most unusual of all. The
Times
had been a kind of home to her—she never took her editor’s dismissive advice to marry, and she never spent a lot of time fixing up her Manhattan apartment, either. A small, self-contained figure with an air of quiet distraction, she seemed most comfortable surrounded by the piles of clippings, folders, magazines, and books that covered the surface of her desk. Glueck continued to come to the
Times
each day. She moved her files to another desk, one space away from her old location in culture gulch, and used the
Times
’ telephones, the
Times
’ computers, and the
Times
’ data base—“Nexis is so expensive!” she said with a wave of her hands—to work on free-lance articles. When she met an interviewer for tea and corn muffins one afternoon in mid-February, 1992, she was finishing up
Times
assignments for Arts and Leisure and for the Sunday
Book Review.
She was so busy that, for the second year in a row, she could not get the paperwork for her U.S. income taxes together. “I’ve talked to my accountant, but I still may have a lien attached,” she said vaguely. Glueck smiled brightly: “Wouldn’t that be just terrible?”