– Matthew Monahan
b. 1972 in Eureka, California, lives in Los Angeles

This spring’s Public Art Fund Talks series features three artists whose works reinvent and extend the language of figurative sculpture for a new era. Neither literal portraits nor traditional monuments, their works push the expressive potential of sculptural forms and materials, marking a renewed interest in the figure in contemporary art. These artists are also featured in the upcoming Public Art Fund exhibition Statuesque, opening June 2, 2010 at City Hall Park. The first speaker of the series is Matthew Monahan. Public Art Fund Talks are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

Monahan received his BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art, New York (1994). Solo exhibitions include: Modern Art, London, 2009; Anton Kern Gallery, New York, 2008; Focus: Matthew Monahan, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2007. He has participated in group exhibitions including: Life on Mars: 55th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, 2008; Unmonumental, New Museum, New York, 2007; Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2006. Monahan is represented by Anton Kern Gallery, New York.

On November 5, 2009, Roberta Smith delivered the 2009 AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School. From her vantage as senior art critic of the New York Times, she shared her thoughts on art criticism in general and, in particular, as it relates to her twenty years at the Times. She both embraced and challenged the concept of art journalism for a daily newspaper that caters to a broad general public, and elaborated on the primary importance of the art object, distinct from the cultural, political or economic context in which it might be situated.

RESPONSE: Laura Auricchio, Responsibility

Laura Auricchio is the Assistant Professor of Art History at Parsons The New School for Design. Auricchio has written extensively for both scholarly and general audiences on topics in the disparate fields of eighteenth-century French visual culture and contemporary art. She is the author of several dozen exhibition and book reviews that have appeared in publications ranging from The Art Bulletin to Art Papers to Time Out New York. Her first book, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution, was published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2009. She is currently working on a visually-informed biography of Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution.

During the heated 2008 campaign season, Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin sought to downplay Barack Obama’s experience as a grass-roots organizer by contrasting it with her own past as the chief elected official of Wasilla, Alaska. The mayor of a small town, Palin famously pronounced, “is sort of like a community organizer, except with real responsibilities.”

Listening to Roberta Smith discuss her thirty-seven years as an art critic, more than twenty of which have been spent writing for the New York Times, I found myself returning to an underlying, if unintended, question implied by Palin’s invidious comparison: does every profession come with its own set of responsibilities? If so, what are the responsibilities of an art critic? And does the act of speaking from a platform as powerful the Times add to her load?

By responsibilities, I do not mean tasks, though Smith surely wrestles daily with a to-do list of epic proportions. (As she explains to a questioner, it is only through obsessive list-making that she manages to maintain her bearings on New York’s high-speed carousel of gallery, museum, and alternative exhibitions.) Rather, I mean responsibility in the sense of “moral accountability,” in the words of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. To whom, and for what, is an art critic responsible?

Smith apparently believes that art critics do indeed carry a certain burden of responsibility. Mid-way through her presentation, she proposes that all of us who are “lucky enough to have a feeling for art” have an obligation “to give back.” “You can’t be proud about where art will take you,” she insists, suggesting an equivalence among the art world’s varied career choices. Whether your professional relationship to art involves making it, curating it, writing about it, or selling it, the fundamental responsibility, Smith believes, remains the same: to “put [the love of art] back into society.”

As a critic, Smith understands herself to be primarily responsible to her “readership.” But who, precisely, is the reader?

At one point, Smith suggests that her readership may be composed of frequent exhibition-goers. Noting that her reviews are “written in the moment,” she observes that they are also “used by people that way, very quickly.” To a certain extent this is true. For a cultured New Yorker or an out-of-town visitor with a bit of spare time, a Times review may offer little more than casual guidance on which shows to catch and which to skip. In this view, criticism is fleeting, with few enduring consequences.

Elsewhere in her talk, however, Smith implies that responsibilities may run deeper. Lamenting that “our visual lives in this country are more or less unexamined,” Smith seems to propose that a critic might serve as a model whose approach to works of art, designed spaces, and other visual features of our environment could be emulated by others. Everyone has a response to the visual, she avers, and everyone has a “critical ability” – the capacity to “analyze and judge.” Yet when faced with Art, which seems always to begin with a capital A, many otherwise confident viewers feel unprepared, intimated, and so fail to engage with their reactions. The world might be a very different place, Smith muses, if this vast but underutilized resource of critical potential could somehow be tapped. She is quite clear on the point that museums have a role to play in fostering visual literacy among the public. Perhaps critics also share some of this burden.

I wonder, though, whether a critic’s constituency might be much smaller than this vision would suggest. As a very part-time writer of exhibition reviews for Time Out New York, I have been known to share Smith’s hopeful attitude towards the power of criticism to open eyes. I’ve aspired to reach out to a broad public, to persuade just one person to give art a chance. But in moments of more sober reflection I have to concede that a reader who finds art uninteresting is not likely to spend any length of time with an exhibition review. Those who turn to the art section are already hooked. In that case, maybe the best I can do is to provide a bit of historical insight or comparative context that will enable readers to see the art in new ways. In other words, maybe the critic’s responsibility is to educate the educated.

Of course, exhibition-goers are not a critic’s only readers. Artists, curators, dealers and collectors also read reviews. In fact, they can be affected quite profoundly, and in lasting ways, by their contents. Is the critic to be held accountable for these effects? Should potential consequences influence a critic’s writing?

Smith responds with a resounding “no.” She is the viewer’s advocate, pure and simple. “I’m not doing it for the artist,” she states. “They can take my response as evidence of how their broadcast is being received,” or they can ignore it. On the subject of commerce, she demurs. “I don’t really know what effect I have on the market because I don’t really pay any attention to it.”

Does anyone? Should anyone? If so, who?

An audience member hints at this line of inquiry by asking how exhibitions are selected and assigned for review at the Times. Evidently, as the critics with greatest longevity, Smith and Holland Cotter wield considerable power in this regard. But Smith hastens to add that they are not omnipotent. Ultimately, the critic reports to her editor, who reports to someone else, and so on up the ladder. At some point, the paper’s bottom line – a matter of particular urgency in these difficult economic times – must come into play. After all, the Times is a commercial enterprise, albeit one that adheres to a code of journalistic ethics. The critic is an employee. She is, in the cold parlance of an increasingly web- and numbers-driven world of journalism, a “content provider.” Neither more nor less.

Still, I think the question is worth pondering. To whom, and for what, is an art critic responsible?

Aleksandra Wagner is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Bachelor’s Program, The New School for General Studies, and a Member of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. Wagner is the editor of our recent publication Considering Forgiveness.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance. His work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances, and written fiction.

Based on Cardew’s compositions and writings and his work as co-founder of the radical Scratch Orchestra, the speakers and workshop participants explore contemporary processes of collaborative and critical learning. Three Cardew maxims underscore the interdisciplinary, performative and experimental nature of this celebration:

1. The composer has to visualize the development of his ideas in time
2. Over a long period of time, nothing remains the same
3. The dynamic control of changes in time is a big part of composition

PROGRAM

An Introduction to Cardew
Friday, April 9, 2010 – 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
The New School, Wollman Hall
65 West 11th Street (enter at 66 West 12th Street)
Admission: $8, free for all students, New School faculty, staff and alumni with valid ID

The colloquium will be launched on the evening of Friday, April 9, with focused lectures introducing the work of Cardew. Complete schedule and participants to be announced.

Workshops with New School faculty
Saturday, April 10, 2010 – 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor
Admission: $8, free for all students, New School faculty, staff and alumni with valid ID

New School faculty Ivan Raykoff and Evan Rapport will host public workshops developed in collaboration with the Lang class New Ears (Raykoff) and the New School for Jazz classes Cross-Cultural Improv and Punk & Noise (Rapport). Sound works produced in the Saturday workshops will be presented in a day-long performance on Sunday, April 11. Complete workshop schedule to be announced.

Performance
Sunday, April 11, 2010 – 12:00 to 6:00 p.m.
Location to be announced
Admission: Free

Sound works produced in the Saturday workshops will be presented in a day-long performance on Sunday, April 11. Complete schedule of events and location of Sunday performance to be announced.

Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009-2010 program theme “Speculating on Change.”

During the span of twelve years, a series of events, later hailed as the Civil Rights Movement, forever changed the social and political course of America. From March 28 to July 11, 2010, The Bronx Museum of the Arts will present two sweeping exhibitions that chronicle both these pivotal moments in the nation’s history and their legacy surveyed through the works of young African-American artists. The first, “Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968,” features 150 vintage photographs, images that not only exposed rampant acts of discrimination in America’s past, but also revealed shinning glimpses of equality and unity amongst its citizens. The second, smaller exhibition, “After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy,” includes works by seven African-American emerging artists and collectives – all born in or after 1968 – who have created new work examining the heritage of the Civil Rights Movement and its affect on the lives of this new generation. Both exhibitions were organized by The High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

The blogroll

The political blogosphere is, as I have suggested, full of interlocking circles, and I have found myself browsing mostly within a particular ambit, which I think of (following a remark by a Bush-II White House flunky) as the reality-based community. It is decidedly center-left and mostly tipped toward electoral participation rather than exodus. There are many other compelling sites; I just don’t make a regular habit of stopping by. The core of bloggers also post on each other’s sites, or comment on each other’s posts, which often constitutes a valuable give and take (not to mention the sometimes tiresome, sometimes rewarding comments by readers and regulars). For example, this is from a man named Valtin, whose blog is Invictus which, among other things, reports and comments on the U.S.’s use of torture and its growing body of legal defenses:

I have been blogging at Daily Kos since May 2005. You can also catch me at Firedoglake, American Torture, The Public Record, Docudharma, the Out of Iraq Bloggers Caucus, and Progressive Historians. I am a psychologist, living in Northern California. A full backlog of my pre-Invictus diaries can be found at my Daily Kos page. E-mail me at sfpsych at gmail dot com.

The blogroll, below, points to some basic sites to visit for political opinion, analysis, comment, and snark. It does not include many of the sites set up as arms of mainstream publications, with the exception of Paul Krugman’s New York Times-hosted site (we are in an economically drastic moment!). There are some sites, such as The American Prospect, those for advocacy groups such as Center for Constitutional Rights, Center for American Progress, American Civil Liberties Union, the CREDO phone company, PFAW, Consumers Union, that are certainly worth reading, but since I receive regular emails from them (listserv phenomenon), I can’t actually list them as sites I regularly visit (but perhaps you should; they provide a wealth of carefully presented material, if without the raw immediacy of the blogs).

Unions maintain websites, often with blogs and commentary, such as Change to Win. The website of the perpetually insurgent, rank-and-file Labor Notes organization is better designed than its magazine. Most magazines and newspapers of note increasingly find it essential to have websites—including the Nation, The Progressive, Le Monde Diplomatique, Harper’s, In These Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Editor & Publisher (breaking news: on Dec. 10, Nielson Co., E&P’s owner, abruptly announced that this 125-year-old magazine – “the bible of the newspaper industry” – and its blogs will be shut down forthwith), Dollars & Sense, and Counterpunch. Znet is a heroic though unbeautiful effort of very long standing at community building and information sharing, and associated with the (even less beautiful) Z magazine. Many of these are trying to nudge readers toward cheaper, web-only subscriptions (especially since some Republicans have persisted in their efforts to stifle dissent by unconscionably boosting third-class postage rates, which affect disproportionately the little magazines that rely more on subscription than on advertising income).

The many video-based websites, mostly not stand-alone sites but offshoots of some prominent blogs (see GRITtv and, say, Glenn Greenwald’s, Kos’s, and TPM’s video links, usually talking-head interviews on topical matters) point to the imminent translation of every important medium of public (as opposed to audience) address to the Internet.

Less well-funded activist and grass-roots groups also maintain news sites, such as Independent Media Center, which collects independent, activist reportage of several countries and languages, of varying quality and interest. (Terminological note: fake grassroots groups on the right, surreptitiously set up by corporations and vicious tycoons, are known as “astroturf.”) Amy Goodman’s superb daily interview radio and community television program Democracy Now! archives every show, offering video, audio, and written transcripts. Finally, individual journalists and writers often have websites that are well worth reading; among others, I like Marie Cocco’s, Barbara Ehrenreich’s, Michael Moore’s, and Helen Thomas’s for periodic visits.

Special mention should be made of some lawyers’ blogs, begun during the Bush II years because of the egregious, persistent, and pernicious flouting of the law by that administration. The premier site is Glenn Greenwald’s, but I have also listed Talk Left, although a number of the other listed blogs are lawyer heavy, and there are other worthy sites, such as John Dean’s FindLaw and, oh, Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Note on the future

Although the Internet is pushing forty, it is under constant reconfiguration. The migration of journalism and of much of the rest of the public sphere, such as it is, to the Internet, has produced a situation in which commerce, technology, and political governance are in play, marshalling the forces of ideology, policing, surveillance, and law; technical and formal innovation; advertising; scams, frauds, and deceptions – and popular pushback. It seems impossible to predict even the next five minutes of Internet life. At present we live in what must look to Internet service providers – commercial giants such as Verizon and AOL – as unreconstructed primitive communism, in which all those who seek to communicate and establish websites are allowed equal access to this virtual “commons,” a situation that its defenders are calling “net neutrality” in their efforts to have this equality of access written into U.S. law.

The grassroots blogosphere is threatened by the efforts of the hosting corporations to scrap net neutrality in favor of the right to charge differential rates to website operators, stratifying the Internet into high-paying corporate providers (and government agencies?) whose sites would load quickly – and all the rest of us, consigned to the slow lane. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, founded in 1990, advocates for electronic policy issues, including the rights of bloggers to remain anonymous, against surveillance and excessive commercialization, for free speech, privacy, digital rights, and of course net neutrality. (Consult them and others on issues of digital rights.) It is net neutrality that has potentiated the healthy set of political blogs and allowed just about anyone to start a new one and hope to find an audience.

Here are some sites that make up part of my regular rounds.

The daily inevitable. The pioneer left activist blog. Left-populist grass-roots central; covering many topics, though unevenly, but the central compass is electoral and congressional politics. Not very good on foreign policy except on our current wars:

Daily Kos — original content, many “diaries,” robust community

Mydd (Direct Democracy) —  spin-off of Daily Kos; see their list of state blogs on the left-hand side of the page

Single author

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com — sharp, often stunning analysis; my homepage

Maha (Barbara O’Brien) — politics & American Buddhism

Echidne of the Snakes — politics through feminist eyes

Informed Comment (Juan Cole) — the go-to source on the Middle East

Tom Tomorrow — cartoons & commentary

I Blame the Patriarchy — a woman in Texas

A further cast of regulars

Hullabaloo — terrific and now often cited by Krugman; one of the first female political bloggers

Firedoglake — sterling; more women

Sadly, No! — snark

Talk Left — another lawyer-based political blog

Progressive Historians

Political magazines, large and small, and aggregators, some with original content

CommonDreams.org

Truthout — aggregator with significant original content

Tom Engelhardt — Engelhardt works at The Nation Institute

Consortium News — investigative journalism; founded by reporter Robert Parry

The Black Commentator — all content is original

Buzzflash — aggregator with attitude, and original comment

The Raw Story — left aggregator

Portside — left aggregator

TPM (Joshua Micah Marshall) — tending more & more toward the beltway mainstream

Truthdig — familiar liberal commentators; led by Robert Scheer, fired after 30-years at the Los Angeles Times

Black Agenda Report — its founders split off from Black Commentator

The Smirking Chimp — named after Bush II

Color of Change — activism on race

Americablog — John Aravosis, one of the early bloggers; site’s political focus encompasses gay activism

Tom Paine — “a project of the Institute for America’s Future”

Duncan Black (“Atrios”) — pioneer

Crooks and Liars — a political site run by a musician; uneven

Journalism & media critique

Media Matters for America — I said above that I wouldn’t list it, but here it is

ProPublica

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

The Daily Howler (Bob Somersby) — uneven, terribly written—unkind metaphors spring to mind—but often heart-stoppingly accurate on press & education reporting

Token science blog, and environmentalism

Pharyngula — a science blog, as advertised

350.org — activism for political action against global warming; founded by writer Bill McKibben

economics, reality-based capitalism

1. mainstream:

Paul Krugman

Brad Delong

Nouriel Roubini

Baseline Scenario (Simon Johnson and others)

2. more to the left:

Economic Policy Institute

Doug Henwood — by publisher of Left Business Observer newsletter

Monthly Review

Middle East

Juan Cole — indispensable analysis

Electronic Intifada — important analysis and commentary

J Street — newly visible Jewish peace camp

New Profile — Israeli activists

oh, well

The Rude Pundit — rude, as advertised

We welcome your comments. Please write to vlc@newschool.edu.

© martha rosler 2009

Please note: this event is free and open to the public, though seating is limited. Please RSVP to Chelsea Haines, Public Programs Manager at 212-254-8200.

The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics will also present a number of public programs, including discussions with Pablo Helguera and Aleksandra Wagner on the role of storytelling in their practice, and a series of screenings of featured works. The events are sponsored by the Vera List Center and the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design in collaboration with ICI, the organizer of the exhibition.

Jostling for position, and who pays?

In the wider spheres of public consciousness, the soi-disant grassroots blogs have been overshadowed by media heavyweights who use their celebrity status derived from their newspaper columns or (worse! much worse!) from their appearances on late night and cable TV to snare an audience entranced with spectacle culture, on the one hand, and inside-the-beltway journalism on the other – and to garner corporate advertising. (Many right-wing sites either are wholly funded by troglodyte billionaires or charge admission.) The most prominent of these liberal-leaning celebrity-infested sites looks exactly like a tabloid newspaper married to a network-television website, but it is not alone in aiming for that sexy je ne sais quoi. In contrast, the corner of the political blogosphere I am presenting here constitutes (with some notable exceptions) a community of distributed labor rather than a corporate, competitive, stand-alone enterprise in search of glory and profits. (Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos also hosts a bloggers’ convention every year.)

Some grass-roots sites accept advertising, others plead for reader support. Compare these self-descriptions, and guess which of these carry ads:

CommonDreams.org is an Internet-based progressive news and grassroots activism organization.

… Daily Kos is the premier online political community with 2.5 million unique visitors per month and 215,000 registered users. It is at once a news organization, community, and activist hub.

MyDD is a group blog designed to discuss campaigns, the progressive movement, and political power. We do polling, research, commentary, analysis, and activism …

Buzzflash: progressive news, progressive commerce, progressive advocacy.

Truthout: We are devoted to the principles of equality, democracy, human rights, accountability and social justice. We believe ardently in the power of free speech, and understand that democratic journalism can make the world a better place for all of us. As an organization, Truthout works to broaden and diversify the political discussion by introducing independent voices and focusing on undercovered issues and unconventional thinking. Harnessing the ever-expanding power of the Internet, we work to spread reliable information, peaceful thought and progressive ideas throughout the world.

Journalism

For the increasingly hysterical and palpably threatened traditional media – the “mainstream press,” or as many progressives call it, the “corporate press,” hate radio, and the shrill cable TV shows – the knock on the left-populist sites is that they are written by ignoramuses (read: ordinary people, graduate students, policy wonks, non-J-school grads, non-beltway types, ferocious people, and so on, and those who are mockingly self-described as DFH, or dirty fucking hippies). This is, I imagine, not much different from what was said in high places about The Tatler, the Spectator, and perhaps the Federalist Papers, back in the day, although these publications were indubitably better written than most blogs (for a variety of reasons, beginning with the shortening of what we have been lately calling the “news cycle” and with the need to have a day job.)

The most serious criticism has been made by those in the higher reaches of print journalism, who point out that not only the aggregators but many of the self-generated political blogs depend on material researched and disseminated by trained, salaried, professional journalists; Bill Keller, managing editor of the New York Times, is not alone in calling political blogs “parasites.” But hate radio too is parasitical, and surely most of journalism and radio, especially local public radio talk shows, is completely dependent on material published in the current or the previous day’s New York Times or Washington Post. If the Times elicits clucks from the political blogosphere, the Post elicits catcalls and snorts of disgust; its journalists, shaped by an insidious, deeply obsequious insider mentality, form the core of what bloggers call “The Village.” Should you care to tune in the execrable Sunday morning talking-heads TV shows, or even Washington Week, a program contributed by Washington, D.C.’s public television station, you will see what this means.

A curious development has been the meteoric rise of Politico, a newspaper and website begun by two right-leaning WaPo journalists that seems to be the beltway Villagers’ effort to produce their own stand-alone conglomeration or journalism-thingie for when the mother ship goes under. Compare this with the much better – but admittedly only on-line – ProPublica, also begun and produced by echt journalists: ah! you’ve never heard of it? I rest my case.

In the United States, the professionalization of the journalistic corps is a bit more than a century old. Professionalization – hinging on the notion of objectivity –  was a defensive maneuver executed partly to prevent government regulation consequent upon the manifest ability of “yellow journalism” to foment wars, the case in point being the Hearst-driven Spanish American War of 1898. (In other countries, the advocacy model of journalism, in which newspapers are clearly aligned with specific special, usually class, interests, such as organized labor or the petite bourgeoisie, prevails.) Local and small-town newspapers defined the story of place, a function that the big players like the Times or the Post had great difficulty treating seriously; now newspapers’ attention to local news and flavor have also fallen by the wayside – along with most newspapers. Corporate news organizations continue to display their bias toward statism or simply a right-defined political narrative, a bias now increasingly visible to a sophisticated readership/audience well-schooled (through exposure to TV, advertising, and punditry) in narrative analysis; blogs dismiss the very idea of objectivity, though not of truth, and regard these organizations as filters or as gatekeepers keeping citizens from political participation and from a clear, cold look at the workings of power. Bloggers take advocacy for granted. If journalism has fancied itself the first draft of history, political blogs would likely see themselves not as scribes but as tribunes.

On other fronts, as the broadcast model of TV (premised on the idea of public ownership of the airwaves) has decisively loses its dominance in favor of the paid, more niche-oriented cable platform, the print-derived media giants, led by Rupert Murdoch, are attempting to keep their on-line content from search engines—most prominently Google—to prevent aggregators and individuals from accessing and linking to their “content” (a move that Murdoch defines as copyright violation and outright theft). Murdoch is trying to enlist Microsoft against Google in this endeavor (at this writing, Google has decided to limit page views to five per day from each news provider). We will see; but this desperate-seeming step to erect virtual fences is merely one move in the great search for profits as readers’ attention shifts from the wood-products page to the screen.

Political blogs – like the range of ever increasing right-wing radio “talkers” and the burgeoning of opinion columnists of every political stripe, the upward creep of celebrity gossip into slick magazines, the multiplication of opinionated talk-show pundits – betray the continuing delegitimation of ideas of objectivity and nonpartisanship and the public’s selective disdain for authoritative statements representing state power in favor of a subjectivized point of view (fill in the many requisite mitigating statements here). In other words, like the social networking services, political blogs are a symptom not merely of technological development but of the long implosion of the public sphere (or, in another formulation, the dissolution of the distinction between public and private).

Political blogging brings a personal voice of individual, uncredentialed citizen observers, often fueled by the same throw-the-bums-out outrage as that characterizing the right-wing talkers but unlike them refusing to duck responsibility by claiming to be mere entertainers. As this sphere gains in legitimacy as “alt.journalism,” perhaps abandoning amateurism as the new form of accreditation by acclaim takes hold, many prominent bloggers have dropped their playful online monikers for their real names, claiming authorship along with their subjective positions. It still remains to be determined whether blogs, by their nature either amateur productions or based on nebulous sources and opinions, can rise to the level of journalism in the sense of meticulously sourced material and extensively researched investigative work – at which point they will, I suppose cease to be blogs and become online journalism, with all the pitfalls of cosiness and cronyism, not to mention false identification, that access to power can bring (cf. The Village).

Meanwhile, one persistent itch I have about the blogs is their relationship to sports fandom. The problem lies not particularly in the blogwriters themselves, a number of whom are female (don’t bother), nor in their origins (like sports guy turned political commentator Keith Olbermann) but that the conceptual and linguistic frames regularly used by commenters, that testosterone-heavy gang, seem to derive from sports radio – sports, of course, is that one arena of apparently tremendous public importance in which men with no standing or experience can be experts. Commenters are continually exhorting this or that democratic politician, of whatever gender, to “grow a pair”; I am as tired of that as of the favored feminist trope of praising women or events that “kick ass,” using a phrase also derived from macho sports lingo.

Final installment, forthcoming.

We welcome your comments. Please write to vlc@newschool.edu.

© martha rosler 2009