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Running True to Hype

Who, would you say was "the most powerful man in 20th century music?" Stravinsky? Gershiwin? Karajan? Schoenberg? Hurok? Presley? According to the dust-jacket of his biography, it was Walter Legge, onetime London music critic who became chief producer for EMI Recording. If you have not heard of him, perhaps it is because he was not a product of selective promotion. He was its master.

The world of the arts today is ruled by "hype," from the Greek word hyper, meaning "excessive, exaggerated, inflated" - as in, hypergenesis, a redundancy of organs. Artists, entertainers, entrepreneurs, administrators, bureaucrats, teachers and critics have all become part of the immense machinery of modern promotional intimidation. The mass media and the Internet are mouths into which something must go: and those who control the input and the output, as Walter Legge did in his own field, dictate what art and artists we shall meet.

But their choices have then to be sold to the public - which is accomplished in the usual democratic fashion: All the resources of applied psychology are used to persuade people to believe they are choosing freely what in fact they can hardly escape. Market surveys are conducted daily, ostensibly to discover public taste, while advertisers simultaneously and relentlessly badger us to change it. We should go for this and forget that, we are told, because everyone else is doing it - and everyone else is told they should do it because we are. This is known as public relations.

But who among us is about to protest this barefaced quackery? Not the artist, certainly. The reward for getting into the funnel, even into the small end, is possible fame and fortune; the penalty for staying out is probable oblivion. This fate especially awaits the individual conscientious objector, because every artwork has now become a collective creation.

A book cannot circulate without editors, publishers, publicists, chains of book shops, libraries, school systems, radio and television pitches, and often the assistance of some government agency. A piece of music becomes celebrated only when a similar army is assembled to push it, plus disc or video jockeys inured to repetition, tirelessly insisting that their taste is ours. Highbrow books and music, if they are to see the light of day, may well need the additional services of a vanity publisher or a vain university.

Painters and playwrights, actors, fiddlers, dancers, potters and divas need agents, managers, impresarios and a bewildering assortment of other collaborators to make us notice their conspicuous talents - while corporate enterprises such as films, theaters, or orchestras, dance companies and art galleries require publicity departments, marketing staffs, government liaison committees and commercial tie-ins to convince the rest of us of the deeply spiritual benefits coming our way. We are left to discover nothing on our own.

If today's artist is inextricably trapped in the apparatus of hype, today's critic (that modern Galahad of esthetic purity) is no less compromised. When positive, the critic's supposedly impartial verdict is the most welcome grist possible for the publicist's mill. Glowing quotations (often wrenched out of context) bedeck jackets, flyers, posters and catalogues - until the critic, however reluctantly or mistakenly, is elevated to the status of authority. When verdicts are negative, on the other hand, they act as a solemn warning to artists inclined to flout the critical winds and go their own way. Some authorities cannot even wait for the opening, publication or vernissage, but render advance judgment in return for a pre-trial peek at the evidence. Then they give the bandwagon a shove before climbing aboard.

But the collaboration can be even closer. Since the critic's eventual evaluation is so important to circulation, artists in every field have taken to consulting critics about works in progress - or even about bare ideas (which are, anyway, the be-all and end-all of conceptual art) - and few bystanders can resist this temptation to play obstetrician. Their involvement, of course, has the enthusiastic support of the artists, who hope to benefit later from the critic's publicly impartial approval. From now on, so to speak, they are in this together.

Many critics are prepared to go further. Not content with sharing in the creative risk, they do what they can to remove the risk altogether. Over and above selecting which works they will and will not recognize as worthy of their notice, they shape the future by acting as jurors in the awarding of grants and prizes, by working as consultants to committees who decide what is to be published, performed, broadcast, screened and exhibited - and by teaching academic courses designed to lay their dubious certitudes on the next generation.

"At Prairie Fire," runs a circular from a literary magazine, "we know who's going places and you'll be the first to find out!...Some of the best critics in the country will help you decide which books are worth reading and which are a waste of your valuable time. If you - like me - are an articulate, independent-thinking..." This is worthy of Voltaire or Orwell; but the writer is too drunk with power to notice.

Many of today's critics affect modesty about this new-found power; they deny it, they deplore it, they even rue it. Some maintain that their views, however trenchant, are ignored by a willful public. Some claim (with beguiling honesty) that they have no responsibility to art or artist or public, but only to the profitability of their journal, network, or personal bank account. Some who do admit to esthetic or social obligations adopt a sort of transcendental detachment, like atomic scientists disclaiming responsibility of others' misuse of their inventions.

But happily there have also been fearless lions, such as one time San Francisco Examiner music critic Richard Pontzious, prepared to face up to the greatness that has been thrust upon today's critic. "There is so much at stake in the arts today," Pontzious has written, "that none of us can afford to stand by and allow any of its forms to either quietly wither or grow erratically on their own merit."

There you have it. The last thing we need is art that grows on its own merit. Why it would puncture the whole balloon.