Overnight Open Thread: Economy Tanks; Newspaper Art and Culture Critics Hardest Hit. (genghis)

(And anything else you feel like yacking about.)

Wow. Things are tough all over, but when things get to this point, can the total collapse of Western civilization be far behind?

”Newspaper culture critics are an endangered species. What does this mean for Seattle artists?”

“Sheila Farr chooses her words carefully when she describes the day her job disappeared. She makes a practice of being careful with language, and this is a story she wants to get right. "Here is how it was put to me," she says, scrupulously recreating her conversation with Seattle Times higher-ups. "They were eliminating my position as art critic. The position would be gone." A fine-boned woman with a meticulous manner, fifty-seven-year-old Farr was the paper's staff art critic for eight years, and a dominant voice in the city's visual arts scene for over twenty. She is a very good art critic and she knows it. So the news she'd likely be the last staff art critic in the Times's 112-year history was a surprise.”

”As the meltdown continues, certain values become clear: the most basic of these is that breaking news is more important than anything else. This breaking-news panic is a product of Blogosphere Fear - terror that the blogs will get the story before the newspaper gets it.”

So the next time you pass by a former columnist on a street corner, holding a sign saying “will critique for food,” be sure to drop an abstract allegrorical invisible coin into their cup. They’ll appreciate the whimsical Bauhaus-inspired Dadaist/Postmodern/Deconstructionist ironic construct of the gesture, with its attendant underlying, subtle, anti-bourgeois-nationalist yet proto-nativist meaning.

Oops: Forgot to tack on the disclaimer/permission slip/overnight tipline. It's below the fold.

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posted by xgenghisx at 12:38 AM

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