Modern Journalism

Modern art – Bathers by a river by Henri Matisse 1910

Yesterday we went to see the new Matisse exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in NY.

(As we live on top of the museum, this was not so hard to do).

The exhibition has gotten rave reviews, and not being such great art historians, we took the audio tour, which makes life easier and far more interesting.

Last week we went to see RED, the Broadway show about Mark Rothko and the Picasso exhibit at the Met.

It’s been an art-packed week.

Modern art has a certain power, an energy that conventional art does not have.  You may love it or hate it, but it represents a step away form what painting was considered to be until the late 19th Century.  What makes people like Rothko, Matisse and Picasso interesting is that they were on the leading edge of the ‘new’, the departure from the use of painting simply to represent what one saw as best one could.

That craft, that art, the ability to apply paint to canvas to faithfully reproduce a portrait or a landscape lost a great deal of its appeal, and certainly its marketability with the rise of photography in the early 20th century.

My old friend Len Shlain wrote a wonderful book about this entitled Art & Physics, in which he marked the parallel rise of modern art and Heisenbergian physics as one in the same phenomena.

When the ability to accurately, in fact perfectly, reproduce a portrait, a still life or a landscape at the push of a button became commonplace, art was faced with, perhaps, its first ‘crisis’ since Lasceaux.

The ‘value’ of painting a family portrait dropped to nothing, for all practical purposes, and the world was suddenly filled with armies of former painters who found that their talents, considerable though they might have been, were suddenly next to worthless.

Sound familiar?

Know any former journalists who, though they may report and write quite well, suddenly find that in the world of the Internet their work no longer is worth very much?  Where once people were willing, in fact happy to pay a reporter to go to India to find a story and report on it, in a world with 240 million blogs and about 50 million Indians alone blogging away on every event in Mumbai, how much value is there in sending some CNN reporter to Mumbai?  About as much as hiring some workmanlike painter to paint your portrait in 1922.  Interesting perhaps, but much easier just to get a photographer to do the job.

In the world of painting, the rise of this new technology of photography freed art and artists to explore other realms.

No longer chained to the necessity of faithfully reproducing exactly what they saw, they slowly evolved into implanting their own emotions and feelings and often political statements into their art.  Shows like Matisse and Picasso, well curated, track the transformation. You can see it, painting by painting. The Rothko play deals with the move from Rothko’s own work to the rise of the next generation – Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg as they left Rothko behind.

Now we come to journalism.

If the web can, almost second by second, deliver ‘news’ in a way that clearly obviates the need for ‘professional journalists’ for the most part, can journalists now also evolve their craft as artists did? (And admittedly it was not easy for the artists and many were left behind).

The first step, I think, is to remove the ‘balance’ from the equation.

The need for every story to be ‘balanced’ is frankly, first unnecessary in a world in which all information is available to everyone all the time.

More significantly, this ‘balance’ drive results in oatmeal journalism – could be this.. but then again this.

Bland.

Insipid.

Perhaps the first step for a new kind of journalism is one that is clearly emotional and evocative, powerful and driven by passion.

You can already see the seeds of this in the success of places like Fox News (though it purports to be ‘fair and balanced, let’s not be ridiculous). And the equal success of Huffington or even Jon Stewart.

We see in this nouvel journalism the same thing we see in the first galleries of the MoMA and the Met as they deal with Picasso and Matisse – a striving to put passion above disciplined regurgitation of the obvious.

Let’s then push all the way.

Let’s create a breed of journalist who put their passion on paper – or film or video – quite clearly and openly.

This, I think, would ‘sell’.

And be a lot more emotionally fulfilling than ‘and now this’.