Shock of the news - and the state of the arts

A new report says the arts and culture get just half of the space in our media that is devoted to sport. Mediawatch asks a leading local culture critic if the arts are just a 'nice to have' for our media now - and why he is warned cultural criticism could disappear with the older Pākehā blokes like him.

Creative New Zealand inadvertently picked a pretty intense week to release a new survey showing the media coverage of arts and culture issues is dwindling. 

One day earlier the media were finally able to publish a flood of stories about the crimes of multi-millionaire arts benefactor and patron Sir James Wallace, following a four-year legal tussle over name suppression that went all the way to the Supreme Court. 

The crimes were described by many in the media as a “worst kept secret” but on Morning Report the next day longtime arts writer and RNZ producer Mark Amery pointed out plenty of people engaged in the arts - including in organisations Wallace backed - would not have known the truth.

Amery also pointed out Sir James' financial input into the arts was such that the revelation raises significant questions about future funding which arts writers will now have to confront as well. 

“I think that's good. I think there's a lot of silence for artists (who) don't want to bite the hand that feeds. There's a very interesting tension in the arts over where the money comes from,” Amery told Mediawatch. 

How the arts are covered in our media had already been on Amery’s mind when - before the Wallace revelation - he wrote his final weekly arts column for the capital’s daily The Post this week. 

“Like journalism, the arts ask us to consider other perspectives. Both our differences and commonalities become more visible in the media and we need to report them with care - something we currently struggle to resource,” he said. 

That was thrown into sharp relief by Creative New Zealand’s Visibility Matters survey of arts and culture coverage in New Zealand media, which Amery himself suggested to the national arts funding body. 

Isentia’s breakdown of media content in the year to June 2022 found 25 percent of our media coverage is about sport - but arts and culture only accounts for half as much. 

It said the arts coverage was “diluted and sparse” and about three quarters of it was consumer-focused stuff about TV, film and music. 

A heavy focus on current or upcoming events was good for promotion of some arts and artists, the report said, but others suffered. 

And it also means there is lots of ‘preview’ publicity  - there is a lot less ‘review’ and analysis.

A bar chart in Visibility Matters report shows the volume of “nuanced criticism or deeper analysis” is small. 

“If it's a consumer item, a film or an album or show there is the resource to put publicists behind things. But there's no arts editors, or very few, in newsrooms. And there's very few arts journalists who've got time or resources to really go out there and find out what's really significant,” Amery told Mediawatch. 

The report also found international artists were more likely to be covered but some local communities were heavily under-represented in arts and culture coverage. 

The report noted “strong elevation of individuals, but . . . limited focus on Māori arts and culture or ngā toi Māori in coverage. Pacific arts and culture and artists were only present in less than 5 percent of coverage."

"The most stark area of under-representation is for NZ Asian arts and culture and artists," it added.  

“There's another report underway now to look at what could be done about it. But this report is really interesting in terms of just letting us look at what coverage there is,” Amery said.

The arts back on RNZ on Sundays  

Amery will soon have a good opportunity to do more himself. 

From next month, he will be co-producing and presenting a new weekend show all about the arts for RNZ National, alongside Perlina Lau who currently presents RNZ’s Worldwatch. She is also a creator, producer and actor in series including Flat3 and the TV comedy Creamerie.

The new RNZ show will incorporate elements of the Standing Room Only and Arts on Sunday which were presented for many years by Lynn Freeman and Simon Morris. 

“There's an arts and culture strategy that's underway (at RNZ) . . and that is progressive. This is a really exciting time for RNZ to really rethink how we treat the arts as intrinsic to our way of life,” he said, 

“When we look at Toi Māori or the Pacific arts they are a far more collective and interdisciplinary part of our culture - a part of a way of life. We need to kind of unbox the arts and think about it more as a culture and a way of life because actually, that's a very strong part of what makes our culture and New Zealand distinctive,” Amery said. 

When Anna Fifield took over as editor of Wellington’s Dominion Post back in October 2020, she told Mediawatch she wanted to bump up the coverage of local arts and creativity. 

She took on Amery as the paper’s arts editor in 2020. Her successor Caitlin Cherry has expanded the coverage even more.

But the Visibility Matter report seems to show most media now regard arts as a ‘nice to have’ that is not a priority in tight times.  

“Let's be clear. We've seen a decimation of our media over the last 20 years, that doesn't just affect the arts. It affects local sports and investigative journalism. I don't want us to get into this point that ‘the arts don't matter’. I think it's the media that matter. And the media has something of a crisis on it on its hands,” he said. 

Online outlets to the rescue?  

“I just want to acknowledge Newsroom and the very few other news outlets that still consider books worthy of critical attention. Books have become a niche subject - which is sad,” Rachael King said after she won the Voyager Media Award for best reviewing recently.  

The media space for criticism of other stuff has shrunk too. 

Wellington-based music critic Simon Sweetman publishes most of stuff these days on the online subscription service Substack - with this note: “I used to write reviews of gigs for the newspaper. But they don't do that anymore.”

Online outlets  - such as Newsroom.co.nz - have revived some of the serious journalism the shrunken mainstream and legacy publishers have struggled to sustain in recent years. Dedicated writers like Amery have found ways to keep going.

King’s runner up at the Voyager Awards was Newsroom’s literary editor Steve Braunias. a stalwart of arts and culture commentary for decades. 

“Newsroom is a great example where Steve Braunias has run a really great area there for the literary community. The Spinoff has done really, really great work. And then we have a raft of amazing online platforms like Pantograph Punch,” Amery said. 

“Senior arts reviewers have set up platforms in the last 10 years that run on the smell of an oily rag,” he said. 

He highlights John Smythe theatreview.org.nz and theatrescenes.co.nz, edited by younger critic James Wenley. Listener music columnist Graham Reid also runs his excellent solo Elsewhere.co.nz music review platform. John Hurrell’s visual arts site Eyecontactmagazine.com. 

“The resilience is remarkable, the contribution immense. It is to be celebrated,” Amery said recently in The Post. 

But the longevity and sustained productivity of long-term strivers like himself and Braunias also highlights an urgent problem for Amery. 

“In the majority criticism remains the editorial preserve of older Pākehā men” like himself, he said in The Post.  

“They battle on - like Steve Braunias does - to bring non-aging, white voices through. But they do so without a lot of support. So ultimately, what we see is their byline many, many more times than anybody else’s,” Amery told Mediawatch. 

To try to broaden the range of voices, he commissioned a piece from someone new and “less like me“ for every piece he wrote himself for The Post since 2020. 

“You kind of get sick of the sound of your own voice. I'm passionate about the arts. I'm passionate about the way it does bring a diversity of different voices and I'm passionate about the media and the way it does it. But why is it the male voices that seem to be so prodigious?’ he asks. 

“The Visibility Matters report shows us that there is a huge number of women writing in the media, about the arts. But when you look at actually how much content is being created, it's guys like myself who are pushing out the content all the time, who feel comfortable in taking up the space. They've been well-meaning and they are pushing for the arts. But I think we need to acknowledge that,” Amery told Mediawatch. 

Criticism itself out of time? 

While Amery wants “a determined investment in a more diverse culture of reviewing” he also conceded in a recent column that “even the word criticism now sounds anachronistic”.

“The growth of a social digital culture has not seen an increase in informed constructive criticism, honest and generous, or a mature culture of citizen debate,” he wrote in The Post. 

Why not? 

“I thought oh we were going to have we're gonna have interesting quick  hot takes (on social media). But generally, the hot takes are positive or the opposite - just really ‘flaming’. And we don't get the thing in the middle,” he said.  

“There's an opportunity for the media to actually use the arts to bring in more critical voices, more conversation that involves all sorts of different people. I think people still love to hear a really robust, critical discussion about you know, whether the latest Taylor Swift album or the latest Troy Kingi album is not as good as the last one , or better, and why.” 

“Culture thrives on those kinds of conversations, but only through many voices. We're in what we call the ‘culture wars’ at the moment. There's a feeling that writers need to defend the artists that they represent, so that Māori writers need,  to a certain degree, to both promote and explain the work of their peers. But I think we need to still get to a place in a healthy culture where we can have many more of those voices that can both platform and critique,” Amery said. 

“I always had rules as a critic. First of all - be honest. If you come to the end a piece of writing and you haven't really said what you really feel, you've got a problem,” he said.  

“Be constructive. If there's something good in what you've seen, say it and be generous. I don't think people necessarily have those rules in their head when they're writing a tweet."