When we in the Dance Critics Association presented Sunil Kothari with our senior critic award in 2010, it was refreshing to hear him get down to brass tacks.
Kothari worked for the Times of India for 40 years. In the talk he gave at our annual conference, as well as in an interview published in the DCA newsletter, he declared unequivocally that dance coverage had vanished from newspapers in India because the “press lords” were not going to “allow” it to continue to be covered.
And that is something that needs to be recalled as we survey the cultural vacuum of our own “mainstream” commercial media here in the US. The decision to eviscerate cultural content—if it is even explained at all – is justified as bowing to some kind of inevitability, some kind of ukase laid down by a readership. It’s not. It’s based on a journalistic paradigm now dominated by clueless bean counters, editors who couldn’t care or know less about it, and culture-free moguls. And then they wonder why readership and ad content plummet.
Of course it is a vicious circle—the less presence culture has, the less awareness of it. Eventually people stop knowing what they’re missing, and the cultural institutions—we’re seeing that in dance—stop answering to any kind of accountability. And the more marginal something like dance becomes, the more the high-visibility media feels justified in ignoring it.
It’s a sad, sick situation, and absolutely unimaginable when I started writing about dance 30 years ago.