National Arts Journalism Program
2950 Broadway, Mail Code 7200
New York, NY 10027
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tel: 212.854.1912, fax: 212.854.8129
email: najp@columbia.edu
NEWS ITEM

The Trans-Atlantic Trap:
Arts Journalism in the U.S. and Europe

Tuesday, April 12
6-8 p.m.

Lecture Hall, School of Journalism
Columbia University
Admission free, RSVP required (contact: alc60@columbia.edu)

ARTS COVERAGE IN THE AMERICAN PRESS is calendar-driven, review-heavy, context-shy and happy-faced. European arts journalism, on the other extreme, is theory-laden, over-long, clubby and combative. Of course, these are stereotypical views on both sides, but they persist -- with some justification. To explore what's really going on, journalists and artists from both sides of the Atlantic seek answers to such questions as:

 What real differences exist between arts journalism in the U.S. and Europe? What about the rest of the world?
 How do critics and artists view each other here and there?
 How did Europe and America evolve historically in media coverage of the arts?
 What can we learn from each other?
 Is the “American model” flooding European journalism? For good or ill?
 Is there transmigration of ideas now? If not, should there be?
 Do differences in journalistic ethics, or publishing models, play a role?

The expert panel includes:

Jane Kramer (moderator), who has written The New Yorker's Letter from Europe for more than 20 years. She has written nine books, among them The Last Cowboy, Europeans, and The Politics of Memory, and has been the recipient of many awards, including a National Book Award. She divides her time between Paris and New York.

Hector Feliciano spent 20 years in Paris as a cultural writer for the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Now he is a NewYork-based cultural writer for El Pais (Spain) and Clarin (Argentina). Feliciano is the author of The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art.

Margo Jefferson is an arts writer and critic for the New York Times, where she has been on staff since 1993. She won a 1995 Pulitzer for criticism. She has been an associate editor of Newsweek and a contributor to The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice, Harper's, Alt (Denmark) and NRC Handelsblad (Netherlands). She is working on a book about Michael Jackson.

Jordan Mejias is the United States cultural correspondent of the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (F.A.Z.). He has lived in New York City since 1974. He is the author of the recently published collection of his German writings under the title Amerika: Ein Porträt in Porträts.

James Wood, a British-born literary critic, is a senior editor of The New Republic. His books include The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, and The Book Against God, a novel. He also contributes to The New Yorker and The London Review of Books.

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