I don't believe Weingarten got a Pulitzer for this. I still remember thinking how silly it is when I read it the first time. Weingarten set this up like an experiment—how much will you pay to hear a world-famous classical musician if you aren't told he's a world-famous classical musician?
But the experiment trades on a second variable, too, though Weingarten doesn't recognize it: How much would you pay, etc. etc., during your rush-hour commute as opposed to during your after-dinner hour in which you enjoy leisurely pursuits?
Why, nothing at all, because you're on your way to work, and you like to think about the coming day or you like to read the news, because you don't like art before you've had coffee, because you're running late, because you hate it when people are standing around obstructing your perfect route to the metro, because you don't like sounds in the morning, because if you had your dithers you'd just be back in bed not seeing or hearing anything. Mostly because you're on your way to work, though.
Meanwhile, Weingarten gets points for illustrating the notion that he failed to prove in print, i.e., that there's a little bit of fiction behind all things. Subtract the stunt, and this profile doesn't garner the attention that it did. I suppose that is an accomplishment but a journalism that considers the art itself first and foremost does not do so as "an experiment in context, perception and priorities."
UPDATE: Does this make me the grumpiest reader in America? I suppose so, but really, have any of you ever used the Metro? The Gallery Place transfer I used to have to make every morning for my commute would fill me with thoughts of murder. Even thinking about it on the walk to the Metro would make me irritable. I kept my head down and disregarded other riders as best as I was able and expected the same of everyone around me.
Weingarten and Bell find an unsuspecting, captive audience at their worst, and they respond by doing as obligations and circumstances would have them do. What did these guys think would happen?
Annie Leibovitz for Condé Nast, 2007–8.
A bewildering essay on Annie Leibovitz by Choire Sicha for the New York Observer. He says that in the 80s, editors at Rolling Stone, clutching stats in hand, pushed out design and photo talent in favor of covers that polled well with consumers and moved newsstand sales. "Then as magazines went, so went Annie Leibovitz," writes Sicha.
Then comes the more provocative thesis that as Leibovitz continued shooting the same people she was unable to strike gold twice. "There is Mikhail Baryshnikov on the beach in 1990—and then, in 2006, he is rappelling down or up a building, looking nothing so much like a Bruce Willis stand-in. And then again also as an incredibly old Peter Pan in one of the latest Disney campaigns."
But neither idea pairs with Sicha's stated thesis: that "An artist who was once fascinated with her subjects lately seems largely fascinated with herself." Granted, that's a dek line and editors write those, not writers. Nevertheless, the thesis is either that something changed about Leibovitz's work or something changed Leibovitz's work and by the end of the piece it isn't clear which Sicha believes.
In fact, I think there's no problem if you just refuse to take Leibovitz at her word when she says she was never a journalist. In fact, she was and still is. At one point her editors asked her to live among her subjects and produce provocative photographs getting to the bottom of them, whatever she thought that entailed, and that's what she did, reliably and at a fast clip. Now people ask her to lend her brand name to their pursuits, whether that's a Disney campaign or an editorial spread, and it doesn't matter whatsoever to anyone what she produces so long as her name's on the project and a beautiful face is in the frame. There's no overarching structural factor behind her professional decline unless you want to call Tina Brown an overarching structural factor, and I don't. It's really very simple: Annie Leibovitz used to be a great journalist, but now she's a hack.
Fema stages a bogus news conference, complete with agency employees posing as reporters, in order to promote the agency's handling of the wildfires in Southern California.
It's funny to me that the equivalent agency in Russia (Ministry of Extraordinary Situations) has an American-sounding acronym: Emercom. Fema, on the other hand, has a Slavic ring to it and is an agency from the Soviet Union.
