Artist PR / MR strategy into the Social Media Age vs. Take the Power Back

The power structure of artist to PR / media relations to traditional journalism-and-other gatekeepers—to the public—remains. L.A. Roka dips back into history, flies into the present, and wants artists-and-educators to collectively get serious, train up, and Take the power back.

L.A. Roka
ADP magazine 2(1): In between | Published 06 February 2010

Looking back into history, when it came to journalism and public relations, the late American composer Virgil Thomson worked both sides of the aisle better than any other creative artist of his generation. In 1940, at the lowest point of his career, the expatriate left occupied France and settled uncertainly into his new post as chief music critic at the New York Herald Tribune.

Fourteen years later, Peggy Glanville Hicks, a young Australian composer hoping to boost her own musical career, wanted Thomson’s recommendation for the post he was about to vacate at the newspaper. In 1954, she half-jokingly told him that being chief music critic at an influential newspaper would undoubtedly bring more attention to her compositions.

Thomson was reported to have looked her in the eye and said, “Baby! I’ve sucked that lemon dry.” Thomson was no fool. His newspaper tenure paid off handsomely, which happened to include a 1949 Pulitzer Prize for the musical score to a major Hollywood film (Louisana Story).

So here we have an example of an artist, who also happened to be a journalist-critic, which facilitated a certain networking and public relations role. Within our specialisms, idealistic independence across "roles" for most of us isn’t practical, just for the top handful of elites. So why are we essentially taught these frameworks as part of our supposed professional training in academia? These frameworks don’t even function effectively in larger sectors like business and government. Hell, who are we kidding after watching the nightly news: we’ve seen instances of legalized corruption via political lobbying for years, and a continued (often hopeless) struggle for reform. Being practical means not only training up the critical media brain, but also accepting the non-exclusive dynamics of production and communications across the arts.

Back to Thomson, he is reported to have done little to change the game for those under the radar or underground. A great composer, Steve Reich, who innovated sampling, received no mention in the pinnacle book Virgil Thomson written by uh, Virgil Thomson himself, published during those glorious avant-garde rebellious days of the 1960s.

Thomson claimed to have his finger on every pulse of the anti-Establishment musical underground movement. He claimed to include the publicized—and the “invisible”. But he missed Reich who has profoundly influenced a string of important artists to this day. But having said this, the combination of PR, journalism and art appears to have served Thomson well, and he did end up publicizing a number of artists. But Reich was left out in the cold, maybe like you, or an artist you know, one that you support, or aim to be. Fortunately through time however Reich’s work was more widely disseminated—and was not "lost"; he gained acclaim with a sped-up version of the Van Gogh suffer-for-art-into-death model.

But more than half a century later, the media environment has changed little since Thomson’s days, making artists dependent—and even subservient—to sector-specific media decision-makers. In fact, from a media coverage perspective, there are two basic artist camps—the well-fed media darlings, simultaneously revered and scorned, and the alley cats scrambling to nibble at scraps—across a continuum.

But instead of futilely complaining about others in the dissemination chain, who quite rightly have their own interests and agendas of tastes and aesthetics, artists of all stripes would do well to acknowledge these media fundamentals, train up, build on them—and take the whole game seriously.