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Nigerian Arts Journalism: Travelling with the legacy of Ben Tomoloju
(Vanguard online)

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Afam Akeh, a former Literary Review Editor of the Daily Times, packaged this piece to mark Ben Tomoloju’s 50th birthday. He is currently based in the United Kingdom

TRAVELLING with the legacy of good practice as demonstrated for Nigerian arts journalism by Tomoloju, involves being chastened and changed by the criticism of others when these are applicable. Critical perspectives on arts journalism have ranged from the concern with misrepresentations and misreporting by arts journalists, the daily life of errors for which all of journalism is justly criticised, to charges of under-reporting or non-representation from critics promoting particular interests, ideas or products in the arts.

I will be concerned here mostly with a third category of criticisms, usually from creative artists, culture experts and academics who decry the level of expertise or competence demonstrated in media reviews and reports by arts journalists and other contributors without specialist training in the particular arts featured in their writing.

Art historian Ola Oloidi’s vigorous and fairly pessimistic valuation of media reporting and commentary on Art is historically relevant to discourse on arts journalism practice in Nigeria. Oloidi’s criticism in The Guardian, January 9 and January 19, 1989, found a respondent in a more pragmatic Toyin Akinosho (The Guardian, January 29, 1989).

Visual arts community

Another art scholar, Chika Okeke, would carry forward this concern of the visual arts community with Nigerian journalism’s low competence in the reporting and assessment of Art. Okeke’’s article, ‘‘Towards Better Art Criticism" in the Daily Times, July 27, 1991, was mostly concerned with offering useful ideas to arts journalists on how to improve what he agreed was a beneficial increase in Nigerian media attention to the visual arts.Chika Okeke’s suggested three routes to a profitable engagement with Art by Nigerian arts journalists are still relevant today for application in the local practice.

First, he suggests "A knowledge of the techniques and processes involved in the making of the various art forms", which may be "acquired through reading related literature". What is required here is not an elaborate study, just "a basic knowledge... to heighten the appreciative capacity and analytical precision of the reviewer".

Secondly, arts journalists without formal training in Art might be

assisted in their media commentary on Art if they got "themselves acquainted with practising artists and theorists", not so much aimed at potentially compromising personal friendships with the artists but at gaining an insight on "the peculiarities of the individual artist’s style and, or, that of their schools..." In Okeke’s view, this kind of diligent journalist gains the advantage of "becoming conversant with the subliminal elements involved in the creation of Art".

Finally, the art critic suggests, art reporters, reviewers and critics in journalism "must show a genuine interest in Art and related subjects for it is only by such means that they can invariably become "informed" enough to discuss and even pass critical judgements on works of art". I will add to Chika Okeke’s worthy recommendations only the counsel that the Nigerian visual arts community itself, especially teachers of Art, will need to become more media savvy, providing more reviews, interviews and commentary, of the kind Okeke has supplied, to arts pages and programmes. Relationship is bi-directional, mostly is. It is important that those artists or art scholars who can write or assist programming for arts journalism offer the time and undertake the tutorials required to do so. The literary community does, and the visual arts community can equally become less dependent on publicists and promotional material in their dealings with arts journalists. The literary community, it must be conceded, has the obvious newspaper advantage of training and enabling more eager writers than the visual arts community.

Certain kinds of critics, however, demand more of media reviews than they are designed or able to offer and we will consider a representative voice from this category of literary journalism critics. It is again to the literary academy but to a foreign field we must now go for this last example of critical perspectives on arts journalism. Marjorie Perloff, the distinguished theorist and critic of post-modern poetry was also one of the more formidable heralds of avant-garde poetics. I am concerned here with her essay, "What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk About Poetry: Some Aporias of Literary Journalism", initially published in PN Review 115, May-June 1997, then collected in Poetry On & Off the Page:

Essays for Emergent Occasions, Avant-garde & Modernism Studies, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1998. "What We Don’t Talk about" takes a historical swipe at the perceived sins of editorial and reviewer incompetence and snobbery in the literary or arts media treatment of avant-garde poetry and poetics.

Perloff is vigorous and in her

assault on such writers and literary media she considered to have been intellectually indolent or in scandalous denial in their treatment of work from post-modern poets, art-poets and other experimental and constructivist poets.

Contemporary poetics

The poet Glyn Maxwell is censored for his joined review of eight books on contemporary poetics in The Times Literary Supplement of January 29, 1993. Other reviewers and even the editorial policies of such eminent literary reviews as the TLS, the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review are all challenged for the reasons earlier indicated. Notice that Marjorie Perloff’’s usage of choice is ‘literary journalism’ not 'arts journalism’. This again points at the jolly confusion in choice of names already considered at the beginning of this discourse. Though her essay is specifically targeted at media reviewers of writing and the published word, which explains her use of ‘literary journalism’, she is also focusing on poetry as an art form and a cultural phenomenon.

It might just have been as appropriate to use the less contentious, though more general, ‘arts journalism’. Perloff's criticism has its detailed exegetical focus and can only partly be pressed into service for our purpose to the extent that is permitted by the omnibus nature of this essay and the medium of its intended initial publication - a Nigerian newspaper. This fact, which informs the writing of this essay, namely, awareness of its intended initial use in a non-academic medium, hence the imposition of limitations in the choice of register and use of abstractions and references, is probably the best media response to one of Perloff’s difficulties with media criticism.

She was rightly concerned with matters of scholarship, rigour and expertise in media reviews of poetry, which she considered impressionistic and facile, but her criticism is, in parts, marred by rhetoric. Her polemical stance failed to accommodate the fact that in newspaper reviews, information and communication take precedence over matters of rigour for which an academic journal is better suited.

Depending on the mass medium, there may also be space or time constraints. Perloff: "A sense of history and a sense of theory, these are the twin poles of criticism missing in the typical poetry review". Of the early reviewers in the New York Times Book Review, she offers this judgement: "The reviewers tended to be themselves minor poets or...professional journalists. Certainly there was no precedent for asking a poetry specialist (e.g., an academic critic or theorist) to review these books. For poetry - and this bias is still with us - had come to be considered a category of writing to which the usual questions of expertise did not apply". Perloff wrote her essay in 1997. Since then there have been some changes, for better and worse, but her concerns are relevant to this discourse because they remain the concerns of many academic critics of arts journalism.

Ignorance, whether of history or theory, is inexcusable in any kind of criticism, even in media reviews, as has been noted with the comments of Chika Okeke on Nigerian media Art criticism, but undue emphasis on academic rigour, obscure forms and esoteric information can hinder the primary concern of journalism "to inform, to educate and to entertain" its varied and mostly non-specialist public. This is true even with the knowledge that Perloff was primarily concerned with a more literate and literary public than the Nigerian public. Even for a self-confessed special interest journal like The Times Literary Supplement, the editorial interest is for reviews that can be accessed by all or most of its readers who cannot be experts on all subjects.

Though often empowered with some specialist information, criticism in mass circulating reviews like the TLS or the London Review of Books is intended not necessarily for the specialist academic reader but for the well read and informed who can only take so much abstract, technical or theoretical information from subjects they are not trained and experienced experts of. Perloff’s other concern was with the process of journalistic canonization by which repeated media prominence may be accorded some creative artists, or schools and generations of creative artists, while others, in this case avant-garde others, are mostly ignored.

Perloff was concerned that contrary to evidence of a

growing movement of constructivist and other experimental poets and their publications or productions, and not minding their acceptance by the academic community, media reviewers had continued to demonstrate ignorance or a conspiratorial silence regarding the new poetry.

She is in no doubt about the reason for this: "The poetry review (one poet reviewing another) comes directly or indirectly, out of the poetry workshop (or, for that matter, the creative workshop in general) is still dominated by a regressively romantic concept of the poet as a man speaking to men (or woman speaking to women - the principle is the same), by the notion that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity, the poet speaking for all of us - only more sensitively, perceptively, and expertly". Aspects of Perloff’s critical comments in ‘What We Don’t Talk about’ provide opportunity for a discourse on good practice as it relates to literary or arts reviews in Nigerian journalism.

Literary reviews, even in newspaper arts pages, have become better informed on avant-garde poetics since 1997 when Perloff’s critical comments were made but preference for ‘‘made’’ or constructed poetry remains a specialist pre-occupation. Much of it is still about the future, about new ways of imagining and rendering poetry. Every kind of futurism or experimentation struggles to become a focus of the popular imagination and it is arts journalism’s responsibility to provide its public with such important cultural information, including information on new movements, generations and schools, or other similar historically important novelties of cultural experience.

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