16 replies to this topic

[dirac]

aurora, on 22 May 2012 - 07:01 PM, said:

dirac, on 22 May 2012 - 09:52 AM, said:

No doubt you can argue that Gelb is within his rights but clubbing critics for delivering news you don't want to hear seems mistaken from pretty much any standpoint.

As its been resolved maybe its too late, but there was something in the wording of this that I found interesting.
Above you called this "delivering news you don't want to hear." I would call reviews--both bad and good--opinion. not news. There is a difference and the fact that people don't seem to recognize that is maybe why the MET opera originally wanted to quash the unstintingly negative reviews...

Hi, aurora. I didn't mean "news" literally. What I meant was that the Opera News writers were telling Gelb something he did not want to hear. A good way for Gelb to defend his productions would have been to respond in kind - in the pages of Opera News -- not by attempting to bigfoot the help. Putting a lid on the magazine wasn't going to stop the critical voices, which are coming from elsewhere as well, and Opera News isn't merely a handout for donors. This was just a boneheaded play from Gelb, as he's belatedly figured out, and makes one wonder how much "Up to a point, Lord Copper," stuff he's hearing around the office these days.

[SandyMcKean]

My guess is that Gelb got exactly what he wanted out of this entire sequence of events!

P.S. And I still think words like: "dispirited, pretentious, woefully misguided, misdirected, foisted" needed to be reined in.  Such words may be "critical", but don't raise to the level of "critical review" in my book.