The com­plete absence of coun­try music on the whiplash­ing summer-​music chart New York put together last week is even less sur­pris­ing than the New York Times’s sim­i­lar sin of omis­sion a few weeks ago. And yet if New York is really, as I sug­gested to a friend the other day, the People mag­a­zine for people like us, you’d think they might try to imag­ine an “us” with a little less con­stricted sense of what counts as summer sonic fun.

There’s some­thing to Jane Dark’s sug­ges­tion that these blind spots are all about class, but I don’t know if that fully explains it. I mean, hell, in every respect save dis­pos­able income and zip code, I’m at the demo­graphic heart of the class their ads are gun­ning for, right down to Dr. Hakimi’s Art of Oral Har­mony. But there I go again, lis­ten­ing to—and, shh, even liking!–coun­try music.

Not that I’m too wor­ried; we all, some­how, find our own ways to sur­vive the dik­tats of glossy-​magazine taste. But still you have to wonder what it’s going to take to make coun­try music safe for the archi­tects of medi­ated cool, when even the high-​profile defec­tions of Jack White, Robert Plant, Jewel, Jes­sica Simp­son, and Jon Bon Jovi couldn’t do it.

You have to wonder, that is, until it hits you: Hootie!

Darius Rucker will save us all.

Willem de Kooning’s Woman I (1950-1952), at MoMA.
(Photo: The Willem de Koon­ing Foundation/Artists Rights Soci­ety (ARS), New York)

Some­thing must be in the water: now New York mag­a­zine has run an arti­cle by Jerry Saltz on gender in the art world. The num­bers there look even worse than they do for poetry. Saltz counts 400 works of art on dis­play on the fourth and fifth floors of MoMA, where the museum dis­plays art from its per­ma­nent col­lec­tion of paint­ing and sculp­ture. Of these, four­teen are by women, or 3.5%. Count­ing artists rather than art­works, Saltz comes up with 11 out of 137, or 8%. (The dates of those pieces run from 1879 to 1969, an obvi­ously impor­tant factor that Saltz doesn’t take enough account of, though see below for some­one who does.)

Here are more stats from the article’s sidebar: