digital emunction

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:

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