Bryan Townsend noted that Don Baton claimed over at City Journal taste in American classical music is a signaling cascade and that Alex Ross is upstream of everyone else, but that New York can be like Toronto, a city that is prized as the heart of cultural influence in the country. Whether or not it's actually the case, however, is debatable. After all, the death of New York has been a theme here and there. To pick just one example ...
New York's slow death as an arts scene due to gentrification is a journalistic trope, and yet at the same time art-washing is also a journalistic trope and also not without cause. Since Hyperallergic was so vigilant about defining and deploying the concept of artwashing in coverage of Boyle Heights I'll include a few links for your perusal.
Now why would I lead with all that before getting to Don Baton's case that we all need to move on from Alex Ross? Well, because if we're going to try to talk about Alex Ross and the influence of arts writers at The New Yorker it doesn't hurt to introduce caveats to the whole project by asking how firm the foundation is for the rest of the world (and even the rest of the United States) caring about what taste-makers in New York are saying. I hated Nirvana when they first became popular and I still hate the band. Most of the Seattle grunge era sound aggravates me. I grant an exemption to Soundgarden but that's about it. Even a Seattleite can note like the Seattle sounds, and by extension, just because Alex Ross says X doesn't mean everyone else has to follow suit. That is, of course, what Don Baton has argued ...
