Susanne Janssen

Cultural globalization and arts journalism: The international orientation of arts and culture coverage in Dutch, French, German, and U.S. newspapers, 1955 to 2005

This article charts key developments and cross-national variations in the coverage of foreign culture (i.e., classical and popular music, dance, film, literature, theater, television, and visual arts) in Dutch, French, German, and U.S. elite newspapers between 1955 and 2005. Such coverage signals the awareness of foreign culture among national elites and the degree and direction of “globalization from within.” Using content analysis, we examine the degree, direction, and diversity of the international orientation of arts journalism for each country and cultural genre. Results denote how international arts and culture coverage has increased in Europe but not in the United States. Moreover, the centrality of a country in the cultural “world-system” offers a better explanation for cross-national differences in international orientation than do other country-level characteristics, such as size and cultural policy framework. Recorded and performance-based genres differ markedly in their levels of internationalization, but the effect of other genre-level characteristics, such as language dependency and capital intensiveness, is not clear. In each country, international coverage remains concentrated on a few countries, of which the United States has become the most prominent. Although the global diversity of coverage has increased, non-Western countries are still underrepresented.

Reviewing as social practice: Institutional constraints on critics' attention for contemporary fiction☆

Abstract This article examines the activities of literary reviewers and the conditions under which they perform their task of judging recently published works of fiction. Reviewers and other members of the institution of criticism usually present their assessments as a highly personal matter, in which the intrinsic properties of the texts under consideration are focused on. To understand why this view is incorrect one must consider the choices and statements of reviewers in relation with the social environment in which they come about. Following a theoretical discussion of the institutional nature of critical choices and judgements, an empirical analysis is undertaken of the selection Dutch reviewers made from the supply of new fiction titles in the 1970s and 1990s. The findings show that reviewers tend to be on the safe side when dealing with recently published texts. In addition to the text itself, they take due note of extra-textual indicators of quality, such as the publishing house that marketed the title and, especially, the assessments of other critics. In doing so, they reduce the uncertainty as to which works deserve their attention. Hence, they reduce the risk of making the choices that might jeopardize their status as literary experts.

Change and Continuity in Newspaper Coverage of Popular Music since 1955: Evidence from the United States, France, Germany, and the Netherlands

In this article, we describe general features of popular music coverage in elite newspapers in the United States, France, Germany, and the Netherlands from 1955 to 2005. Drawing on data from content analysis of over 4,000 newspaper articles sampled in four reference years (1955, 1975, 1995, and 2005), we document broad changes and continuities in the extent, focus, and form of popular music coverage in mainstream media outlets of each country.

Popular music as cultural heritage: scoping out the field of practice.

This paper sets out to deepen our understanding of the relationship between popular music and cultural heritage and to delineate the practices of popular music as cultural heritage. The paper illustrates how the term has been mobilised by a variety of actors, from the public to the private sector, to highlight the value of particular popular music manifestations and justify or encourage their preservation and diffusion for posterity. We focus on Austria, England, France and the Netherlands – countries with diverse popular music histories and with varying national and international reach. Popular music heritage is present in national and local public sector heritage institutions and practices in a number of ways. These range from the preservation and exhibition of the material culture of heritage in museums and archives, to a variety of ‘bottom-up’ initiatives, delineating a rich landscape of emblematic places, valued for their attachment to particular musicians or music scenes. The paper points to an underlying tension between the adoption and replication of conventional heritage practices to the preservation and remembrance of the popular music and its celebration as an expression of the dynamism of contemporary popular culture.

Globalization and Ethnic Diversity in Western Newspaper Coverage of Literary Authors: Comparing Developments in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, 1955 to 2005

In contrast to most studies on cultural globalization, this article examines the dynamics of cross-cultural exchange between and within (Western) nation-states. Through content analysis, the authors study the extent and composition of newspaper coverage given to literary authors of non-Western ethnic origin—both foreign and domestic—in four nations across 50 years.The analysis reveals, among other things, that newspaper attention to ethnic minority authors appears related to various features of a nation’s ethnic minority population, the extent that a given national literary field is receptive to ethnic diversity, and the relative position of that nation in the literary world-system.

Cultural Mediators and Gatekeepers

markdownabstract__Abstract__ The shaping influence of cultural mediators, in particular their legitimizing power, has led cultural scholars to coin them ‘tastemakers,’ ‘gatekeepers,’ ‘surrogate consumers,’ ‘reputational entrepreneurs,’ or even ‘coproducers’ of the work of art. Yet, in practice, mediators perform highly different and often distinct activities according to their particular contributions in the (increasingly) vertically differentiated process of cultural production. This article discusses the various roles and activities of cultural mediators, followed by a review of the role and impact of critics and other mediators in the production and consumption of culture.

Arts Journalism And Its Packaging In France, Germany, The Netherlands And The United States, 1955–2005

In the second half of the twentieth century, the volume, content and appearance of arts journalism in Western daily newspapers have changed significantly in accordance with wider transformations in the arts and journalism. Previous studies have focused on (1) which culture receives attention, (2) the way culture gets attention, and (3) economic pressures underlying transformations. In this article we aim to bring these strands together by analyzing how changes in the packaging of arts journalism have evolved in relation to the cultural content which is discussed and the volume of (cultural) advertising that is featured in newspapers. We conduct a content analysis of the coverage given to both “highbrow” and “popular” art forms in French, German, Dutch and US elite newspapers for four sample years: 1955, 1975, 1995 and 2005. The results show that newspapers all seem to converge into a balance between news reporting and reviewing. We find evidence for an increased catering for the needs and interests of audiences in some aspects (e.g. more popular culture) but not in others (e.g. no more human interest). Finally, most newspapers show an increase in cultural advertising, although the European newspapers in our sample contain much less advertising than the American ones. A stronger presence of advertising is positively related to both a lifestyle orientation of newspapers and a focus on popular culture.

Institutional Recognition in the Transnational Literary Field, 1955–2005

Contributing to research on social processes of cultural de-hierarchization, this article explores how critical recognition in elite newspapers is related to the recognition that authors receive from other agents in the literary field in the past half-century. We distinguish four types of institutional recognition: (a) long-term recognition in literary encyclopedias, (b) short-term recognition through literary awards, (c) recognition through bestseller list success, and (d) recognition through the prestige of publishers. Our study uses a sample of articles from 1955, 1975, 1995 and 2005 in French, German, Dutch and US elite papers (N=2,419), as well as further information on the extent to which fiction book authors discussed in the newspaper sample received the above forms of institutional recognition. We conduct cluster analysis to inductively establish how these forms of recognition are related, and multinomial logistic regression analysis to predict membership of clusters. Throughout the period 1955–2005 we consistently find three author categories: the unrecognized, the contemporary prestigious, and the historical prestigious. Countries differ, however, in the extent to which these categories are represented in newspaper literary coverage. Our analysis of factors determining membership of these clusters points to the lasting importance of symbolic capital, but also to the transnational nature of institutional recognition as local and international recognition show highly similar patterns.

Popular music heritage, cultural memory and cultural identity

This issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies presents the first results of the European research project entitled ‘Popular music heritage, cultural memory, and cultural identity. Localised popular music histories and their significance for music audiences and music industries in Europe’, hereafter referred to with the acronym POPID. The three-year project, which started in 2010, was financed under the Humanities for the European Research Area (HERA) and set out to examine the increasing importance of popular music in contemporary renderings of cultural identity, and local and national cultural heritage, from a comparative perspective. To this end, the POPID brought together a team of internationally established academics in the fields of popular music studies, sociology of the arts, media research and cultural studies. The Erasmus Research Centre for Media, Communication and Culture at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University led the project, which included partners at the University of Liverpool, the University of Ljubljana and the University of Vienna.

Popular Music, Cultural Memory, and Heritage

The purpose of this special edition of Popular Music and Society is to bring together a series of articles from an international group of scholars who consider, in particular and locally specific ways, how popular music has become an object of memory and, in turn, a focus for contemporary renditions of history and cultural heritage. Popular music’s links to and evocation of the past have been evident for many years. Frith has highlighted popular music’s inherently nostalgic properties, a point reinforced by DeNora in her highly instructive work on the propensity of music both to link individuals with their past and to emotionally ground them in the present. In an everyday sense, the untimely deaths of rock and pop icons such as Elvis Presley, John Lennon, and Kurt Cobain have triggered mass mourning that forcibly demonstrates the extent to which such artists come to signify the complex interplay of generational identification and collective generational memory (Gregory and Gregory; Elliott; Strong). However, it is not just popular music artists themselves but rather the vast array of music-related objects, images, texts, and places that become inscribed with memory (Bennett and Rogers, “In Search,” “In the Scattered”) by music fans and members of specific music scenes. While the study of cultural consumption is well established (see, for example, Miller; Dant; Woodward) in the field of popular music studies, a focus on memory and heritage is less so given the dominant emphasis in scholarship on artists, texts, performance, media, and industry. There are some notable exceptions, such as Waksman’s highly innovative work on the electric guitar and Hayes’s study of vinyl records. Similarly, there is an emerging focus on technological artifacts of popular music history (see, for example, Shuker, Wax). However, the broader field of popular music’s material legacy, and its connections to cultural memory, remains largely unmapped. A similar, if slightly more dynamic, situation obtains in relation to the significance of popular music as contemporary cultural heritage. Certainly, particular regions and cities have for a long time created robust tourist and leisure industries around their popular music histories, a notable example here being Chicago, which is an