An editor tells the NY Times: I don’t read newspapers for the pictures

More mail coming our way on the contentious redesign of the NY Times arts section:
For Dean Baquet
Executive Editor

Dear Mr. Baquet.

While we have never met, I spent the last few decades at The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News, institutions that have also periodically redesigned themselves — and not always happily.

That said, your new arts section (actually boxed reviews were tried out during Paul Goldberger’s tenure) is particularly dimwitted in its old-fashioned notion that subscribers like me read papers for their pictures. Just now, I have stared at two stupid pictures of an idiotic game show. Wouldn’t one do? And why do I need two pictures of dancers in tights and little skirts — outfits worn by a lot of dancers actually. The gigantic illustration of the Coward playlet is wider than the stage at 59E59.

I’m not finished. What a day. Please study your mildly interesting story about preening academics tussling over a Beethoven manuscript. Now why did this need three illustrations?

Instead you might have squeezed in a review of an area of inquiry you almost completely ignore though it is the most important of topics in a time when so many of us walk around gob-smacked by the latest flabbergasting odes to money and power. Architecture.

Your arts section should reflect the city illuminating your name.

Please try again.

Manuela Hoelterhoff
Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and critic.
cc. Liz Spayd