Christopher Knight To Deborah Solomon: "Get Away From Me!"
Last week's New York Press cover story about New York Times reporter Deborah Solomon's perhaps less-than-ethical methods reminded some of her other subjects of their own negative experiences with the Q&A queen. Particularly irate was one Christopher Knight, longtime Los Angeles Times art critic and 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Knight sent a fury-laced letter to the Press this week in which he tells us that the last time he saw Solomon, he actually yelled "Get away from me!" at her.
Why, you ask? Back in the day, Solomon interviewed Knight for a Times Magazine story on Los Angeles art schools. "Having been a journalist (at that time) for almost two decades, I also did my homework," Knight writes. "I prepared a couple of quotable quotes on the subject, which might encapsulate larger ideas." One of Knight's pearls of wisdom, "Modern art began as an assault on the academy, but post-modern art might be described as a return to the academy," excited Solomon so much that, according to Knight, she printed it as her own observation in her final piece, which bore no mention of the Knight interview.
In the final story, a seriously bitter Knight writes, "It was not a quote; my words had become her words. They were used to introduce her observations on the relevant history of the G.I. Bill. Our interview was not mentioned in the 3,500-word piece. (Frankly, the omission had its benefits since her story was awful)." Ouch.