By Chris Jones
Tribune arts critic
Published May 29, 2005
Last week was a lousy one for critics, especially those of the insecure variety.
On May 22, the Los Angeles Times published a lengthy and painfully resonant article declaring that critics have lost all their clout — reduced to the compost of irrelevance by an unstoppable combination of declining newspapers, diminishing literacy, peripatetic blogs, gonzo marketing, ubiquitous user reviews and the critics’ own hapless elitism.
This billet-doux was penned in honor of this weekend’s historic joint Los Angeles conference of critics from several arts disciplines. If critics weren’t already depressed in their rare unity, they sure were by the time they arrived to the news of their own imminent demise.
For arts critics, there was more doom and gloom to come.
On Monday, the board of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University — a rare group that probed, advocated and generally cared about the field of cultural reporting and criticism — announced that it was closing its doors, due to the expiration of a pivotal grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
“In this field, we are in preservation mode,” said Michael Janeway, who ran the program for years. “And that makes it hard to attract new funding.”
Celebrity focus
On Monday afternoon, Time and Newsweek magazines arrived in a mailbox. These two newsweeklies once were fonts of serious arts criticism. But both current issues are woefully bereft of examples of the art, preferring quick hits, zippy celebrity interviews, gossip, dialogues with artists and the pseudo-democratic like. It is the TV and Hollywood actors — and their fans and press agents — who control the shots on these lifestyle-driven pages, not the poor schlub trying to put them in some kind of broad cultural context.
Need unequivocal empirical evidence of the decline of arts criticism? Look only to your coffee table. Janeway calls it “the entertainment imperative pushing against the arts imperative.”
The critic’s antagonists are multiple. Penny-pinching publishers. Readers with short attention spans and diminishing interest in serious cultural criticism. Obfuscating TV networks and Hollywood studios. Actors with short fuses and long tentacles of clout. Society’s growing segmentation. The celebration of the multiple voice instead of the lone, powerful voice. Web-based reviews of everything from hotels to books.
In these you-be-the-critic days, you can actually read numerous, widely divergent “guest reviews” of Target’s Adagio Seating Collection of patio furniture. On Target’s own Web site — complete with star ratings raging from one (“not even funny”) to five (“high style at a low price”).
Professional critics? Who needs ’em?
As a breed, the creatures aren’t even especially sympathetic — what with their arrogant pronouncements from the cultural mountaintop, their oft-imperious attitudes, vindictive streaks, transparent external agendas, self-serving rhetoric, biases of race and gender, irritating tendency to try and be clever.
Stars have learned that they can control their own agendas, if they push hard enough. Why else does Britney Spears want a reality-TV show? She wants to control her own narrative, rather than sit around reading other people’s reviews of her life and art. It’s a futile exercise — even critics have critics who, in turn, have their own critics — but who can blame her for trying?
To a great many artists, the emasculation of the critic is something to be cheered.
At a recent panel at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Timothy Shields, the managing director of the Arena Stage in Washington, told attendees that regional theaters should concentrate on “reducing the influence” of the local critic. This could be done, he implied, by creating a community of audience members and subscribers who trusted their arts organization — and each other — so much that the view of “that one guy” would mean little or nothing to them. This, Shields said, was the only way a theater could create a climate conducive to artistic risk-taking.
Rise up and marginalize the critic! Take back the art!
In many ways, that’s a very healthy idea — contrary to popular opinion, most critics don’t crave exclusivity. But user reviews are just that — user reviews.
Excellent criticism involves contextualizing. People don’t need only to know if “Desperate Housewives” is worth watching — they need to know what it means, what the show says about America at this precise moment in time. There’s no diminishment in the public appetite for explanation — the cultural world out there only gets ever more bewildering.
Actually, the death of the critic is greatly exaggerated — there still are publications that showcase reviews and readers who seek them out, read them, think about them and even act upon them.
Cultural changes
And to a large extent, the decline of the critic is a consequence of external cultural changes that have little or nothing to do with criticism — a classical-musical critic, after all, is only as powerful as the art he or she writes about. And if fewer people read a daily newspaper, then, inherently, fewer people read serious criticism.
Some argue that these things are cyclical.
“There’s so much clatter out there now,” says Sig Gissler, a Columbia University faculty member and the former editor of the Milwaukee Journal, “that informed criticism can only rise to the top. Eventually, quality counts and wisdom prevails.”
Wisdom includes a lack of conflict of interest.
After all, Target reserves the right to remove one of those seemingly free-spirited furniture reviews if it so desires, whereas any newspaper worth its salt doesn’t give studios or networks or theaters the right to veto its reviews. Smart readers know that.
Go to Tripadvisor.com, key in the name of a New York hotel, and you’ll be confronted by several deeply opposing reviews, with no means whatsoever to judge the integrity or agenda of the writer. Professional critics might be devils, but at least they’re known devils who aren’t on the payroll of the place they’re judging.
But it is dangerous to be defensive — there’s no question that the critics’ lot has changed for good. Critics now have less power. To the degree that flows from the marginalization of serious cultural inquiry — and it surely does — that fact is to be mourned and fought back against. But to the degree it flows from the empowerment of the audience, reader or listener, it is to be cheered.
Critics do not dispense absolutist verdicts anymore. They merely start — or, more often, join — an ongoing conversation. Probably an online conversation with multiple sites and strands. The critic’s once-potent influence is mitigated by the new ease with which contrary and competing opinions can be posted and probed and acted upon. As any critic will tell you, any temporary arrogance can be washed away with an hour spent on a bulletin board watching oneself be pilloried and abused. Or — perhaps worse — ignored entirely.
Critics will never again be imperious creatures — except, perhaps, in their own minds and prose. These days, they have to swim in a sea of constant feedback and dizzying competition.
We don’t matter much anymore. And that might just make us all better critics.
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cjones5@tribune.com