an especially beloved critic going to town on someone

is this? [archived]
posted by HearHere at 1:02 AM on September 18 [2 favorites]

Yes, the article itself links to that piece.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:41 AM on September 18 [1 favorite]

my liege
posted by HearHere at 3:51 AM on September 18 [1 favorite]

That's a good post title
posted by one for the books at 8:19 AM on September 18 [2 favorites]

Thanks for posting, this has some excellent points. From the post link:
¡°I¡¯m all for expanding our forms of criticism ¡ª the podcast with Alex Schwartz, Vinson Cunningham, and Naomi Fry is the latest evidence of that ¡ª but I¡¯d never give it up,¡± said editor David Remnick of written criticism, even if it doesn¡¯t bring in as many clicks as, say, an investigative feature. ¡°Editing according to traffic is not editing; it¡¯s engineering,¡± (bold and italics mine)
From the piece mentioned (and linked by HearHere) on social justice versus political justice:
One of the principal goals of the protests of 2020 was therefore to seize the means of expression: protesters were not exercising their right to speak freely so much as they were trying to amass a form of social influence that could meaningfully compete at a national level. In other words, they were starting a newspaper; what Williams hates is that people started reading it.
The fact is that telling a voiceless person they have free speech is like telling a poor person they have freedom of money: Nice work if you can get it!
posted by winesong at 8:30 AM on September 18 [6 favorites]

I wonder how much of this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most theater reviews I've read recently, for example, have just been whether or not the reviewer liked it with absolutely no interrogation as to what the piece was intending to do and/or whether or not it did so successfully. I suspect this comes from a crop of critics - and audiences - boiling in the milieu of being asked immediately to assign a number of stars to every single thing they ever touch online.
posted by bookwo3107 at 10:19 AM on September 18 [5 favorites]

When I was in my twenties, I worked for six years as the performing arts editor and theater critic for an alternative newsweekly. I fell into the job when the previous critic quit because my editor knew I could write and knew I had done some acting and figured that was probably all the gig required. It wasn't; I spent the first two years repeatedly embarrassing myself with naive or simplistic or needlessly cruel reviews. But seeing and writing about 75 performances a year is a great way to educate yourself, and before long I had decent understanding of the theater community in my city and the national theatrical scene, and I knew what I liked and what made for good theater and how to tell when something was good even if it didn't cater to me.

At the time, my small market had three people writing about theater for newspapers on a weekly basis, plus a solid collection of freelancers and bloggers. Today none of the newspapers regularly publish any kind of performing arts criticism. We have a really good online arts magazine, but they struggle to keep up. Most shows don't get so much as a calendar listing.

I knew, when it was my job to write about theater, that I didn't have a whole lot of readers. It isn't very popular art form. But I got enough angry emails (and occasional positive notes) to know that there were some people out there who thought what I wrote mattered.

A high point of my critical career was attending a fellowship in Los Angeles put on by the NEA and USC. A couple dozen arts journalists from all across the country, from markets as big as New York and as small as Monterey, were flown to LA during the Hollywood Fringe and a major international arts festival to spend 10 days attending performances, writing, and learning from performers, producers, and critics (including Michael Phillips, who recently took a buyout at the Chicago Tribune). It was a wonderful education, and connected me to a national network of critics. It must have been tremendously expensive; after that year, the NEA ended the program.

I've continued to write theater criticism and restaurant reviews in the years since, but these days there's just about nowhere to publish. The disappearance of local arts criticism has been really hard on artists and presenters. Reviews bring people to your show and help you get grants. If the critic is really good, they might help you think about your art differently. Now that we don't even have a decently comprehensive performing arts calendar, audiences are on their own to figure out what's playing and where and whether it's worth spending $60 or more to see. Even a negative review tells people you're doing something. Without critics, how do you even know what's going on?

There were obvious downsides to the old way of doing things, when a bunch of white guys were gatekeepers to commercial success in the arts. But the democratization of reviewing and the disappearance of the professional critic has created a context in which it's really hard to know if anything is any good before you try it out. Every restaurant is rated 4.5 stars. Every movie is 80% fresh. Every show has a flashy poster and closes after two weeks.

I don't really care whether the Times employs any critics at all. But local art communities need someone to cover them, or else they whither. I know of all the challenges facing local theaters this is far from the greatest, but still--criticism matters!
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 12:09 PM on September 18 [9 favorites]

The disappearance of local arts criticism has been really hard on artists and presenters. Reviews bring people to your show and help you get grants.

For just about a decade here in NYC, there was a web site called nytheatre.com. It actually started in the late 90s as the personal blog of a New Jersey accountant who loved theater, and got frustrated that none of the other places were covering off-off-Broadway shows, so he just started doing that himself. Then he got to know several of the people behind the Indie theater scene, got even more into it, and finally launched the web site, enlisting a whole lot of us from the theater community (myself included, for a spell) to serve as volunteer critics.

He made it an especial mission to write reviews for each and every one of the shows in each year's Fringe Festival, for precisely that reason. Artists and theater groups were coming from around the globe to appear in our festival, but only a scant handful got any press in any of the other media, and the local artists had all impressed on him how this was a huge hindrance to the companies who'd been overlooked. Plus - he said he just felt so bad for, like, a Nigerian dance troupe who'd scraped together the money to come all the way to New York for a performance and then went home without any press to show for it.

Things started fizzling when the NYC Fringe did, and finally he folded up shop. There's a bit more attention paid to off-off-Broadway by now, but not much.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:43 PM on September 18 [6 favorites]

Just the one swan, actually: "Now that we don't even have a decently comprehensive performing arts calendar"

I am in Minnesota and we have the same problem. There are several different sources that are trying but none of them cover everything. I have a lot of ideas on their user interfaces, and this would certainly be my pet project if I won the lottery.
posted by soelo at 1:24 PM on September 18 [2 favorites]

Goldstein added, ¡°If the publications step away from this core element of taste-making and gatekeeping, they¡¯re ceding a lot of their power.¡±

There are real problems with the decline of criticism but we should not lose sight of the fact that much of the edifice of Criticism was erected with CIA and USAID money to propagate a rather circumscribed, capitalist-friendly, point of view. We can't allow ourselves to be too surprised that the intellectual high-wire act is discarded when it's no longer needed.
posted by dmh at 2:44 PM on September 18

much of the edifice of Criticism was erected with CIA and USAID money

Please expand on this, very interested. My personal knowledge is in film criticism which at least in part arose organically with the medium (which paralleled the growth of the newspaper) but I¡¯d love to know how it was shaped by political influence through the 20th century.
posted by q*ben at 4:00 PM on September 18

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