Art of Criticism

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The problem, at least for artists and arts organizations, is that as consumers we spread out our money and time more than ever before. These changes are having profound effects on the core business models of arts organizations today.

In his discussion at the NEA institute, Michael Ritchie, of Center Theatre Group, predicted that “ticket subscriptions are going to die.” This from a man whose three L.A. theaters enjoy a combined annual subscription base of more than 63,000 people.

“Our culture is shifting,” Ritchie continued. “I mean, come on – do you know where you’re going to be, or what you’re going to be in the mood to do, on January 30th at 7 o’clock in the evening next year?”

Think about that in a local context. On any given night in a town as small as Missoula, Montana, one can attend a gig by a rock band or a recital by a university student, see one of a dozen or more movies at a local theater, check out art shows at one of the many galleries and coffee shops, or – more often than not, anyway – take in a theatrical production. One can also immerse oneself in a video game, or check out videos of Oscar Peterson on YouTube, or bop down to the video store for the latest DVD.

The choices are dizzying. So how to choose?

Here we bump into another aspect of our modern era: the democratization of critical influence, and the changing role of criticism itself.

Gone are the days when a single, negative review in The New Yorker or The New York Times could doom a Broadway show. The newspaper critic’s old bully pulpit has been overrun by a thousand bloggers and millions of thumb-pecking texters, whose readers probably know and trust them more than they know and trust any newspaper reporter.

By the time we can read Roger Ebert’s latest movie review online, the film itself has already been swapped on pirate file-sharing networks, friend-linked on MySpace pages, and chatted up – or down – on Web sites like Epinions and Reddit. Those sites are, according to The Wall Street Journal, “giving rise to an obsessive subculture of ordinary but surprisingly influential people who, usually without pay and purely for the thrill of it, are trolling cyberspace for news and ideas to share with their network.”

Nobody knows this better than Doug McLennan, editor of artsjournal.com. Every day of the week, McLennan takes it upon himself to try to keep up with the arts news and criticism in some 200 American and British newspaper Web sites and arts blogs; he feeds the best of what he finds to thousands of e-mail subscribers and Web site visitors every morning.

Even he admits he can’t keep up with everything.

“The idea of how we individually relate to culture changes as we evolve into more and more niches,” said McLennan in a session at the NEA institute. “People are overwhelmed by all the options.

“The most important role a critic can serve today,” said McLennan, “is to survey the cultural landscape, navigate through it, and map it out for people.”

Criticism, by this model, is not so much about what is good and what is bad, what matters and what is just diversion. It is, instead, about pinpointing and articulating nexuses of social convergence in the cacophanous diaspora of the modern world. Every artistic product is potentially interesting to someone; it is the critic’s job to say to whom and why.

In this regard, McLennan thinks that most newspapers today have it all wrong. In the stampede to fill their arts and culture pages with celebrity gossip and mass-entertainment news and reviews, newspapers are “trying to always be interesting to everyone,” when what most people today need is “a place to turn to for information and perspective about the specific niches that interest them.”

Where do people turn for that information? Increasingly, they turn to places like MySpace.