Art of Criticism

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“Social networking sites like MySpace are made up of people thinking about the role of the media the way that newspapers originally did: As a means to bring people together around the ideas and interests that define a particular community in a particular place at a particular time,” said McLennan. “The original genius of newspapers was to put together bits and pieces that reflected local people’s lives – a little bit about bridge, something about the ducks at the park and the car crash on the highway, some national news and so on. That’s the kind of thinking you find on MySpace and in the blogosphere.”

In this world of endless opportunity, people need – and seek out – critical perspective more than ever. Trouble is, most of what they get from newspapers is built on a faulty model.

Roger Ebert is one of the finest film critics in the business today. He is knowledgeable about film history, he is open-minded, he is articulate. He is also partly responsible for one of the worst trends in criticism today: the curse of the thumbs.

The bane of criticism in recent years has been the bandwagon trend toward pseudo-objective reviewing, toward replacing substance and discussion with stars (or thumbs). By attempting to give a subjective experience an objective rating, we not only shortchange the complexity of the aesthetic experience, but we grossly underestimate the diversity of our audience.

The fact is, one man’s star is another man’s splattered tomato. It is impossible to provide a consistent, one-size-fits-all gauge of good and bad, when different artistic experiences are designed for different audiences, in different places and times. Judging a work against the achievements and expectations of mass culture – or even of some nebulous nationwide subset of theater-goers or art-lovers – is a fool’s errand that serves no one, local readers least of all.

Theater and most other art forms are intensely local; they happen right in front of our eyes. The critic’s gauge of success must therefore be calibrated to that local context first and foremost. The critic must certainly know a good bit about the big picture – the history of the art form and its role in larger society; but he or she must be equally knowledgeable and engaged in the local context in which an event takes place.

This is not to say that a critic should never pass judgment; quite the contrary. The analysis and articulation of the success – or failure – of a particular artistic product is central to the responsibilities of a critic. But rather than tossing opinions from on high, the critic must endeavor to wrap herself in the skin of the target audience, and engage, analyze, and articulate the experience from that vantage point. Call it critical relativism.

“You can’t just engage theater in the walls of the theater,” said Dominic Papatola, theater critic at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, in a workshop at the NEA institute. “You have to connect it to local politics, sports, the other sections in the newspaper – in other words, all the things that are happening in your community ... As critics, what we should try to articulate is the relative humidity in the room.” So much for thumbs and stars.

It is for these reasons that I chose to review 13 in the voice of a 13 year old. My aim was to simultaneously give fair warning to those theater-goers who wouldn’t care for this type of light, derivative, teen-oriented fare, while appealing to those who seek exactly that. I would hope that, just as people who attend a performance of 13 would have different reactions to the musical, readers of my review would similarly come away thinking either, “I need to see that,” or, “No thanks” – depending on whether they would like the play in the first place.

A successful critic, by this approach, is less arbiter than matchmaker, introducing audiences to the artistic experiences that might connect to them.

In our very first session at the NEA Institute, we listened to Eric Ehn, dean of the theater program at CalArts, talk about his work in Africa. Ehn co-founded the Center for the Study of Genocide and Culture at CalArts, a program focused on exploring theatrical responses to the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Ehn has spent much of his career contemplating crimes against culture, the power of theater, and the role of the critic.

“A witness is not independent of a crime scene; he is part of what happened,” said Ehn. “In the same sense, you as a critic are something of a co-creator in the experience of theater ... Criticism is not about writing reviews. It is about witnessing, experiencing, and then creating conversations that hopefully carry on in the world beyond the printed word.

“Good criticism should breed criticism,” Ehn noted, “in the same way that good art begets more art.”