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Last week, when The Times announced a reorganization of its arts department that involved moving four critics – theatre, television, pop and classical – to other positions, the reaction in both the media and the arts world was bewildered. But even more alarming than the personnel changes was the rationale behind the Times’s culture editor, Sia Michel, in a memo in which she described the move as an ongoing effort to “expand” the Times’s cultural coverage “beyond traditional reviewing.” There are many worthy ways to discuss the arts, but her attack on reviewing suggests a false expansion that will actually lead to serious deterioration. Michel’s push for a variety of formats, including video, is justified but one-sided: the practice of criticism should be as diverse and evolving as possible, but it should not lose its core – the written review.
In keeping with my own title, this is not a defense; I am not throwing my arms around traditional reviews to protect them from criticism or attack. Rather, I am advocating for them not to preserve the status quo or revive past practices but to advance art itself—because reviews, far from being conservative (as Michel’s words imply), are the most progressive way of writing about creativity. When critics write reviews, they are in the position of spectators: watching a film, attending a concert, seeing a play, buying an album. Reviews are rooted in the most basic unit of the art business—personal engagement with individual works (or exhibitions of multiple works)—and the economic consequences of that engagement. The specificity of the review is both aesthetic and social. For one thing, it is a consumer guide, a kind of service journalism. Critics are both consumers and representatives of consumers; As Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker in 1971, “Without a few independent critics, there is nothing between the public and the advertisers.” It is this independence, both editorial and textual, that is crucial in commercial reviews, which serve as a kind of consumer protection evidence.
Independence is what is usually missing in everything that replaces reviews in cultural journalism. For example, reports water down free expression and instead give the floor to the artists themselves and sometimes to other participants in the project (producers, gallery owners, publishers, etc.), i.e. parties with vested interests. Most interviews timed to coincide with the release of new works should rightly be seen as part of a marketing plan. Such interviews and quotes usually lack sincerity. There are exceptions, but in the age of social media, when a disjointed remark risks dominating the narrative of, say, a film or album release, such exceptions are becoming increasingly rare. The result is interviews that shift the focus to personalities, to the glittering charm of celebrity journalism. They encourage and reinforce self-promotion rather than introduce new works to a potential audience.
In such a diluted light, the proper appreciation of the basic cultural unit is lost. Just as an individual work is something that individual artists—whether directors, actors, crew, or producers—make in the moment, so audiences essentially seek out works: one at a time. And a review, above all, embodies one viewer’s perception of a film. The essence of a review is an assessment, which, of course, does not imply the crude simplicity of “like” or “dislike.” (Critics are especially pleased to hear from readers who are unsure whether to count a particular review as positive or negative.) While a review reflects the commercial role of a work, it also embodies its opposite—its potential scope, the possible overwhelming and transformative impact of a single viewing or listening.
While the journalistic review answers the short-term needs of the cultural business for novelty, it is not a product but a process—a personal interaction that is at once narrowly focused and free, as free as the essay (of which it is a type). Other works by the same artist, or in the same genre, or that offer some significant reference or connection; relevant social and political history; reflections on or implications for other art forms; aspects of the artists’ lives—and, for that matter, the critics’ lives—are all fair game. The review is as capacious as the critic’s intelligence—and courage. Its only limits are the critic’s own imagination and the editors’ tolerance for whatever expansion and experimentation the critic may dare. The review is whatever comes to mind about a work of art; everything is criticism.
This is why reviews, even those linked to the immediate availability of a particular work or event, transcend this narrow context and provide an opportunity to live on, to engage and inspire readers who do not have access to the event in question or who come too late. For example, a fundamental mistake of editors and reviewers is to regard reviews of classical concerts as mere descriptions of the performers and the performances. I have written several, and the main topic of a review of a performance of, say, a Beethoven symphony is not the musicians, but Beethoven and the symphony. K
Sourse: newyorker.com
