Criticism is Not a Four Letter Word

I’ve been eavesdropping on the online conversation about criticism in the arts for awhile now (thank you, HowlRound). Every year, there is a panel at the Humana Festival (like this one) dedicated to assessing the state of theatre criticism. I find the conversation both frustrating and fascinating. I find it fascinating because criticism was my jam as an academic (and all the real philosophers are critical theorists these days - I dare you to find philosophy seminars devoted to anyone born in the twentieth century). It's a frustrating conversation because I also happen to be a huge fan of the work being done at Grantland, a place where sports and popular culture meet. That’s a bad description. I’d say that the insight Bill Simmons had (perhaps unconsciously) is that sports culture is popular culture. And you should have a website devoted to the smartest people covering all of the narratives in popular culture and that this should include everything from NBA shot charts to the most interesting things happening in tabloids today to instigating some excellent gonzo journalism (if the only thing you get out of this blog is reading this Brian Phillips piece on the Iditarod, we are all winners). Everyone should take Derby day to read Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal work on Derby week to be reminded of what great cultural journalism looks like. With all of these Grantland contributors doing such outstanding work, it is bizarre to listen to theatre critics lamenting the death of reviews in print. So, if you want to know the state of criticism in the arts, Grantland is the state of the art and drama critics are the superannuated 18^th century model.

The basic challenge for theatre critics has always been how to get past the popular misconception that the primary work of the critic is to review shows. The problem with that is that the only thing people know of criticism are the reviews because that’s the pretty much all newspapers will print about a theatre show or a movie. This is bundled up with the fact that far too few people understand how awesome live theatre is in general, and not just in New York, or at your local roadhouse. In the modern world, newspapers are no longer sufficient for people who truly love something, even newspapers acknowledge that. The New York Times has ArtsBeat and the Washington Post has WonkBlog and Grantland exists. Conversations are moving more quickly now than ever and criticism is really about fostering and facilitating that conversation.

Only at its most basic level is criticism is about judging the quality of a work. This is much more important in theatre than in film reviewing, because there is so much more theatre being produced than film and with far less money. To truly appreciate cultural artifacts, it is often necessary to understand the components of the form, what its elements are, and how they work together, especially when dealing with challenging work. That’s an educational function and it is to a certain extent necessary, but it isn’t the soul of criticism and, even if it was, it is impossible to do this well in print in the context of a review. This function could and should be moved to a network of content about theatre making, very similar to HowlRound or 2AM Theatre, but with the theatregoing audience in mind, not theatre makers. 

Returning to my academic bread and butter, I am reminded constantly of Friedrich Schlegel. In the 18^th century, Friedrich Schlegel and his cohort attempted to craft a form of criticism that was also itself art and they did it in blurb/blog form, but when that form was printed as a literary journal (called the Athenaeum). This proved to be extremely difficult, but the insight rings more true today than it ever has because cultural criticism is so popular, thanks to the entertainment value of the way it is done. Grantland is all over this, Ain't It Cool is all over this, FilmSpotting is all over this. I think the impetus behind Grantland was the realization that some cultural criticism/observation is better than others and that the writing about the thing can be just as great as the thing (again, see Hunter S. Thompson). Magazines like Rolling Stone and Spin carried this torch for a long time (and still do). All of these great folks have fantastic conversations about cultural products and they do so in a way that is smart, challenging, interesting, and often hilarious. Criticism is doing fine in the 21st Century. The message for theatre criticism is pretty simple: It gets better.