Results tagged “critics” from Slipped disc

Sharp-eyed readers of the arts pages will have spotted that the Daily Telegraph has succumbed to the temptation of appending stars to its arts reviews. It is the last of the upmarket British dailies to fall in line with this simplistic trend.

One of my first acts in March 2002 as Assistant Editor of the Evening Standard was to abolish review stars, except on recorded products that could be quantifiably measured by repeated sampling.

The argument I put to my editor and colleagues was that if we were employing the best and most readable team of critics in the business, it made no sense to encourage the reader to skip from headline to star line, omitting the subtlties of our review. My argument held sway so long as I wielded executive authority at the paper.

Of all the devices that devalue the function of criticism, the bar of stars is among the most pernicious. It suggests that artistic creation can be ticked off like a school essay and subjected to a set of SATs, in which the individual, expert guidance of teachers and examiners is set aside for the one-rule-fits-all solution of 21st century politicians.

I understand full well the busy lives that most readers lead and their need at a weekends to make a quick judgement on which show to see without having to wade through all the guff that comes with a multi-section paper.

Nevertheless, as critics we have the duty to protect art from snap judgements. Judgements of this kind allow art to be easily branded as 'degenerate' or 'anti-people' or 'anti-art' - and you know where those labels come from.

I am sorry to see the Telegraph fall prey to the dumbed-down times and I hope serious papers elsewhere will continue to resist. It is not just critics that are diminished by these shortcuts - it is journalism itself.

Or am I wrong? Your views, please.

Last night, I went to see Kurt Weill's Street Scene at the Young Vic, its first UK staging in 20 years which drew chief theatre critics from almost every national daily.

This morning, I addressed a dozen students, year 10-11, at corporate HQ on the prospects for arts careers in the media. Which would you think was the more excitable audience?

The students were terrific, sharp as buttons and receptive to early-morning stimulation (they laughed at my jokes). They were also media savvy, fully informed about the impact of internet usage on the print and record industries. They were not going to be fobbed off with bromides. What they wanted to hear was a range of fresh solutions to a familiar crisis. I did my best to give them hope.

The critics were in Thursday-night mood, worn out after too many late nights filing reviews for the last editions. But by the interval, the ones I chatted to were hopping and popping with the impact of the work. And by the end they (and I) were on a Weill high, totally blown away by the sensational mutations of 'Lonely House' leitmotiv with which the composer drives the piece.

Someone said this sort of excitement reminded him why he became a critic in the first place. I was struck more by the vital social function that performing arts critics perform, wading night after night through dullness and mire in the hope that something will light their fire, as Weill did ours last night.

That is why newspapers need critics - to protect readers from the routinely awful and the meretricious rubbish that masquerades as novelty, and to excite them with the blood-rush of the real thing. This is also why people read newspapers - to find a voice they can trust to lead them through the barren wilderness to a kind of promised land. Kurt Weill knew that, even as old man Kaplan ranted about 'the capitalist press'.  

Every newspaper that sheds its critics, as so many are doing, loses a powerful reader magnet.

There are two reasons why newspapers are getting rid of established critics. The obvious one is that newspaper revenues are caught in a double arm-lock by the internet and the credit crunch, neither of which is likely to ease in the forseeable future.

Less obvious is the internal perception, right or wrong, that certain forms of commentary and opinion forming are no longer central to what editors want and readers expect. As a sometime editorial executive, I have been party to some these discussions and that leaves me more than a little puzzled at the hysteria aroused by the recent layoffs. Nobody likes to see job losses but newspapers are a dynamic industry, quick to adapt to changes in public demand.

Take the role of television critic. Ten years ago, it was a high-profile spot in most papers, the generator of many water-cooler moments in the workplace. But television is not what it was. With hundreds of channels, there is not much likelihood that four people around the cooler will have watched the same programme the night before and, if they did, that they will want to read intelligent comment in the morning about dumb reality shows and talent contests.

If television is a mindless thing on the wall, why bother to write about it? Newspapers that have abolished TV reviews suffered no backlash from readers. The function had become redundant, except in the case of a few doyens - Nancy Banks-Smith in the Guardian, for instance - who developed a voice over many years that loyal readers would miss.

Radio criticism is a different matter. Radio has a distinct community, or set of communities. It is listened to by long-distance drivers, nursing mothers, menial workers and the elderly, among others. Many of them listent intently since, on a great many stations, content has been upheld at high level.

Radio columnists such as Gillian Reynolds in the Daily Telegraph provide a stimulating collage of inside information, listener guidance and incisive artistic criticism that serves, in turn, to keep producers on their toes and maintain original output. A loss of the radio signal would provoke outrage among  the readership. 

Neither of these forms of criticism has a direct bearing on arts reviews, which is where many of the cuts have lately been falling. It is, of course, impossible to generalise about critics. There are good arts critics and bad, as well as once-good critics who run out of things to say or hate everything in sight. But what is happening at the moment is that the axe is falling indiscriminately on critics good and bad - Lawrence Johnson in Miami is one of the best - and the tendency is growing in newspapers to regard arts criticism as peripheral to their purpose.

That would be both a disaster for newspapers and a danger to a free society, matters which I will attempt to reflect upon in a future comment. Your responses are, as ever, essential to the process. 

The Observer, a British Sunday newspaper, set up one of those self-fullling propositions today by asking: Critic vs Blog - is the art of criticism under threat from the web?

The article that explores these tensions is, so far as I can judge, fair, balanced and, insofar as it quotes my views, pretty accurate and to the point.

What skews it are the photographs which show the critics to be bursting with middle-age, while the bloggers portrayed are uniformly young, hip and street-wise.

The pictures, I can reveal, were posed. The critics were specifically asked to dress up in suits, while the bloggers are seen in gear that is generically casual. The meaning conveyed is simple. Critics = old and square, bloggers = young and cool.

That 's the sort of thing that gives journalism a bad name, the more so when it is palpably untrue, as it is here. Many of the  bloggers I come across on-line are of pensionable age and crusty disposition. Many of the critics I meet in pursuit of my trade are young, unwaged and astonishingly open-eared and minded.

Nor are the two worlds mutually exclusive. Most arts bloggers get their juices flowing by what they read in newspapers, print or on-line. More and more professional critics are alert to what airs on-line and, from time to time, assimilate and respond to it.

There are no hard and fast borders. Some bloggers strive for an impartiality worthy of the New York Times at its dullest. Some critics make polemic their passion, the rage at bad art increasing with the passing of years. That makes essential reading.

Some - I am not alone in this - inhabit both sides of the tracks. We write in newspapers for a living and feed a blog like this one with material we either can't or don't want to put in print - stuff that, in our judgement, has its most appropriate place out here, sparking instant responses and cutting more quickly than a newspaper page can with its cumbersome furniture and - in the Observer article - occasionally distorted view of the world.

One of the first laws of journalism is never make the facts fit the story. In the Observer, the story looks as if it has been commissioned to fit a fake picture.