My Wall Street Journal review of Kate Whoriskey’s Shakespeare Theatre production of The Tempest, in which I suggested that audience members wait to read her program notes until after they’d seen the show, has inspired a couple of very interesting posts elsewhere in the blogosphere. (You’ll find them here and here.)

These postings put me in mind of H.L. Mencken’s saying that criticism is “prejudice made plausible.” He had a point, but some prejudices don’t lend themselves to such treatment, or at least shouldn’t. I don’t like all art, I’m pretty sure I don’t like all good art, and I think it’s the better part of wisdom for me not to pretend that all the art I dislike is bad. Like everyone else, I have my share of aesthetic allergies, which may or may not necessarily correspond to the Truth About Art.

All other things being equal:

• I prefer short plays, films, novels, and pieces of music to long ones. (I also prefer small paintings to large ones, which is not exactly the same preference but probably a second cousin to it.)

• I prefer comedy to tragedy.

• I prefer prose to poetry.

• I prefer simplicity to complexity.

• I prefer realism to fantasy. (This is why I prefer comedy to tragedy, by the way: I think it’s truer to life.)

• I usually have major problems with “documentary” art, or any other kind of idea-driven art. Marcel Duchamp said that he inscribed sentences on his “ready-mades” in order to “carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal.” That sums up the kind of art I like least.

• I loathe “artiness.”

• I tend not to like camp.

To some extent these prejudices can be made to add up to a rough and ready philosophy of art, but the alert reader will note that they also contain some built-in contradictions. O.K. by me. As I’ve said time and again, art is empirical: first you make it, then you decide whether it works, then you try to figure out why it works. Similarly, criticism starts with the critic’s spontaneous, unmediated response to an aesthetic experience. If it doesn’t, it’s bad criticism–period.

One of the reasons why I trust my taste is that it not infrequently leads me in surprising directions. I’ve reviewed more than a few plays and productions for the Journal that didn’t conform to my list of prejudices, but which I loved anyway. (Among them were Anna in the Tropics, Charlie Victor Romeo, I Am My Own Wife, Intimate Apparel, Jumpers, Nine Parts of Desire, Private Jokes, Public Places, Rose Rage, and Small Tragedy.) A critic who always knows in advance what he’s going to like–or dislike–is writing about the show in his head, not the show in front of him. One sure way to increase the likelihood of surprise is not to look at the printed program at all, and sometimes that’s just what I do: I go in, sit down, and see what happens.

In the case of The Tempest, I knew that Ms. Whoriskey claimed to have interpreted Shakespeare’s text in a highly political way, which is definitely not my thing–but I’d also been told in advance by a person whose taste I trust without reservation that the production was first-rate, so I split the difference, went in cold, and didn’t crack open the program until intermission, by which time I was already head over heels and happy to be. So much the better. It’s not uncommon for me to have clear-cut advance expectations about the shows I review, but I’m always willing to be proved wrong, and delighted to admit it in print.

I’m sure several of you out there are already thinking the same thing, and I’m a half-beat ahead of you: doesn’t it matter that Kate Whoriskey superimposed a political interpretation on The Tempest and came up with a beautiful production? Duh, yeah, of course. To be sure, my experience suggests very strongly that politicizing Shakespeare (or any other great playwright) tends not to yield good results, but if it works for her, it works for her, regardless of whether it works for anyone else.

As for me, all I care about is the end result. Bore me and I’ll fall asleep, even if I agree with every word you say. Astonish me and I’ll sit up and take notice, even if I think you’re dead wrong. In art, the only unforgivable sin is to be dull.

UPDATE: Mr. Superfluities has posted a list of his own prejudices. While they tend not to run in very close sync with my own, he says some things with which I couldn’t agree more enthusiastically. Among them:

Theater’s strengths, in this technological age, are that it’s simple, it can be cheap and it appeals to a very basic need for physical communion….

Campy popular cultural references mire a work in its own time. It’s one thing to offer comment or criticism of the world in which we live; it’s another to unthinkingly exploit the popularity of junk in an effort to make our own shows more accessible….

Artists can’t afford to be without a familiarity with the other art forms in which they don’t work. It also helps when they have a good broad basic understanding of philosophy, psychology, history and science: sometimes to inform their own work, sometimes to be aware of the questions which these disciplines don’t answer.

Hear, hear! (Do I smell a meme coming on?)

“I have only read Proust in translation. I thought he began well but went dotty half way through like J Joyce in Ulysses. No plan. Nancy [Mitford] says it is uproariously funny throughout & only English & Americans treat it as anything superior to P.G. Wodehouse.”

Evelyn Waugh, letter to Margaret FitzHerbert (Aug. 9, 1964)

I’ll be going to Chicago on Friday (sorry that I can’t take you!), but if I weren’t, I’d be going to Alice Tully Hall to hear “Five Lovers,” a recital by soprano Jama Jandrokovic.

Here’s the “official” description of the concert:

Soprano Jama Jandrokovic sings texts from her autobiographical collection of poetry, Five Lovers, featuring settings of the texts by leading American composers Lori Laitman, Luna Pearl Woolf and the 2004 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Music, Paul Moravec. Special guests include poet Dana Gioia, pianists Soeyon Kim and Andrew Rosenblum, and the North Sky Ensemble, with violinists Jesse Mills and Colin Jacobsen, violist Max Mandel and cellist Rubin Kodheli. Directed by Gina Lapinski.

Now here’s an explanation of the program’s significance by my fellow ArtsJournal.com blogger Greg Sandow, a tireless and trenchant advocate of non-traditional classical-music programming:

On Friday, at Tully Hall in New York, a soprano named Jama Jandrokovic will give a recital, consisting of three new song cycles by three composers, all of them settings of her own autobiographical poetry! This really deserves an exclamation point, because normally–to state the obvious–it’s people in pop music whose music is explicitly about their own lives. So now here’s someone in classical music doing it.

The poems, according to the press release for the concert, “chronicle Ms. Jandrokovic’s romantic journey as a recently divorced, newly single young woman in New York City attempting to reinvent herself.” I haven’t read the poems, and can’t say if they’re good or bad. But! The very idea of a classical singer doing something like this is revolutionary. The composers are Lori Laitman, Luna Pearl Woolf, and Paul Moravec, and the concert–very good move here–has a stage director. This is not your grandmother’s vocal recital.

I know about this concert because I know several of the parties involved, but readers of this blog shouldn’t need to be reminded that I don’t recommend anything in advance unless I have damned good reason to think it’s going to be worth seeing and/or hearing. This will be both.

Jandrokovic’s gorgeously designed Web site, with full information on the program, is here.

To purchase tickets, go here.

Things I didn’t know till now, gratefully culled from The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film:

– Total number of feature-length commercial sound films of plays by Shakespeare: about 40.

– Average percentage of Shakespeare’s original text heard in these films: 25-30%.

– Director who “consistently uses fewer words for each transaction between characters” in his Shakespeare films: Orson Welles.

Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, is inviting
bloggers to write about their favorite painting in America and their favorite American painting (which I suppose could be one and the same).

This is, of course, an impossible task, but having just said that it can’t be done, I’ll do it, subject as always to minute-by-minute changes of mind.

As of the time stamp on this posting, the winners are as follows:

– Favorite American painting: Fairfield Porter’s The Mirror, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. As regular readers of this blog know, my passion for Porter is boundless–his work is my major preoccupation as a collector–and I can think of a half-dozen of his paintings that I might be inclined to put at the top of this list. “The Mirror,” though, seems to me a particularly revealing exemplar of Porter’s highly individual brand of realism, and one that I don’t get to see often enough because it hangs in a Midwestern museum. All the more reason, then, for me to pay a visit to Kansas City this summer. Good jazz, good barbecue, a good museum with my favorite Porter–what’s not to like?

– Favorite painting in America: Paul C

Yesterday I was striving to describe some of the infinitely variable moods of Lake Michigan, and tonight Mr. Modern Kicks goes and provides a one-click ticket to an unbelievably perfect–and perfectly beautiful–illustration of what I was babbling on about with these suddenly crude-seeming materials, words: Cynthia King’s far more eloquent oil pastels of the very lake, in several of its moods. I haven’t decided yet whether seeing her lovely pictures adds steam to the prospective Lake Diary project or just makes it seem terribly unnecessary.

“‘There is no man,’
he began, ‘however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said
things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant
to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it
from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because
he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man–so far as
it is possible for any of us to be wise–unless he has passed through
all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate
stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons
and grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them
nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have,
perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to
retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of
everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures,
feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and
sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for
ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else
can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom
is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.
The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are
not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at
school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by
reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that
prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I
can see that the picture of what we once were, in early youth, may not
be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in
later life. But we must not deny the truth of it, for it is evidence
that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of
life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life,
of the life of studios, of artistic groups–assuming that one is a
painter–extracted something that goes beyond them.'”

Marcel Proust, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff)

I just got back from New Haven, where I drove in order to see Long Wharf Theatre’s production of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties (I’ll be reviewing it next week in The Wall Street Journal). It was a long night and a long drive, and I have four appointments ahead of me today–one of which is a house call from a computer repairwoman. Yikes!

For all these reasons, I rather doubt I’ll be posting anything more until Thursday. In my absence, do the obvious: slide over to the right-hand column, scroll down to “Sites to See,” and explore the wonderful world of artblogging.

See you later.