Just who is this guy?

In the early '90s, the Dallas Times Herald hired a new theater critic who, it turned out, had been a professional actor. He even still had his Equity card; he'd acted off-Broadway. He came to town making it plain to the local theater community that he was one of them, He understood. A seasoned stage performer: the perfect opponent, it would seem, to underscore any insecurities about my own credibility.

Then one evening I ran into a theater director/professor/friend and happened to ask him what he thought of the new critic in town. He was curious to know more about the fellow's background, and when I explained, my friend promptly quipped, "Oh, yes, that's what every director wants judging him from the seats. An ex-actor with a grudge."

Well put. What this says is that not only is direct education/experience in an art not absolutely necessary for a critic, it can even be a hindrance, a distortion. Your teacher could have been an eccentric, someone with a warped notion of his art. Or, considering the highly collaborative nature of an art like theater, extensive background as a lighting designer may cause one to over-value the importance of blue gels and undervalue the contributions of, oh, say, actors.

As it turned out, the new drama reviewer, for all of his first-hand knowledge of theater, was a perfectly dreadful critic. In all of this, I am not making a case for ignorance as an asset in a critic. Far from it. I envy the depth of classical knowledge in writers such as Daniel Mendelsohn or Garry Wills. But let's return to the teacher analogy: Haven't we all had a teacher who was clearly very knowledgeable in his field, perhaps even a leading scholar in it -- and he was still a bad teacher? Boring, poorly organized, incapable of conveying his topic in a manner that either interested his students or just let them grasp it?

All the knowledge in the world doesn't necessarily make for a good critic, either. it doesn't necessarily mean we should (or even will) listen to him.

So what does?The answer came to me while listening to other newspaper critics answer one of the most common questions we hear from readers: How did you get this job?

The question is prompted by several desires to know more. First, there is no set career path to be a critic on a newspaper or magazine. So it is a bit of a mystery. Only relatively recently have graduate journalism programs even included classes on reviewing. Yet they are no guarantee of eventual employment as a critic. There is still no "required" apprenticeship or degree program or even designated butts to kiss. It remains an ad hoc, who-you-know, what-editor-happened-to-read-your-work profession.

Related to this lack of a clear-cut background is the reader's simple curiosity: Who is this person handing me advice over breakfast? It is a common human interaction. When a reader would ask me, one-on-one, for a good novel to read, my first response has generally been, well, what kind of novels do you typically like?

We often try to personalize the exchange of information like this. Critics (and readers) may believe that theirs are judgments based on aesthetic principles and rationally arrived-at values, but in most ordinary conversations about any art form, the discussion quickly turns to matters of likes/dislikes, personal favorites, anecdotal evidence. This goes on unconsciously, I believe, in the course of almost any recommendation. If a friend or family member tells us not to see a particular film, we make a thousand calculations without thinking, based on our knowledge of our friend's previous expressions of taste, cinematic preferences, his hots for the leading actress and so forth.

The same is happening on a more overt and even crude level when we ask, "How did you get this job?" -- in other words, what has shaped your choices? And do they lend you any credibility?

Having heard my fellow critics (and myself) answer this question dozens of times with the expected litany of degrees earned and promotions won, I was struck by how the answer seemed beside the point. It disappointed because it didn't answer what was actually being asked. How did you become a critic? That is, what was it in you that let you believe you could pass judgment on books or music, and people should listen to your pronouncements?

In short, there's an element of moral challenge to the question: Who are you to say these things?

Finally, the question is often asked because the critic generally has no licensed position of authority, that is, no real power backed by law or money or custom. Consider: Only a handful of people in our entire lives can judge us with impunity and make those judgments matter. Our parents, our teachers, our employers, real judges in court, and maybe religious ministers (though many, wisely, leave that judging stuff to God). Anyone else who tells us that we can't write or that our taste in music is awful, we can safely tell them to screw off. You're not the boss of me.

Yet we still avidly seek out the judgments of such people, people we most often don't even know personally -- and follow their advice on how we should spend our evenings, what we should hang on our walls, put in our CD collections.

Where did they earn this 'power'?

It's with the word "earn" that I realized how this all actually works. We have it backwards. The critic doesn't bring authority to his reviews. It's his reviews that grant him authority, earn him any authority. A review is not an opinion, as Mr. Schickel says. It's not even (just) a wise judgment. It's an attempt at persuasion. It doesn't simply tell us that this book is worthy of our time and attention. A review tells us why and how. In trying to explain the critic's own response, the review justifies them. The review leads us into sharing his conclusion.

In other words, the critic earns his authority by using his knowledge, his rhetorical skills, his humor, his personal insights, maturity, modesty, bravura cleverness -- whatever it takes, in this particular instance, to convey the experience of the film in question and to convince us not only that he's right but that he's worth listening to. These are the only things that matter with a critic. Just as with a teacher, it's all about the classroom (and how he handles the homework), with a critic, it's all about what's on the page. If he can't do that, all the rest is meaningless.

So, then, what does one need to be a critic? A critic worth listening to? One needs to have experienced a lot of the art form in question -- read a lot of books, seen a lot of plays. One needs to have thought about them a lot. And one needs to be able to express those thoughts vividly, lucidly. Persuasively.

And if you work for a newspaper, you'd better be able to do it fast and to the point. And then do it again tomorrow.

Of course, a critic may gain a cumulative authority. We're won over by one review, he turned out to be right about that great sitcom. So we pick up his next review to find out what he says now. This is why it's important for newspapers and magazines to have regular critics: They gain authority over time, and we get to know their sensibilities, just as we know our friends'. This, I believe, is essentially what people mean when they tell critics the other line we so often hear: I don't agree with everything you say, but .... and what they leave unsaid (although sometimes, they do say it) is that I always read your work anyway/always enjoy reading your work/always learn something from reading your work.

This also why the rise of the "five star" or "thumbs up/thumbs down" review mechanism, the Entertainment Weekly blurb review, the blogger's bitchy dismissal have all been pernicious developments in the art of criticism. In these instances, they reduce the process, they crudify it. It is just an opinion, so much amusing confetti or spitwads, less than a book jacket blurb or those breathless movie ad exclamations from some radio or TV (or increasingly, internet) hack you've never heard of. One can learn little from these so-called reviews except, perhaps at best, the craftiness of the writer in feeding the worst aspects of the corporate marketing machinery or the Zippy-the-Pinhead attention span of the web. Would you give more credence to one of these blurb-o-mats if the name of the author were followed by Ph.D.?

My conclusions here may seem commonplace -- all this writing and my big insight comes down to a critic's work on the page is what matters, all that earns him a following. Big surprise. The sad surprise is how often this seemingly obvious point gets lost in the posturing and anger and snobbery that always seem to come out in arguments over judgments, the purpose of reviews, the power of the critic, the supposed decline of the critic, the place of the critic, the rise of the amateur web critic, the professional ethics of the critic -- and all of the other perennial debate topics that never seem to advance the art of criticism much.

But my conclusions tell me that, ultimately, Mr. Schickel is wrong. Some bloggers certainly deserve respect as critics, and they gain it (or are gaining it) the old-fashioned way, the same way Mr. Schickel has, the same way critics have done since Aristophanes mocked Sophocles or Aristotle tried to figure out how theater worked its magic on an audience.

They earned it.