Last week, when the Times announced a shakeup of its arts desk that involved reassigning four of its critics—of theatre, TV, pop music, and classical music—to other roles, the reaction in the media and arts worlds was one of dismay. Even more disturbing than the personnel moves, though, was the reasoning given by the paper’s culture editor, Sia Michel, in her memo about the decision, which couched the move in terms of an ongoing effort to “expand” the Times’ cultural coverage “beyond the traditional review.” There are many worthwhile ways to write about the arts, but her sniping at reviews suggests a faux expansion that would actually be a grave diminution. Michel’s desire for a variety of formats, including video, is well founded but one-sided; the practice of criticism should be as wide-ranging as possible and constantly growing, but it shouldn’t lose its center, which is the written review.
Pace my own headline, this is not a defense; I’m not spreading my arms out in front of traditional reviews to protect them from insult or attack. Rather, I’m advocating for them, not in order to preserve the status quo or to revive past practices but to advance the cause of art itself—because reviews, far from being conservative (as Michel’s words imply), are the most inherently progressive mode of arts writing. When writing reviews, critics are in the position of the public: watching a movie, attending a concert, seeing a play, buying a record. Reviews are rooted in the most fundamental unit of the art business—the personal encounter with individual works (or exhibits of many works)—and in the economic implications of that encounter. The specificity of the review is both aesthetic and social. For starters, it’s a consumer guide, an intrinsic variety of service journalism. Critics are simultaneously consumers and avatars of consumers; as Pauline Kael wrote in 1971, in The New Yorker, “Without a few independent critics, there’s nothing between the public and the advertisers.” What’s commercially crucial about reviews, which serve as something like a consumer-protection file, is precisely this independence, both editorial and textual.
Independence is what’s usually missing from whatever takes the place of reviews in cultural journalism. For instance, reported pieces tone down uninhibitedly opinionated expression and, instead, turn the microphone over to the artists themselves and sometimes to others involved in a given project (producers, gallerists, publishers, and so on)—in other words, to parties with vested interests. The bulk of interviews done to coincide with the release of new work should be rightly understood as part of a marketing plan. Such interviews and quotes are generally short on candor. There are exceptions, but, in the age of social media, when a loose remark risks dominating the narrative of, say, a movie’s or a record’s release, there are ever fewer of them. The result is interviews that shunt coverage toward personalities, toward the glitzy allure of celebrity journalism. They reward and amplify self-promotion rather than illuminating the new work for a potential audience.
What’s lost in such diluted coverage is proper assessment of the basic cultural unit. Just as the individual work is what individual artists—whether directors, actors, crew, or producers—create at a given moment, it’s also how viewers fundamentally seek out works: one at a time. And what a review embodies, above all, is one viewer’s experience of it. The essence of the review is evaluation, which of course doesn’t imply the crude simplicity of a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. (There’s a special pleasure for critics in hearing from readers who are unsure whether to take a particular review as positive or negative.) Even as a review confronts a work’s commercial role, it also embodies the opposite—a work’s potential vastness, the possibly overwhelming and transformative impact of a single viewing or listening.
Although the journalistic review responds to the culture business’s short-term demands for novelty, it isn’t a product but a process—a one-on-one engagement that’s both tightly focussed and free, as free as an essay (of which it’s a subset). Other works by the same artist, or in the same genre, or that offer any significant reference or connection; relevant social and political history; reflections or implications to other art forms; aspects of the artists’ lives—and, for that matter, of the critics’ lives—all are fair game. A review is as capacious as the mind—and the audacity—of a critic. Its only limits are those of a critic’s own imagination, and of editors’ tolerance for whatever expansion and experimentation a critic may hazard. A review is whatever a work of art brings to mind; everything is criticism.
That’s also why reviews, even when linked to the immediate availability of a particular work or event, leap beyond that narrow context and offer a chance to live on, to entice and inspire readers without access to the event in question or coming too late for it. For instance, it’s a fundamental error of editors and reviewers alike to consider classical-music concert reviews as mere accounts of performers and performances. I’ve written some, and the main subject of a review of a performance of, say, a Beethoven symphony isn’t the musicians but Beethoven and the symphony. A classical review of merit weighs in on the meaning and the significance of Beethoven, makes a persuasive case for even performing Beethoven nearly two centuries after his death. Or, to put it differently, critics who take Beethoven for granted are doing injustices to readers, Beethoven, and music—whereas those whose reviews reach deep into the music itself and renew knowledge, interest, and passion in regard to Beethoven have thereby broken the limits of time lines and opened readers’ listening pleasures and perspectives into the future.
And that’s the point of reviews: the future. With perspective on the history of an art form and an awareness of its current state—an awareness developed by the immersive diligence of writing reviews on a wide range of recent events—critics see in new works their implications, their promise, the possibilities that they expand, the vistas that they open. They see it not because they’ve heard the artists’ claims but because they see the art dynamically, even prophetically.
It’s by reviews that critics stay current, by reviews that critics lay the groundwork for essays, videos, podcasts, and other cross-sectional or survey formats. Any cultural journalist can absorb a (no pun intended) critical mass of movies (or plays, concerts, records, etc.), but it’s only by way of extended engagement with each one of them that the essay or discussion can get past chitchat and reflect the substance and the merits of the works at hand. It’s not a matter of critics taking themselves seriously but of taking art seriously. By all means, newspapers and magazines should feature videos (I do them enthusiastically), essays (this is one), festival roundups (which are also reviews), profiles (I’ve done them, too, and find that their prime value is as veiled criticism, as backdoor approaches to the work itself). But all of those things rest on and are nourished by the fundamental critical confrontation with individual works.
In the absence of this, what’s left is the curse and the shrug of the “interesting”—a nonaesthetic approach that puts art before readers as a curiosity, as a set of talking points rather than as a form of personal experience, of devotion, of passion. The heart of the review is emotion, the stirrings of the soul, receptiveness to the life-changing power of art (even commercial art); personality-centered formats rooted in reporting or in talk are art from the ego, more like homework or social capital. And, though criticism is obviously subjective, at another level it is resolutely objective—a form of reporting from within. As idiosyncratic as individual critics may be, they also have fundamental commonalities with readers—and, in expressing, with care and flair, their own feelings, they often awaken such feelings in readers, for whom these emotions had been latent or inchoate. Like any literary work, the individual critical voice finds its echoes in the world at large, in readers’ self-recognition, in a sense of community.
A review by a responsible critic inherently involves introspection, looking into oneself to see whether unnoticed or unquestioned personal factors influence or deform one’s experience of the work at hand. The effort to seize, convey, and deepen one’s personal experience—to expand the two hours at a movie or a concert or a play into one’s own life, to extend that experience through one’s longtime aesthetic passion, and to do so with a sense of style that embodies the excitement and the energy of that experience—makes the review inherently a deeply personal work. Veering away from such essentially literary explorations of art, as the Times seems ready to do, is a disservice to readers and to art itself. In downgrading reviews, publications yield to the temptation of corporatized impersonality, just as much as tightly formatted and studio-governed Hollywood movies do. Arts coverage risks becoming a spectacle unto itself, the creative vitality of individual voices replaced by a smorgasbord of packaged samples. When media companies quiet or subordinate voices that meet art where it happens—that lend it the spark of life on the page, that kindle artistic fervor in readers—a decline in enthusiasm for the arts, and for arts journalism, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. ♦
