The state of the arts critic As theaters and local entertainment resume, what kind of press will they be met with? AJ Abelman Photography
By Bob Abelman
I
t is safe to say William Shakespeare had no critics in the late 1500s and early 1600s. Sure, there were supporters, sponsors, detractors and promoters, but there were no professional theater critics scuttling out of the Globe to meet a deadline for the morning edition. Newspapers and a large, literate audience to read them did not surface in earnest until the late 1700s. And even then, those who chose the theater as a profession – as artists and critics – were not deemed particularly newsworthy. In London, theater critic was an occupation pursued only by what has been described in one historical text as “managerial toadies who were puffing their own wares, opportunistic knockers (or) unclassified eccentrics.” In the United States at that time, theater criticism was described as “fly-by-night news-sheets and scurrilous pamphlets popping up everywhere, mingling blind-item theatrical gossip with detailed analysis, often willfully and malevolently inaccurate, of plays and performances.” As a Cleveland critic myself for the past 20 years, I know first-hand that this perception of the profession has changed very little. THE RISE OF MODERN CRITICISM Western arts journalism evolved largely in the coffee houses of London and saloons of the United States in the aftermath of the industrial revolution in the mid-1800s. The growth of cities, rail transportation and leisure time by an increasingly large privileged class gave way to the development and support of arts institutions and museums. And the growth of newspapers and magazines led to the well-educated and highly opinionated arts journalists they employed. “Comprehension without critical evaluation is impossible,” said Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, an 18th and 19th century philosopher.
34 | Canvas | Fall 2021
Also, arts criticism grew exponentially when artists began to make works that were not sponsored by the church or state, whose commissions demanded ideological and often stylistic conformity. Artists had become freelance freespirited producers for a market that was not always there. Finding, informing and intriguing a market required objective evaluation from a credible source, which reinforced and bolstered the role of the critic. THE ROLE OF THE CRITIC “We read critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that we didn’t fully grasp when we saw the work,” noted Pauline Kael, the late film critic who wrote for The New Yorker. Andrew Sullivan, former editor of The New Republic and columnist for The Sunday Times in London, suggested that “Many readers were bemused by Marcel Proust and James Joyce until (American literary critic) Edmund Wilson wrote about them. When Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting For Godot’ opened, the audience was puzzled until (English drama critic) Harold Hobson’s famous review came out. ... If they had not been there, our artistic world – our inner lives – would have been more anemic.” Without the “consciousness that only a critical infrastructure can supply,” wrote American novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick in an article in Harper’s Magazine, “readers and writers are doomed to talk at cross-purposes, or at random; it takes a corps of influential critics to unite individual reactions into a common discussion. Indeed, superior criticism not only unifies and interprets a literary culture but has the power to imagine it into being.” And so, over time, the critic has earned a certain sovereignty over art history, or at least great influence in creating the canon of art by naming modern movements and their influential artists, and evaluating their works. In the early 20th century, the professional arts critics’ opinions were revered and often feared by their respective industries. They not only helped inform audience opinions, they also dictated sales, kept the
CanvasCLE.com
