Do the Arts Need Critics?

By Mike Fischer

Critics, Stephen Sondheim tells his fellow artists in Look, I Made a Hat (2011), “cause you to waste your time. And did I mention that they can steer people away from your show, just as they can hurt sales of a novel or put a crimp in further gallery showings of your paintings or concerts of your music? They can discourage both you and your audience.”

Critics, the naysayers allege, deliberately emphasize the negative. They’re more intent on pursuing their own political and aesthetic agenda than they are in honestly judging what they see. They take themselves too seriously; this is entertainment, after all, and an audience ought to be left alone to have a good time. Finally: they’re parasites, living off the work of others who do something they themselves cannot.

Throughout the 15 years during which I covered theater and wrote book reviews for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, I heard many variations on these themes, from disgruntled actors and audience members as well as from directors and designers.

The majority of those complaining were convinced I had zero sympathy for artists and didn’t have a clue what I was doing. Sondheim again, on critics: “most of them have little knowledge of the craft as it is practiced.”

None of this is new, or peculiar to me.

“The history of criticism,” writes New York Times film critic A.O. Scott in Better Living Through Criticism (2016), is “an endless cycle of complaint and accusation, a series of protests against the activity of criticism itself, and in particular against the blindness, stupidity, and destructive aggression of its practitioners.”

Believe me, I get it. Here’s part of what I wrote in an open letter to the arts community when announcing that I was walking away from the Journal-Sentinel two years ago: “I’m also acutely aware that what all of us remember most are the occasions on which we’ve been criticized. No matter how gently such criticism is offered, it feels personal.”

Not to mention, as Sondheim pointedly notes, that a critic’s words are “out there in public, that thousands of people are witnessing your humiliation.” Little wonder that so many people spend so much energy questioning critics’ right to exist.

So why do I passionately believe that we need arts critics now, more than we ever have before? Let me begin to answer that question with two illustrative stories.

Discovering Williams; Championing Sondheim

On the night after Christmas 1944, an unknown playwright with a string of failures to his name opened a show at the Civic Theatre in Chicago. The weather was horrific: icy, snowy, and cold. The theater was a mass of empty seats. Some of the few audience members who were there remember a howling wind.

The play, by a young Southerner named Tennessee Williams, was The Glass Menagerie, and it was reputedly a mess. Two weeks of rehearsals in Chicago had been contentious; the dress rehearsal was a disaster. There were no advance ticket sales; rumors were that the production would close well before completing its scheduled ten-week run. “It looks bad, baby,” Williams wrote in his diary.

Among those in the audience that night was Chicago Tribune arts critic Claudia Cassidy – known as Acidy Cassidy for her tough and unforgiving reviews. But she loved Williams’ play, as is clear even now when reading her review. “If it is your play, as it is mine,” Cassidy wrote on December 27, 1944, “it reaches out tentacles, first tentative, then gripping, and you are caught in its spell.”

Cassidy would return to see Williams’ play on each of the next three nights; she wrote about it constantly in the Tribune during ensuing weeks. As current Tribune theater critic Chris Jones notes in his edited collection of past Tribune theater reviews, New York theater people started coming west to see what all the fuss was about. Three months later, Williams’ play opened on Broadway to glowing reviews. The rest is history.

Sondheim c. 1976

Theater history is filled with stories like these; among the most famous involves Sondheim himself.

While we now know Sunday in the Park with George as one of Sondheim’s best musicals, it opened in 1984 to almost universally hostile reviews, excepting the one in the New York Times by Frank Rich, known as the “Butcher of Broadway” because of his tough, often show-killing reviews.

Anthony Ross, Laurette Taylor, Eddie Dowling and Julie Haydon in the Broadway production of The Glass Menagerie (1945)

“I went back and saw it again and again and again,” Rich later recalled in Hot Seat (1998). I “kept being moved and kept writing about it until I felt I had made my case.” Other critics were persuaded to return for another look; some of them changed their minds. Sunday went on to win the Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

More recently, beloved Broadway hits like Hamilton and Fun Home, Spring Awakening and The Band’s Visit – each a Tony winner for Best Musical – may have never made it to Broadway and immortality after their initial runs, had it not been for the major critics who fiercely championed all of them when they first opened Off-Broadway.

But even in New York, there’s precious few such critics left; out here in the heartland, the situation is even worse. When critics retire, they’re now rarely replaced; those still working cover ever less, as space for arts journalism continues to shrink. That’s bad for critics, of course. But it’s potentially far worse for the arts they cover.

The Crisis of Criticism

When I began working for the Journal-Sentinel in 2003, individual critics on staff covered art and architecture; popular music; classical music and dance; television; film; books; and theater. Today, almost all of the locally generated arts coverage for the Journal-Sentinel is written by two editors and a music critic. And when it comes to arts coverage, things are actually comparatively good in Milwaukee.

Wisconsin currently has no theater critic who comes even close to covering the scope and breadth of work throughout Wisconsin that I reviewed for the Journal Sentinel, during years when I routinely saw more than 200 shows each year while also writing numerous features and critical essays as well as book reviews.

“We may still have critics who review one or two shows a week,” laments New York-based theater critic Elisabeth Vincentelli, who sees “about 215 shows” each year. “But the critic who sees everything, who goes through that exhausting grind, is going to disappear.”

The result?

New work – something The Glass Menagerie itself once was – suffers most. “You’ll still get coverage of Hugh Jackman coming to Broadway,” observes New York Times critic Jesse Green. “But you’re going to have a hard time getting coverage of a new play by a young author in a basement in SoHo.” There will also be fewer critics offering mixed assessments, let alone writing flat-out negative reviews. Everything is now measured in clicks, and glowing reviews get more of them. The consequent pressure on reviewers, wrote theater critic Helen Shaw in a 2017 American Theatre magazine article, “works quietly but pervasively, and though critics may not be consciously pulling their punches, the punches do get pulled.”

Shrinking space for arts journalism within daily newspapers doesn’t help, particularly when this means that smaller companies taking the biggest artistic risks aren’t being covered at all, even as far less can be said about the work that is still being reviewed. You can’t tweet an arts review.

“A good critic,” mused legendary critic Linda Winer in an interview several years ago, “is someone with an interesting mind. It isn’t the yes or the no that matters – it’s the why. Everything we do is about trying to explain the why. That is harder and harder to do with reduced space.”

In 2017, Winer decided to resign her post at Newsday rather than continue under such straitened circumstances. That resignation shook me, contributing directly to my own decision to move on and explore new ways to give to the arts. Winer didn’t want to spend the rest of her life groveling for clicks or agonizing over all those deserving small companies that were no longer being reviewed. Neither did I.

Advocating for the arts

While I worry about Americans’ growing distrust of experts – whether the field is science or aesthetics, it simply isn’t true that everyone knows everything and that all opinions are equal – there’s no point in waxing nostalgic for a time when critics’ voices were authoritative enough to at least foster conversation by offering a focal point for debate and dialogue.

The old days aren’t coming back, and they had their own share of problems. Like yours truly, most critics were (and still are) white men, which inevitably skewed what was seen and how it was assessed. I’ll have a great deal more to say about this vital topic – and the current, long-overdue discussion involving race and representation in the arts – in the next issue of ArtsScene.

The Covid pandemic – during which the arts have been among the hardest hit sectors of our economy – has also reinforced my growing belief that traditional arts journalism isn’t the only way to promote meaningful and nuanced discussion of plays and books, music and art.

Whether as a dramaturg, educator, podcast host, or weekly columnist writing an arts-related visual arts guide, I’ve found ways during the past two years to offer the same sort of nuanced appreciation and assessment I once provided as a critic, while avoiding the necessarily reductive sense that I was offering a verdict on what I’d observed.

The arts will always need critics. But criticism itself needs to evolve. Jose Solis, a Honduran culture critic based in New York, rightly insists that criticism must constantly be reinvented. “If the arts keep evolving,” Solis asks, “why has criticism remained essentially the same since the 19th century?”

Sondheim implicitly makes the same point; acknowledging the need for good critics, he envisions something quite different from most newspaper reviewers, who are increasingly reduced by space constraints and click counts to writing up-beat marketing summaries rather than providing engaged analysis.

“A good critic,” Sondheim writes, “is someone who recognizes and acknowledges the artist’s intentions and the work’s aspirations, and judges the work by them, not by what his own objectives would have been. A good critic is so impassioned about his subject that he can persuade you to attend something you’d never have imagined you’d want to go to. A good critic is an entertaining read. A good critic is hard to find.”

In future monthly columns for ArtsScene, I’ll try to be such a critic for you. Or perhaps a better and more accurate designation is “arts advocate.” What I said when announcing my exit from the Journal-Sentinel remains true: “Nothing has made me happier during my tenure as a critic than celebrating great productions, and I’ve never been shy about sharing my enthusiasm for them.”

Even in the middle of a pandemic, there’s a lot in the arts in Wisconsin to be enthusiastic about. I’m looking forward to sharing my abiding love for Wisconsin’s thriving art scene with you. In the interim, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts and observations with me. You can reach me at mjfischer1985@gmail.com.

A Milwaukee-based writer and dramaturg, Mike Fischer is a member of the Advisory Company of Artists for Forward Theater Company in Madison. On behalf of Forward, he co-hosts a bimonthly podcast and writes a weekly visual arts guide.