What Am I Doing Here? Or There?
Another post over at Millman’s Shakesblog concerned the role of the critic in writing about new work, whether we’re talking about entirely new work or new productions of established classics. I thought that post might be interesting to some folks who might not otherwise be inclined to wander over. So I’ll repost it here to see what, if anything, the rest of you think.
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I don’t mean here as in where I am physically – that’s Canada, the promised land, where I’ve already seen six productions at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival that I haven’t gotten around to writing about. I mean here as in on this blog, writing about theatre. What is the purpose of this activity?
The question comes to me because I’m still hoping to take this blog to someplace where I could grow more substantial traffic, but as I’ve contemplated doing that I’ve realized that I have only the faintest idea what I’m about. And that led me to the question: what are critics about generally?
I think the purpose of criticism, generally, is to open up additional windows into work that a casual reader/viewer/listener/etc. might not otherwise think to open, or see were there at all. But that’s the function of criticism of work that is already established as worthy of criticism, or that the critic wants to justify moving into that category.
But criticism of new work can barely do this at all, because it doesn’t have the time to be properly reflective, but also because no windows are open yet. And so other considerations may come to overwhelm the proper function of criticism, functions that I think are at least somewhat questionable.
Most obviously, there is the critic’s own desire to have a reputation. If we’re talking about criticism of established work, one hopes this reputation will be based in part – though it never will be entirely – on whether it generates novel insights, and whether it communicates these persuasively and well. But for new work, a reputation can be gained other ways more easily.
The most rewarding strategy for a critic of new work is to be seen as a good pundit – someone with a good track record of getting it “right” – and getting it “right” means predicting what will be received generally the way it was received by the critic in question. For the most “powerful” critics, this process becomes somewhat self-fulfilling: lesser-regarded critics, some producers, and to a limited extent even audiences will fall into line once the great critic has pronounced sentence. For less “powerful” critics, the critic can achieve some of this success by internalizing the expectations of his or her reading audience. If he or she knows their taste well, then he or she can write reviews that will help that audience find works that will appeal. This, though, has essentially nothing to do with criticism; rather, it’s consumer advice – valuable, I would certainly say, but not as criticism.
A critic can also establish a reputation by being a gadfly, a curmudgeon, a wit, a gossip – by adopting a persona that is engaging and entertaining in and of itself, at least to some of the audience. Negative reviews are especially good for this, and I think most people – even artists who hate critics – enjoy a really well-written savaging, because they are entertaining. But this, again, has very little to do with criticism, the best evidence being that the best reviews of this sort are of work that wasn’t worth reviewing from a critical perspective in the first place. Rather than criticism, this is a kind of comedy writing.
Then there is the critic as gourmet. I think this is what most critics, in fact, think they are: people of exceptional taste and knowledge who, whether the mob follows them or not, deserve respect because they have that exceptional taste and knowledge, which empowers them to say what is good, what is better, what is best. (And what is outright bad.) But this is the critical type that is, it seems to me, the least justifiable. The gourmet, after all, does not necessarily educate in any fundamental way – does not communicate actual insights about the work in question. Because that’s not strictly necessary, and in some cases isn’t even possible – how much can you possibly learn about music from reviews of the opera, or about cuisine from reviews of great restaurants? Reviews like these are frequently stuffed with content-free terms of praise or scorn. Many readers read gourmet critics to acquire opinions about works they don’t understand and may never even have experienced, so the gourmet does not even necessarily drive sales to degree that the pundit or consumer advisor does.
So what am I doing here? Well, what I’m doing first and foremost – in keeping with my producerist predilections with regard to art generally – is pleasing myself. Writing so that I clarify for myself what I myself have experienced. I really do think that’s true for all creative writing: you do it for yourself, and then to share it with others. And I hope I am providing actual criticism, thoughtful reflection on, in particular, classical theater and productions thereof. Sharing insights I learned from particular productions in the hopes that readers who are familiar and unfamiliar will learn something – or will argue with me, and I will learn something. Artists generally, and understandably, hate to read criticism of their own work, but if I had to describe my ideal audience there would be a great many artists in it – writers, directors, actors, etc. I like to flatter myself that, if I have an insight into, say, Leontes’s motivations, which came to me because of a particular actor’s performance, that this insight might prove useful to another actor preparing for the role, even differently useful than seeing the other actor’s performance might have been, since that performance might have struck the second actor differently than it did me, and led to different insights (or merely to the imperative to find a different way in, not to copy someone else’s performance).
But, inevitably, I’m going to fall into some of these other patterns: trying to a pundit, or a wit, or a gourmet. And a little of that is ok. But I hope my limited coterie of readers will keep me on the straight and narrow and reprove me if I indulge in those habits too much.
Thanks. A helpful typology.
I think the rise of aggregating websites like Rotten Tomatoes has rendered the pundit movie reviewer less valuable. While in the 1980s if it were Friday afternoon in Chicago and I wanted to know if any movies were worth going to see that evening, I’d check out the reviews by Ebert in the Sun-Times and Siskel in the Tribune, and read the cherry-picked quotes in the ads carefully.
But now I can get an overall wisdom-of-critical-crowds sense of how good a movie is by looking at Rotten Tomatoes, so the value of a local or even a leading pundit is only a fraction of what it was in 1985.
Here’s a question: has any reviewer shown himself to be consistently exceptional at praising the movies that were tepidly reviewed initially but then turned out to be long term favorites, such as The Big Lebowski, The Matrix, The Shawshank Redemption, and so forth, or vice-versa with movies that were generally overpraised upon release but haven’t stood the test of time. I’ve never seen a study of this, and I can’t think of any names offhand.
— Steve Sailer · Aug 15, 07:32 PM · #
On the other hand, I don’t want to disparage the gourmet critic too much. Some people simply have better taste than I do, and I try to respect their judgments and educate my own taste.
— Steve Sailer · Aug 15, 07:38 PM · #
Finally (hopefully), I think there’s a useful role for a reviewer who can take the time to reflect upon questions such as, “What is this movie about, anyway?” If all these talented craftsmen have spent all this money to make this movie that a lot of people like, what does it imply?
If you look at the movies that got nominated for the Best Picture Oscar over the last couple of years, it seems to me that most of them were, indeed, pretty good. Distinguishing pretty good movies from mediocre ones isn’t terribly hard. On the other hand, it can be more work to understand what a pretty good movie is about. For example, “The Social Network” is obviously a pretty good movie, but the more I looked into it, the less it appeared to be about Mark Zuckerberg and the more it was about Aaron Sorkin.
And sometimes, the critical consensus over what a film is about can be close to 180 degrees wrong. For example, the Best Picture nominated “District 9” was almost universally described here as an “apartheid allegory,” even though the writer-director, a Boer refugee in Canada, gave dozens of interviews explaining that it was more inspired by current black South African resentment of black illegal aliens from Zimbabwe and by his general Malthusian worries.
— Steve Sailer · Aug 15, 07:51 PM · #
Steve:
Thanks. I tend to agree that crowd-sourcing can in many ways do a better job than a “consumer guide” type of critic. That works better for some works of art than for others, and for some media than for others. For movies and books, it works best by identifying better and worse works within generic categories. If you know you like film noir, then checking out the crowd’s response to a particular noir will let you know whether it’s a better or worse one. But if you don’t know whether you like noir, these aggregate numbers will tell you nothing. And when the film or book is hard to categorize, you often get next to no good out of these aggregations. In my experience, this is even more true with music – fans love what they love, good or bad, and everybody else loves what they know. And for stuff like theater, you don’t get a big enough sample to be able to use these kinds of algorithms.
Notwithstanding the value of these sites, though, there seems to be an endless appetite for punditry – trying to pick winners – in almost any field of endeavor: arts and entertainment, sports, politics, business, you name it. And there’s essentially no effort to distinguish people with good predictive track records from people with lousy ones. Which suggests that the appeal has more to do with how the predictions sound than with how they stack up.
My complaint about the gourmet critic is that, too often, you don’t actually learn anything substantive. And I think there’s something questionable about simply learning what you are supposed to like. I think it’s far more important to develop taste, and that involves learning why some things are good or great, not merely that they are.
As for your last point: “what is this really about” is one of the things real criticism is about. When Stephen Greenblatt writes that Shakespeare created the amazing character of Shylock because he was appalled by the execution of Queen Elizabeth’s Portuguese converso doctor on suspicions of treason, I think he’s off his rocker but he’s doing real criticism (of an admittedly very old-fashioned biographical sort that I don’t always find useful). Similarly with your point about Aaron Sorkin’s film. But there’s very little of that in reviews, and the reason is right there in your comment: “the more I looked into it” you say, but reviews of new work come out right away, based on first impressions, and don’t allow time for reflection.
— Noah Millman · Aug 15, 08:22 PM · #
Right, you have to look within genre for movies or books. For example, the IMDB 1-10 ratings by fanboys are quite reliable (a 7.0 is better than a 6.0 most of the time) as long as you are aware you are that most of the people rating movies are 15-25 year old guys who really like the kind of movies that 15-25 year old guys who really like movies like.
— Steve Sailer · Aug 16, 06:43 AM · #
From the above PEG post…
“Corporations are persons.
What this means is that they’re recognized by the law as entities that can have a name, sue in court, be a party to contracts and have property.
Different types of persons have different types of rights, but these types of persons have only the rights that allow them to exist.”
Where does corporate freedom of speech fit into that?
Mike
— MBunge · Aug 17, 02:48 PM · #
Right, exactly. PEG’s post handily demonstrates his “people are stupid” conclusion by completely ignoring the most salient controversy over so-called “corporate personhood.”
— Ch3t · Aug 18, 01:51 AM · #
PEG’s failparade continues today with his physics-busting assertion that the resources of the Earth are without limit, and that the power of the sun is “near-infinite.” In fact, the total insolation of the Earth’s surface is less than 700,000 terawatts. And that’s it! That’s all the power possibly available to human civilization. Use any more than that, and you’re “dipping into the savings”; collecting the stored power of ancient sunlight. And those accounts are nearly overdrawn.
— Ch3t · Aug 18, 08:44 PM · #
Yes, in a way more people are better. But keep in mind that as the earth’s population increases, government needs to be more oppressive. If we follow the principle that “The right to swing your fist ends where the other man’s nose begins,” then with a greater population size we’re going to have a lot more fists within reach of other people’s noses, and we’re going to need more government regulation to enforce the separation of noses from fists. That doesn’t tend to make for a better quality of life.
— The Reticulator · Aug 19, 05:49 AM · #
So what all that waltzes around is that a crtitic is really another artist, riffing off of the source material of one work to make a new one, to be examined for artistic merit in the same way that the crtitic examines the original piece, no? Granted this view becomes endless-mirror-y — think Borges’ “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote” — but it also means that when the critic is an artist with a substantial oeuvre himself — think Nabokov or Roberto Bolano — the criticism is essentially part of that oeuvre, and it’s that you’re trying to grow.
From that perspective the nasty takedown criticism is also a fine art, as you suggest above. But also the sort of programmatic criticism (think Shostakovich under Stalin) that tries to rein in the art to larger cultural agendas is also by its own standard high art, where the critic’s own worth is tied to how well he hews to the right cultural touchstones. That is, the critic is doing the same thing the playwright is: setting an artistic standard and then adapting source material to it, only the source material is now somebody else’s work. So “What am I doing?” seems as pointless a question as it would be for a novelist.
That gets conflated in your writing aboe with an entirely conceptually different thing which is also called criticism, just because sometimes the to things can overlap (e.g. in the programmatic case, it’s not just that I want art to fit some agenda, but also that I want you to want to feed your head with such art.) Call that type of thing “reviewing,” and it’s no different from writing a good review of a table saw: it’s a factual thing telling me whether or not this table saw is the one in which I want to invest. As such it has the same limitations: basically it tells me how the thing — novel, exhibition, table saw — conforms to what my expectations of its form are, and it’s very poorly suited to judge things which don’t fit into those expectations. It has its uses, and it’s certainly a place where you can, as you point out, “get it right,” but it’s not really criticism, is it?
Do you understand those things to be seperable, or necessarily conjoined?
— Kieselguhr Kid · Aug 19, 01:40 PM · #