At our Studio 360 taping yesterday, Kurt Andersen asked me about the thumbs-up/thumbs-down tendency in modern-day reviewing. This morning, I found in my mailbox an essay about criticism from an interesting-looking Web site called Charlie Suisman’s Manhattan User’s Guide:
With a film, say, or a book, a negative review may not be helpful, but the thing itself continues to exist, regardless of critical reaction. The inherently ephemeral nature of restaurants and theatre productions means that negative critical reaction can effectively close a business down. That makes the critic’s words in those fields especially fraught. There are reviewers out there who consider themselves consumer advocates, helping readers spend their money wisely. It’s a thumbs up/thumbs down mentality and there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. But the best critics have always brought much more to their analyses: crucially, a sense of context and the weight of institutional memory.
If you’re reviewing a play by, say, Jon Robin Baitz, you can’t be an effective advocate for the reader if you don’t bring full knowledge of Mr. Baitz’s career to the table. And not just that: you should also be able to place the play in historical, stylistic, and theatrical context. Critics (good critics, in our view) have taken something of a curatorial role. Think of Pauline Kael on movies. It’s not really about nurturing, we wouldn’t call it “being supportive”, but it is at least cognizant of an artist’s career, of a trajectory, of how the threads have come to together. It may be tough love, but the love for the form (and often for the practitioners) comes through. The artist and the critic are in it for the long haul….
Institutional memory takes two forms. There’s the institutional memory of the critic’s own paper and there’s the institutional memory of the industry being reviewed. Both need to inform the analysis. Of course a reviewer will reach his or her own conclusions, but being heedless of what came before leads to exactly the kind of disjointed, decontextualized appraisal that understandably drives artists, and chefs, and readers to varying states of distraction….
I like that. And I wish I’d read it before the taping.
Read the whole thing here.