Our best critics are dying. And with it a form of writing and assessment of our cultural has been downgraded to a lower form. Where critics once served to educate their readers and point to new directions in our arts and culture, most criticism today is either boosterism or narcissism. It is a shame, really, because it appears that with the decline in cultural criticism we experience a decline in the quality of the arts.
Within the past couple of years, Hollis Alpert, founder of the National Society of Film Critics, has passed away. John Leonard, esteemed literary critic, has also moved on to another world. Clive Barnes, dance and drama critic, died not too long ago. Pauline Kael, perhaps the most influential of film critics, died a few years back. Vincent Canby. The list goes on.
Others still hang in there, writing quality reviews. Stanley Kauffman remains the literary critic for the New Republic. Erudite and sometime curmudgeonly octogenarian, John Simon, still writes theater and film reviews. Fellow film critic and octogenarian, Judith Crist, still writes and teaches at Columbia University. Likewise, Andrew Sarris.
While a few have inherited the love, concern and at times the erudition of this older set of critics, Rodger Ebert and Manohla Dargis, come immediately to mind, most critics today are interchangeable faces with paste on smiles and clunky writing styles. Where the others had a deep passion for the arts, most critics today are merely hired hands, flogging product and searching for the next rung on the ladder. It is not the passion and involvement that seems to drive them, but career advancement. Most will not and cannot take chances.
Time was art and cultural critics would take the lead in defining a movement or style. They would go out on a limb. They would push the unpopular because they believed it was good. They would denounce works and fight with their creators. Feuds between artist and critic were renowned. For the most part, both gained from the conflict.
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It is unimaginable that critics of the past would deign to even review much of the art that our current cluster of critics tend to praise. Good writing is almost a thing of the past. It is fashionable to laud the middle brow and to deem the wretched acceptable if not great works or art or entertainment. Sad as it may be, it is understandable. Like other media people, there is little knowledge of the history of their subjects. Therefore, there are few reference points. Their analysis, overall is pathetic and short sighted. Writing styles hand out language that is impenetrable. Rather than serve as true critics who in turn advance the quality of the arts, driving their creators to do better, their task is mainly to talk about celebrity.
The presentations are as mediocre on a good day and do little or nothing to raise the quality of the art form. I start reading reviews and midway through I start wondering what the hell the writer is trying to say. There is no real point of view, and if there is a point of view quite often it is singular and simplistic. There is no guts to it.
As for the reviews on television or radio, they come off like promotion pieces designed to send you to the theater, or out to buy the book. There is a tie in between the entertainment industry, the media and the lucky slob who issues forth his McReview. Whether some are rewarded for writing favorably is a point of conjecture. But with so much else on the take, it is difficult to imagine that ambitious souls with questionable talent wouldn’t be susceptible to a material pat on the back.
As I noted earlier, there are still a fair amount of quality books, films, dance, and theater. But given the sheer quantity of what is produced for the market in a single year, the good art represents a slim minority. As for projecting and developing the complexity of human experience, with few exceptions you can forget about that. You would like to think that the torch is passed from one generation to another. You would like to believe that the arts endure and with the changes in society there are advances in the arts. Not in the technology of the arts, but in the arts themselves.
You would like to think that. But then you would be dreaming.
