The Arts Critic's Prime Directive

In an article written for the Los Angeles Times, Terry Teachout, drama critic for The Wall Street Journal who writes about himself and his work on his blog About Last Night, thinks there's some truth to the dictum, "Those who cannot do, review":

Critics don't get much respect. (Pause here for raucous laughter.) If you doubt it, look up the word "critic" in any book of quotations and see what you find.

H.L. Mencken's New Dictionary of Quotations is full of zinger after zinger, most of which revolve around a single theme: Those who cannot do, review. I especially like this sulfurous couplet by John Dryden: "They who write ill, and they who ne'er durst write / Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite."

Is that true? Not really — yet there's some truth in it, especially when it comes to my particular line of work.

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Many critics have managed to write well about the arts while keeping their creative maidenheads intact. But most of the best ones ... have had at least some professional experience in at least one of the art forms about which they write.

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[H]ands-on experience also gives critics a proper respect for what Wilfrid Sheed calls "the simple miracle of getting the curtain up every night." It's hard to sing Violetta in La Traviata or play the Stage Manager in Our Town. It's scary to go out in front of a thousand people and put yourself on the line. Unless you know what it takes to do that night after night — not just in theory but in your blood and bones — your criticism is likely to be more idealistic than realistic.

But isn't it an essential part of an arts critic's professional responsibility and obligation to measure a performance or an artwork against an ideal; an ideal formed by the critic's extensive study of and experience in the domain(s) which he covers; study and experience as a student and observer, not as a performer or creative participant? It seems to us that a critic who knows from his own attempts "what it takes" from a performer's or creator's standpoint is subtly handicapped in making clear-eyed and bias-free critical assessments as those assessments are certain to be colored by the experience of his own attempts which, more likely than not, are not at all reflective of the experience of those genuinely gifted performers and creators who pursue their art precisely because of that genuine gift no matter the generousness of the gift.

In any case, while empathy with and an understanding of performers and creators and their efforts formed and provoked by a critic's own performing and creative efforts surely have their place, that place ought never to establish itself as an element of a critic's critical assessment of a performance or artwork. All that ought to concern the arts critic in that regard is the finished product regardless of the circumstances of its making or what did or didn't go into that making (which matters the critic should feel free to treat separately if he finds them of sufficient interest in their own right), and how it measures up when measured against the critic's deeply informed ideal of what that performance or artwork ought to or could have been.

This, it seems to us, is the arts critic's Prime Directive, and the extent to which the critic disregards that directive a measure of the worthlessness of his critical judgments.