Sounds & Fury

Things May Be Looking Up

Here are two news items from the worlds of opera and the spoken-word theater: here and here, respectively.

1: The heirs of Francis Poulenc are nun too pleased with Dmitri Tcherniakov's 2010 production of Dialogues des carmélites. They've taken the Bavarian State Opera to court, alleging the concept, in particular the final scene, misrepresents the 1957 opera.

2: Simon Stone, the resident director of Belvoir St. Theatre, an Australian company, jumped head first into a pail of boiling oil when he took it upon himself to rewrite [Arthur Miller's] Death of a Salesman. Not only did he cut the play's epilogue, but he altered the manner in which Willy Loman, Arthur Miller's protagonist, meets his death. In the original play, Willy dies in a car crash that may or may not have been intentional; in Mr. Stone's staging, he commits suicide by gassing himself. On top of that, Belvoir neglected to inform ICM Partners, the agency that represents Mr. Miller's estate and licenses his plays for production throughout the world, that Mr. Stone was altering the script. [...] No sooner did ICM get wind of the changes than Belvoir was informed that if the company didn't perform Death of a Salesman in its entirety — complete with epilogue — the production would be shut down....

Things may be looking up on the staging front — finally.

An Apologia For Serious Critics And Criticism

If there exists a finer, more compelling argument for the need, necessity, and value of dedicated (i.e., professional), serious, deeply informed and literate critics and criticism in the arts and literature than the one written for The New Yorker titled "A Critic’s Manifesto" by Daniel Mendelsohn we've never encountered it.

An excerpt:

By dramatizing their own thinking on the page, by revealing the basis of their judgments and letting you glimpse the mechanisms by which they exercised their (individual, personal, quirky) taste, all these [professional] critics were, necessarily, implying that you could arrive at your own, quite different judgments—that a given work could operate on your own sensibility in a different way. What I was really learning from those critics each week was how to think. How to think (we use the term so often that we barely realize what we’re saying) critically — which is to say, how to think like a critic, how to judge things for myself. To think is to make judgments based on knowledge: period.

[...]

And so the fact is that (to invoke the popular saying) everyone is not a critic. This, in the end, may be the crux of the problem, and may help explain the unusual degree of violence in the reaction to the stridently negative reviews that appeared in the Times Book Review earlier this summer, triggering the heated debate about critics. In an essay about phony memoirs that I wrote a few years ago, I argued that great anger expressed against authors and publishers when traditionally published memoirs turn out to be phony was a kind of cultural displacement: what has made us all anxious about truth and accuracy in personal narrative is not so much the published memoirs that turn out to be false or exaggerated, which has often been the case, historically, but rather the unprecedented explosion of personal writing (and inaccuracy and falsehood) online, in Web sites and blogs and anonymous commentary—forums where there are no editors and fact-checkers and publishers to point an accusing finger at.

Similarly, I wonder whether the recent storm of discussion about criticism, the flurry of anxiety and debate about the proper place of positive and negative reviewing in the literary world, isn’t a by-product of the fact that criticism, in a way unimaginable even twenty years ago, has been taken out of the hands of the people who should be practicing it: true critics, people who, on the whole, know precisely how to wield a deadly zinger, and to what uses it is properly put. When, after hearing about them, I first read the reviews of Peck’s and Ohlin’s works, I had to laugh. Even the worst of the disparagements wielded by the reviewers in question paled in comparison to the groundless vituperation and ad hominem abuse you regularly encounter in Amazon.com reviews or the “comments” sections of literary publications. Yes, we’re all a bit sensitive to negative reviewing these days; but if you’re going to sit in judgment on anyone, it shouldn’t be the critics.

RTWT here.

Ave Atque Vale, Gore

For the second time in the space of a month our hiatus from blogging is interrupted by the death of yet another irreplaceable artist whose passing we cannot let go without comment.

Gore Vidal — writer; public intellectual; notorious wit, provocateur, and celebrity figure — died yesterday at his home in Los Angeles from complications of pneumonia reports The New York Times. He was 86.

Mr. Vidal possessed an almost embarrassing abundance of gifts: handsome to the point of beautiful, his cutting acerbic wit and sharpness of intellect were wonders to behold on numerous occasions on television talk shows and on the lecture circuit. As if those weren't gifts sufficient, Mr. Vidal, one of this country's most prolific writers, was perhaps the most elegant writer this country has ever produced, a gift on display in his 25 novels and scads of essays too numerous to count, not to mention several plays and a number of TV dramas and Hollywood movies.

With Mr. Vidal's passing, the world has been deprived of one of its most accomplished artists.

Atque in perpetuum, Gore, ave atque vale.

Speaking Of Colossal Stupidity

No, this has nothing to do with Peter Gelb or opera but with the world premiere of a musical version of the hit movie An Officer and a Gentleman titled, cleverly, An Officer and a Gentleman: The Musical. The premiere took place down under in Sydney, Australia and was given a savage review in the Arts pages of The Australian by Deputy Features Editor Deborah Jones. Wrote Ms. Jones in part:

As An Officer and a Gentleman: The Musical came to its close at Friday night's world-premiere performance, the women in front of me exchanged excited glances and started wriggling with pleasure. The Oscar-winning song "Up Where We Belong" from the 1982 film was finally being let loose. It's what the women expected to hear, but more than that, there was something they expected to see, without which they would have felt badly cheated. They got it.

Newly minted naval officer Zack Mayo — Ben Mingay, in the Richard Gere part — strides into the factory where Paula Pokrifki — Amanda Harrison in the Debra Winger role — is at work making boxes. Mingay scoops Harrison up into his arms. Cue cheers and thunderous applause.

Then — and I kid you not — the pair head up a set of stairs to a platform on which they are solemnly transported up and out of our sight. Love lifts us up, you see.

This kind of cringe-making obviousness comes as no surprise, however, given what goes before. If there is a laborious, lifeless way to have a conversation, get across a plot point or express an emotion, Douglas Day Stewart and Sharleen Cooper Cohen (book) and Ken Hirsch and Robin Lerner (music and lyrics) have found it.

On reading the review, Mr. Stewart was understandably a bit miffed and in an utterly stupid counterattack chose class warfare as his weapon. Wrote Mr. Stewart in a piece for the same Australian Arts pages:

As the Academy Award-nominated writer of the film An Officer and a Gentleman and co-writer of the world-premiere musical that opened last Friday at the Lyric Theatre in Sydney, I want to thank the enthusiastic audiences who have filled the theatre through previews and opening week performances, giving standing ovations to our talented performers.

And I want to urge those of you who are reserving judgment to ignore the so-called review that appeared today in this paper. After four decades in this business I can tell you this was not a review by any standards. It was an "execution" by someone clearly unable to feel human emotion, or to put it in a kinder way, by someone whose highbrow tastes do not represent you. Perhaps she had made her mind up before seeing the show.

I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that many critics pretend to represent the popular taste but often only represent an eclectic, overly intellectual point of view that allows them to insulate themselves inside a cocoon of superiority. I like to think of them as that unpopular outsider from school who can now wield a cudgel of revenge against those of us who feel true emotion. When you read a review of a new artistic effort that has only harsh negativity to offer (like the one in this paper) that is your warning that you have run into such an emotional cripple. [...] If I can be your Officer and a Gentleman for a moment, I want to warn you Sydney theatregoers how dangerous it is to have voices like this speaking on your behalf.

Yeah. That'll show that Jones person a thing or two and, better, bring audiences swarming into the theater.

Idiot.

Authentic Shakespeare?

Lord preserve us (and the Bard forgive us)! HIP has now invaded the world of the spoken theater: Shakespeare spoken as Shakespeare would have heard it spoken. Give a listen.

"Authentic" Shakespeare?

Let's hope not.

Teachout On Kushner

We're not much of a fan of culture and drama critic Terry Teachout whose blog, About Last Night, we long ago removed from our S&F Culture Blogs listing as we found it mostly devoid of any real content its entries almost exclusively (and totally shamelessly) of the advertisements-for-myself sort and therefore useless as meaningful contributions to the cultural blogosphere not to mention genuinely annoying in themselves.

Mr. Teachout, as we suspect most of you know, is principally the drama critic for The Wall Street Journal and the chief culture critic for Commentary magazine. As we have only passing interest in the theater we don't often read his WSJ columns, and as his writings for Commentary have largely to do with music about which we find him something less than perceptive and enlightening when the subject is classical music, we don't often have occasion to read his writings for that journal either except when they're linked by a source we follow regularly and whose judgment we trust. Such a link was posted today by the still indispensible Arts & Letters Daily to a fairly lengthy Teachout piece in Commentary not on music but on playwright Tony Kushner which piece shows what a first-rate, perceptive, and enlightening writer Teachout can be when writing on matters about which he's truly knowledgeable and about which he has something of genuine value to say. Following, an excerpt.

Part of the reason why Kushner is so admired by elite opinion makers is that he is, as Newsweek pointed out, the living embodiment of their unanimously held views on a wide range of political and social issues.

[...]

The supremely high esteem in which Kushner is held in bien-pensant circles was demonstrated in May when the board of trustees of the City University of New York voted to deny him an honorary degree, citing his belief that Israel was “founded in a program that, if you really want to be blunt about it, was ethnic cleansing. . . . I have a problem with the idea of a Jewish state. It would have been better if it never happened.” The response of the cultural establishment to the board’s decision was so reflexively and overwhelmingly negative that CUNY’s executive board voted a few days later to overrule it and confer the degree.

As it happens, the uproar at CUNY took place at the end of a theater season during which Kushner was omnipresent. In October, the Signature Theatre Company mounted the first New York revival of Angels in America, which played to full houses throughout its long run. Seven months later, the Public Theater gave the New York premiere of The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, Kushner’s first new full-length play in a decade. But unlike the Angels revival, which was greeted with the usual lockstep praise, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide received unexpectedly mixed notices — albeit mostly of the cautious kind in which the reviewer takes care to make clear his otherwise extravagant admiration of the author. Even so, it was evident from the reviews that Kushner’s new play was felt to have fallen well short of Angels.

In fact, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide and Angels are of a piece. Like Kushner’s other plays, they are the work of a flawed artist ill served by the indiscriminate esteem in which his work is held — and whose problematic style may at last have reached the point of diminishing critical returns.

RTWT here.

Shades of Schlingensief

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 6:57 PM Eastern on 7 Jul to correct a transposed phrase.]

You might think a mutilated dead bunny onstage in a theater a new thing but you'd be wrong. The notorious Regie Christoph Schlingensief (1960-2010) been there, done that in his 2004 staging of Wagner's Parsifal for the Bayreuther Festspiele (yes, you read that right: Parsifal) albeit his mutilated dead bunny was shown in images rather than onstage live — er, dead.

Well, actually you won't be able to see that mutilated dead bunny onstage after all if you attend the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of As You Like It in New York as New York bunny-lovers have risen in outraged protest against just the very idea, and so the producers have decided to, um, cut the mutilated dead bunny completely for the New York run of the play even though the mutilated dead bunny played without incident in the company's production of the play in London some two years ago.

New York's loss, bunny's gain.

Built By Amphion's Lyre

That Richard Wagner as a composer of opera was a consummate genius is something that for over a century is beyond all dispute and debate except by those of the lunatic fringe who have perpetual and ignorant objection to Wagner on other grounds. Not so well known is that by all the best firsthand accounts, Wagner was a consummate genius as an actor and stage director as well. And I think we have to add yet another consummate genius award to Wagner: as a designer of opera houses the Bayreuther Festspielhaus being eloquent testimony to that genius as the governing design concept of the building was Wagner's own. Here's Wagner himself on the Festspielhaus as it began to be built:

To explain the plan of the festival theatre now being built in Bayreuth, I believe that I cannot do better than begin with the need I felt first, namely, that of rendering invisible the technical hearth of the music: the orchestra. For this one constraint led step by step to the total redesigning of the auditorium of our neo-European theatre. Those of my readers who are familiar with some of my earlier writings will already know my thoughts on the concealment of the orchestra, and I hope that even if they had not already felt this for themselves, a subsequent visit to the opera will have convinced them of the rightness of my feeling that the constant and, indeed, insistent sight of the technical apparatus needed to produce the sound constitutes a most tiresome distraction. In my essay on Beethoven [Beethoven, 1870] I was able to explain how at thrilling performances of ideal works of music we may ultimately cease to notice this reprehensible evil as a result of the force with which all our senses are retuned, resulting, as it were, in a kind of neutralization of our sense of sight. With a stage performance, by contrast, it is a question of attuning our sense of sight to precisely apprehending an image, which can be done only by distracting it completely and by preventing it from noticing any reality than lies in between, such reality including the technical apparatus needed to produce the image in the first place.

A Meaningful Loss

We don't know Julie Taymor nor have we ever even so much as exchanged a word with her. Nevertheless, crushed is not too strong a term to express our feelings on learning of her effective ouster from the beleaguered production of the Broadway musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark; this even in the face of our earlier declaring she should never have involved herself with this piece of pop trash in the first place much less have squandered almost ten years (ten years!) of her valuable creative life on the thing. We don't give a rat's ass about the show nor do we give a rat's ass about the $65M the investors in the musical stand to lose on the production. It's, after all, only money, and money and investors are common commodities and entirely interchangeable and replaceable entities. Unique, brilliantly gifted creators such as Julie Taymor are neither common nor interchangeable or replaceable. No matter how Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark turns out in the end (and knowing no more about this production than what we've read in the media, we confidently predict that absent Ms. Taymor at the helm it will, artistically speaking, be little more or other than just another piece of execrable pop trash entertainment in a world awash in execrable pop trash entertainment), the debacle attending this production will limit severely future professional opportunities open to Ms. Taymor and that's a meaningful loss — not only for Ms. Taymor and the world of the performing arts, but for us all.

More's the pity.

A Suggested Solution To The Eurotrash Problem

We once suggested, only half in jest, that every Eurotrash Regietheater Regie should be hung by the balls (or an appropriate female equivalent thereof as the case may require) while being made to watch a year's worth of reruns of Gilligan's Island.

Well, that's just a smidge draconian not to mention illegal, and so we herewith propose a solution that's not at all draconian and could be made perfectly legal.

Let a law be established internationally that would make it a criminal offense, punishable by a stiff fine and/or imprisonment, to bill, advertise, or in any way promote a Eurotrash production of a work as a production of that work of the same name by the work's original creator. That would leave Eurotrash Regietheater Regies perfectly free to do whatever their self-involved, self-serving little hearts desired as long as their creations were clearly identified as their creations and not the creation of the work's original creator.

That should make everyone happy and give no one cause for complaint.

Well, perhaps theater owners would complain, but that's their concern entirely and none of ours.

This Should Nail The Coffin Shut

The seemingly forever in preview, accident prone, $65M Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has at last been reviewed by The New York Times's chief drama critic Ben Brantley, and a devastating piece it is, too. Writes Mr. Brantley in part:

[Near the end of the first act of of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,”] calamity struck, and it was a real-life (albeit small) calamity — not some tedious, confusing tripe involving a pretty girl dangling from a skyscraper and supervillains laying siege to Manhattan. And not the more general and seriously depressing disaster that was the sum of the mismatched parts that had been assembled onstage.

No, an honest-to-gosh, show-stopping glitch occurred, just as the title character of this new musical was about to vanquish or be vanquished by the evil Green Goblin. Never fully explained “mechanical difficulties” were announced by an amplified voice (not immediately distinguishable from the other amplified voices we had been hearing for what felt like forever), as the actors in the scene deflated before our eyes. And for the first time that night something like genuine pleasure spread through the house.

[...]

The sheer ineptitude of this show, inspired by the Spider-Man comic books, loses its shock value early. After 15 or 20 minutes, the central question you keep asking yourself is likely to change from “How can $65 million look so cheap?” to “How long before I’m out of here?”

Our heartfelt sympathy goes out to the show's creator, writer, and director, the brilliantly gifted Julie Taymor, but as we remarked previously, this mindless pop trash is not the sort of thing she should have involved herself with in the first place.

Read the entire Ben Brantley review here.

We Just Don't Get It

On first reading some time ago that brilliantly gifted director/designer Julie Taymor had undertaken to do a Broadway musical based on the comic book character Spider-Man with music and lyrics by members of the rock band U2, our thinking was that she was doing it as a lark; a brief respite or hiatus from more substantial work. Turns out, she was doing it in all seriousness — some $65M worth of serious by some estimates, and still counting; the most costly Broadway musical in history by a huge margin. What we don't understand is why such a gifted artist would, in all seriousness, have willingly involved herself with such clear pop crap. Better would her time have been spent had she, for instance, lobbied Peter Gelb to offer her the Met's new Ring. The fit would have been perfect, and the Met, the world of opera, and the world generally would have been the richer for it. Instead, what we have is yet another piece of pop trash (and we dare you to be reckless enough to question how we know it's pop trash without seeing or hearing so much as a second of it) cluttering an already pop-trash-cluttered culture no matter how theatrically spectacular it may be (and we've no doubt that with Ms. Taymor at the helm, theatrically spectacular it will be).

We just don't get it. But perhaps after the fact we will.

Urban Intellectual Fodder

There is a certain kind of art made here in America for a lofty but banal purpose: to enliven the contemporary educated mind.

You know: the mind of you and me, dear 3QD reader -- the NPR listener, the New Yorker reader, the English major, the filmgoer who laps up subtitles, the gallery-goer who can tell a Koons from a Hirst.

This art is superior to the cascading pile of blockbuster kitsch-dreck-crap that passes for pop culture, but only superior by a few pips.

This art sure ain't Picasso, or Joyce, or Rossellini, or the Beatles, or even Sondheim. It's more Woody Allen than Ingmar Bergman, more Joyce Carol Oates than James Joyce, more Jeff Koons than Duchamp, more Arcade Fire than the Beatles.

It does not expand the borders of art or wreck the tyranny of the possible or enlarge our hungry little minds.

It is art of the day to inform the conversation of the day by the people of the day who need to be reassured that their taste is a little more elevated than that of the woman on the subway reading Nora Roberts.

For want of a better label, here's a suggested honorific for this kind of art:

Urban Intellectual Fodder.

RTW Spot-On T here.

Bloody Unbelievable

See, it goes like this. In cities smaller than your major metropolitan areas, it makes economic sense to support and preserve regional art museums and legitimate theater companies, but makes little economic sense to support and preserve regional symphony orchestras because there's no other way to experience what's on offer by the former two, but what's on offer by regional symphony orchestras can readily be experienced by the simple (and inexpensive) expedient of downloading the requisite MP3s from iTunes and playing them back on one's iPod.

What's wrong with this picture?

Answer: Just about everything. In fact, it's so abjectly mindless that one suspects it surely must have been suggested by a clear simpleton. Sad to tell, it wasn't. It was suggested (if not precisely in our above words) by none other than big time culture maven Terry Teachout, and in The Wall Street Journal, no less.

Bloody unbelievable.

We know where he's coming from, actually. Mr. Teachout is an art freak (art as in paintings and sculpture), and a live-theater freak as well (he's the WSJ's drama critic), and has stated publicly that he no longer attends classical music concerts because he'd much rather listen to his favorite recordings of whatever music might be on offer at Lincoln Center, Alice Tully Hall, or Carnegie Hall. Therefore, reasons Mr. Teachout (or so it seems), while experiencing reproduced paintings via, say, a deluxe coffee table book or stage plays reproduced via DVD is a categorical no-no because experiencing reproduced paintings and stage plays cannot possibly equal the aesthetic experience provided by the live thing, with classical music, experiencing a reproduction (heard via an MP3 on a bloody iPod, no less!) is a perfectly acceptable substitute aesthetically for experiencing a live performance, especially when that live performance is by an orchestra that's something less than world-class.

And this is a man who's a sitting member of the National Council on the Arts!

Little wonder this country is in such dire straits culturally.

The RSC Hamlet

Today, the assertion, "Shakespeare is the greatest playwright who ever lived," comes easily to the lips as does, say, the assertion, "Babe Ruth is the greatest baseball player of all time"; even to the lips of those who've not read so much as a single line written by Shakespeare much less seen his plays performed onstage, or to the lips of those who've never so much as watched a baseball game. They're commonplace givens today; even axiomatic. And while one may get a dissenting argument from experts regarding the latter, no such arguments can be lodged in earnest against the former. One has but to be confronted by a superbly played and mounted production of a play such as Hamlet to quell all argument on the point. Just the sheer beauty of Shakespeare's language, and the dramatically resonant depth and profundity of his trenchant, psychologically spot-on dialogue are, by themselves, enough to bring one to the verge of tears.

Such a production is the superbly played and mounted TV film production of Hamlet directed by Gregory Doran produced for the BBC by England's Royal Shakespeare Company, a film aired here for the first time this past week on PBS with David Tennant as Hamlet, Sir Patrick Stewart as both Claudius and The Ghost, Penny Downie as Gertrude, and Oliver Ford Davies as Polonius. We just finished watching our tape of the film (the first time since its airing we've had a quiet three consecutive hours to devote to it), and were simply riveted by it. Questions of interpretation aside, and with the single exception of a cringe-inducing and embarrassing couple of minutes when David Tennant as Hamlet, in his, "O that this too too solid flesh would melt" soliloquy, forgot or disregarded Hamlet's instructions to the Players to play their roles and speak their lines without "tear[ing] a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings," the performances by everyone, principals and bit-players alike, were just sterling, and the production, lushly but tastefully set.

If you missed seeing this film first time round, you owe it to yourself to make good the deficit. For that purpose, the film can be seen in full here.

What's that I hear you saying? What's the deal with that modern-dress, 21st-century setting?

Say what? Modern-dress, 21st-century setting?

Oh.

So it is.

Out Of The Frying Pan Into The Fire?

Apropos this August S&F post's closing "Stay tuned," this announcement in yesterday's New York Times doesn't strike us as particularly comforting or encouraging:

Jonathan Landman, a deputy managing editor of The New York Times, on Tuesday was named the new culture editor, adding to a résumé that includes top positions in a unusually wide range of news departments[!].

The executive editor, Bill Keller, chose Mr. Landman to replace Sam Sifton, who has been named The Times’s new restaurant critic.

[...]

Mr. Landman served as acting culture editor in 2004 and 2005, when he reorganized the department. He has been an editor on the newspaper’s masthead since 2003, first as assistant managing editor overseeing the paper’s longest, most ambitious reporting projects.

Previously, he was the metropolitan editor, the editor of the Week in Review section, acting editor of the Sunday Business section and deputy editor of the Washington bureau.

A graduate of Amherst College and Columbia’s graduate school of journalism, Mr. Landman joined The Times in 1987 after having been deputy city editor of The Daily News in New York and a reporter at The Chicago Sun-Times and at Newsday.

Uh-huh. A regular hard-core-news-type guy Mr. Landman, or so it would appear. His replacing Sam Sifton as The Times's culture editor strikes us initially rather like an out of the frying pan into the fire deal vis-à-vis The Times's arts pages.

But let us not be hasty here and indulge in that reckless practice of judging a book by its cover, so to speak. Instead, let us withhold judgment for the next few months to see how this actually plays out even as we confess our expectations are something less than sanguine.

And so, once again, Stay tuned.

The Long And Short Of It

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 12:57 PM Eastern on 9 Sep. See below.]

Regular readers of S&F will be aware that very little has been written here about theater, and what little has been written is mostly negative as our feeling is that, aesthetically speaking, whatever can be expressed onstage live in the theater can potentially be better expressed through the medium of film (see, for instance, this 2004 S&F post).

Playwright, theater theorist and critic, and blogger George Hunka of Superfluities Redux, a champion of live theater, has up a recent post dealing with the state of contemporary theater criticism wherein are contained the following remarks:

[W]hat little long-form creative criticism about theatre that is being written [today] fails to find outlets in general print publications.... And electronic media, such as the blogosphere? At the panel [on contemporary theater criticism convened at a conference held by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education], Mac Wellman (no slouch at essayistic meanderings above, beneath and around theatre himself) offered his opinion that the blogosphere too was a disappointment at providing this, and, after seven-plus years of writing and disseminating my writing via Superfluities Redux, I had to agree. This is not the fault of the medium itself, but rather of the assumptions that have become attached to it: that the "ideal" blog post is short, informal, personal, whathaveyou. I'd like to meet the Plato who decided that this was indeed the Ideal. In its often-contentless navelgazing [sic] (and subsequent public display of the lint found therein), its 300-to-600 word reviews of everything from Shrek to Long Day's Journey into Night (whether meaningful discussion of these plays can be contained in such a short space or not), its anxious attention-deficit-disorder jumping from topic to topic and inability to stay focused (not only from post to post but from paragraph to paragraph as well), its frequent expressions of personal venom in lieu of professional or aesthetic dialogue, the theatrical and dramatic blogosphere has quickly become like the print media's treatment of theatre and drama. Only worse. [italic emphasis ours]

We confess to being one of those "Plato[s]" who have declared that the "Ideal" blog post is always short in length as compared with the long-form sort advocated by Mr. Hunka. A blog post is no proper place for such long-form disquisitions which disquisitions are more proper to specialist print journals. As we wrote in a 2004 post titled, "Writing For The Blogosphere",

And what, by far, have I found to be the most egregious fault of serious-minded writing in the blogosphere generally? Lack of discipline. Or, as [journalism professor and then-weblogger Brendan] O'Neill put it:

Then there are the over-long posts — 2000 words, when 400 words would have been fine. As Voltaire once wrote: "The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out." Blogging everything that comes into your head is a recipe for revealing nothing of substance about yourself or your views.

Quite right. There's simply no excuse or justification for a lack of discipline of that sort; unless, that is, one's an academic where the rule — nay, the imperative — is never let 1000 words do if you can manage 10,000.

There's precious little appropriate to the weblog format, the print equivalent of which would be the daily or weekly newspaper column, that requires more than 1000 words or so to express fully and adequately if one knows what one is talking about; 1500 at the outside, but typically that many only when one's post includes a necessary quoting of others' text(s), or the inclusion of, say, cast lists and credits, or other such pertinent technical data. By and large, a post longer than that and one's either an inept writer, doesn't know what one wants to say, doesn't know how to say what one wants to say, simply loves the sound of one's own voice, or any combination of two or more of the foregoing. I can't begin to list the weblogs I no longer read due this one fault alone (well, actually I can, but will here refrain from doing so).

It's a sobering thought, or ought to be, that one of the most justifiably lauded and influential writers among American critics and journalists, H. L. Mencken, first made his mark on American letters largely by column-length pieces that averaged some 800 words or so (no, I haven't word-counted his early pieces; I'm taking that word-count figure from other sources). If Mencken required only some 800 words per piece to get his points across and first make his mark as a writer, less gifted writers (which I can say without fear of serious contradiction would include just about all who write for the blogosphere) can be permitted 1000-1500, rarely more. Any more is little more than gross self-indulgence which one ought to feel nothing but shame for inflicting upon an innocent public.

And with that, I'll step down from my soapbox, but not before leaving my fellow webloggers with two final sobering thoughts. The 1953 seminal article by Watson and Crick in the science journal Nature describing the just-discovered structure of DNA and how that structure was derived took up all of 900 words, and Lincoln's dedicatory address at Gettysburg, all of 267.

And to that, we've little further to add as adding just a little more would quickly bring this post beyond the "Ideal" 1000-1500-word limit without saying much more worth saying on the subject.

---

Update (12:57 PM Eastern on 9 Sep): For more on this, see this S&F post.

Back Where He Belongs

In a snarky July 2007 S&F piece titled, "Explains Just About Everything", wherein we raked The New York Times's culture editor, Sam Sifton, rather nastily over the proverbial coals for his, um, less than enlightened editorship of the once sterling Times culture section, we noted that Mr. Sifton's background hardly qualified him for that editorship, taking as our source this excerpt from the 2005 Times press release announcing Mr. Sifton's appointment as The Times's culture editor which excerpt we quoted in our 2007 piece:

[Mr. Sifton] joined The Times in 2001 as deputy Dining editor, and became Dining editor later that year. Previously he was a founding editor of Talk magazine where he worked until 1998. Before joining Talk he held a number of positions at the New York Press from 1990 to 1998, including managing editor, media critic, senior editor, contributing editor and restaurant critic.

Well, it appears the powers that be at The Times have now finally, if somewhat belatedly, realized the error of their 2005 decision, and, according to The Times, are sending Mr. Siff back where he rightly belongs.

The culture editor of The New York Times, Sam Sifton, will become the new restaurant critic, Bill Keller, the executive editor, announced on Wednesday, filling one of the highest-profile jobs at the paper and setting in motion the search to fill another.

Mr. Sifton will replace Frank Bruni, the [restaurant] critic for the past five years, who will become a regular writer for The Times’s Sunday magazine.

The change will mark a return for Mr. Sifton, 43, who gained attention in the 1990s as a restaurant critic for New York Press, an alternative weekly.

Sounds to us like a good move for Mr. Sifton, The Times, and for us (collective us) — that last depending, of course, on who will be replacing Mr. Sifton as the new culture editor of The Times.

Stay tuned.

The Role Of The Arts Critic In A Wired, Postmodern World

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 2:00 PM Eastern on 1 Aug. See below.]

Blogger, lawyer, and freelance writer Zach Carstensen of The Gathering Note — a fine classical music blog heretofore unknown to us but called to our attention via a post by Scott Spiegelberg of Musical Perceptions, and now added to our exclusive Culture Blogs listing on our left sidebar — has this to say about arts critics and arts criticism:

I am not a journalist by training but I have freelanced. I am a lawyer. I didn’t go to J school and I have never been a staff critic. What I know is arts journalism is changing and I think it is changing for the better. Arbiters of taste are becoming a thing of the past when the Internet and recorded music can help anyone become an expert on Brahms, Beethoven, or even someone like Conlon Nancarrow. There are more tools than ever for people to form opinions about the music they are hearing and the events they are going to and just as many ways to express an opinion about what they are hearing. Facebook and Twitter let Average Joes pan a performance or tout its virtues.

These changes might seem unsettling. For people who run magazines and newspapers it is probably as unsettling as the emergence of Napster was to the recorded music industry. I think these changes bother people because they diminish the power of the print media as an opinion maker.

[...]

Arts organizations are nervous for completely different reasons. As magazines, newspapers, and critics disappear there are fewer mainstream publications telling them their performances are good. Ironically this hand wringing is occurring at the same time the explosion of social networking and other platforms has made it easier for their audience to comment on what they are hearing. This new type of commentary isn’t always good, but some of it is very good especially when compared to the Mad Lib concert reviews we have become accustomed to. Ultimately, shouldn’t the opinion of the audience matter more than someone who brands himself a critic?

In the world of the arts (as opposed to the world of popular culture), the answer to that question is, of course, a resounding No — that is, assuming the one who "brands himself a critic" has the education, training, experience, and expertise that would bestow upon him a right to that title. For arts organizations to look to and take in earnest the opinions of the arts world equivalent of the Common Man to assess how well they're doing artistically is a perfect prescription for artistic suicide. The arts world's Common Man may be entitled to an opinion, but it's entirely worthless to anyone but himself and his kind. To say the thing less generously, the arts world's Common Man is not entitled to an opinion beyond expressing that he liked or disliked whatever it is he heard and/or saw, and, given the source, we all know just how worthless that sort of judgment is except to the one declaring it.

Mr. Carstensen then muses,

I don’t believe critics will disappear, but their role will change. Someone has to shape the discourse. Maybe the role of the critic is one of a moderator; someone who might expound on a subject but never pretend to be the final word on a subject. Maybe a critic is someone who is interested in what other people have to say and is willing to provide a forum for them to express themselves. Maybe the critic is the conduit between the media that remain, the audience, and the musicians. What do you think the role of the critic should be?

And the answer to that question is that the role of a genuine arts critic (i.e., someone who has the education, training, experience, and expertise that would bestow upon him a right to that title) should and ought to be what it's been since Day One: to provide illumination for, and educate and generally enlighten the arts world's Common Man, and to provide aesthetically, technically, and historically well-informed critical feedback to arts organizations who have forever looked to well-informed critics to help them (the arts organizations) make clear-eyed assessments of their own artistic performance notwithstanding their perennial and de rigueur bitching and moaning about the uselessness of critics and what they have to say.

We fervently hope Mr. Carstensen is right in his expectation that arts critics (genuine arts critics, of course) will not disappear. They're a necessary element in and component of a culturally healthy and flourishing arts scene, for in their absence yawns the mosh pit.

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Update (2:00 PM Eastern on 1 Aug): Zach Carstensen responds by selectively quoting from and commenting on our above (he omits quoting or making any comment on or mention of what we had to say regarding the central issue to hand: the role of the arts critic), and in the process thoroughly misunderstands our point while unwittingly confirming it; viz., that the arts world's Common Man isn't qualified or competent to hold an opinion beyond expressing what they liked or didn't like about what they heard and/or saw (or will hear and/or see). None but a properly educated, trained, experienced, and expert arts critic is qualified and competent to express opinions beyond that and have those opinions worth something other than their worth to the one expressing them.

What's that we hear you saying? That's an outright elitist position to take?

You betcherass it is. It's also an ineluctable truth of the real world.

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.

[...]

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.

[...]

[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.