Arts Reviewing

A Practical Guide

Andy Plaice

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138675117
• eBook ISBN: 9781317199441
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Arts Reviewing: A Practical Guide is an accessible introduction to the world of arts criticism. Drawing on professional expertise and a range of cultural reviews from music, film, theatre, visual arts, television and books, Andy Plaice discusses different approaches to arts criticism, with tips on crafting great reviews.

Chapters explore:

• a brief history of arts criticism;

• researching and preparing for an assignment;

• legal and ethical boundaries when reviewing;

• finding your own writing style;

• starting and sustaining a career in arts criticism in the digital age.

The book is underpinned by over 20 interviews with leading practitioners from across Britain, America and Australia. They offer fascinating insights into the life of a critic, including their best and worst career moments and the debates impacting the field of arts criticism. Interviewees include Neil McCormick, rock critic at the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian theatre critic Lyn Gardner and television critic Mark Lawson (BBC/ the Guardian).

New approaches to reviewing techniques and writing style are combined with real-world advice from leading professionals in the field, making this book an ideal resource for students and graduates of journalism, cultural studies and media studies.

1

The role of the critic

There has never been a more challenging time to be an arts critic. Delivering to digitally literate readers who expect your thoughts on the play by the time they arrive home is one such challenge, as is meeting the expectations of your overworked arts editor, who knows that you’re both in the firing line should the axe swing again in another round of redundancies. That is to say nothing of the artists, who need and crave your attention, or the fact that the blog you started last year is hitting the spot with your witty observations but hasn’t made any money.

The ubiquity of digital content has combined with a downgrading of print – the once superior form has had its face slapped, with tumbling circulations resulting in reduced advertising revenues, which, in turn, has led to job losses and restricted space for arts coverage.

High-profile casualties have included arts writers at the Daily Telegraph and Independent on Sunday in the UK, and at Variety magazine in the USA. An outcry ensued (Kermode 2013) in 2010 when Variety cut two of its film critics and one theatre critic from the staff, thinking that readers ‘won’t notice’. In 2009 Telegraph arts staff all came off contract and were put on freelance terms, and in 2013 seven writers at the Independent on Sunday were axed as the paper dropped its ‘The Critics’ section in favour of a rebooted arts section, where it was hoped those same writers would be able to contribute. This was a sign of things to come as the Independent printed its final edition in March 2016 and reinvented itself online.

News and sport remain the kings of content in the traditional newspaper, but that is of no consolation if you write about contemporary art and you’re at the peak of your powers. Increasingly the arts critic has had to diversify if he or she wants to make a living, though we should not be under any illusion – there are scores of critics eager for business in every town and city – nor should we assume that we are only talking about full-time, professional reviewers.

In reality the number of writers commenting on other people’s art as a full-time career was – even pre-Internet – relatively low. Do a quick calculation of theatre critics, totting up the UK’s national newspapers from the Scotsman to the Sun along with its one trade newspaper (The Stage), and we have around a dozen or so people, a number drawn from papers without one (like the Sun) to those with two or even more (like the Guardian or The Times). Similar figures can be arrived at for other art forms, though film, music and television would see higher numbers given the wide choice of magazines on offer in addition to newspapers.

The likelihood is that these full-timers are adding value to their roles by interviewing artists or creatives and writing features, sometimes topical pieces sparked by a newsworthy event in the arts but more often than not what the British refer to as a preview and the Americans call an advance. That in itself creates an interesting ethical dilemma for the writer, which we shall explore later on. Lyn Gardner at the Guardian said that of her many visits to the theatre in a week – normally five, six or seven – ‘the vast majority of those would be things for review but a couple might be that I’m catching up on something that I’m thinking of blogging around, or it’s in preparation for a feature’.¹

Gardner is unusual in that she is on staff and writing full-time for one publication, whereas most freelance critics hop from one title to another (in some cases across disciplines as well, increasing their marketability). They might take on other work – teaching, training, writing books – and they possibly write a blog.

So far we have talked about criticism and reviewing as if it is the same thing. Let’s establish some ground rules.

A critic or reviewer?

A number of factors lie at the heart of this question, particularly the level of experience of the writer behind the words and the form in which they are published. Many publications offering judgement on works of art – film, popular music, classical music, television, books, theatre, games, visual art, comedy, dance and opera – signpost this kind of writing as ‘The Critics’ or a ‘Critics’ Choice’ when really the style and format is more rooted in reviewing. So what’s the difference?

We associate criticism with scholarly output: Johnson and Hazlitt wrote convincingly about poetry and Shakespeare and other great dramatists from a safe distance. They had reflected on what they wanted to say over a period of time, shaping their argument in the light of what they had experienced in the moment but informed by everything else they had read over many years of study. Today’s critic should think deeply about the art and evaluate its effect. The ingredients which form that evaluation will be looked at later in the book, though in practice the luxury of this thinking time may not present itself, to a large degree because of points already touched upon such as a shrinking team but also because of a pressure to be first with a verdict. The critic will often – though not always – be a specialist in their field, honing their skills over many years of practice, supporting their evaluation in the context of other art they have encountered, whereas reviewing suggests a quicker response. In the broadest sense it does mean something quicker: reaction to a live gig might be uploaded to your blog or your newspaper’s website with that last power chord still ringing in the air. Live performance is clearly unique and yet other art forms might happily be tackled in advance – all recorded television, for example, can be viewed and reviewed well ahead of its broadcast by writers allowed access to online streaming.

Let us take stock for a moment because it would be easy to see this as black and white when the reality is far from that: reviewing is quick, is generally written to a tighter word count than a lengthy helping of criticism but can display many of the hallmarks of criticism in terms of deeper thinking and levels of analysis. As the American author and lecturer Campbell B. Titchener (2005) puts it:

A review is, at its most basic, a report with opinion, but the reviewer can bring so much background to his or her observations that there can be a critical aspect to it.

Michael Billington is regarded as one of the great theatre critics. When he started at The Times in 1965, joining the Guardian in 1971, the Internet was a world away, and his finely crafted journalism would appear in the next day’s edition or the one after that. Nowadays his work is published on the Guardian’s website within a couple of hours of curtain call, but we would not dream of calling him anything other than a critic. So why the confusion? Who is who? Is it to do with the length of the piece, the experience of its writer or the esteem in which its publisher is held?

It’s all of those things, but it’s also influenced by something more simple: first, tradition and second, what trips more easily off the tongue. ‘The critics are in!’, cries that nervy stage director in his rallying call before press night. ‘Can’t wait to read their reviews!’, says the star (OK, maybe not, but go with it). Nobody says the reviewers are in, can’t wait for their criticism. It’s just easier the other way, and in any case ‘critic’ sounds more qualified. People who judge art in print or online may acknowledge that they are writing reviews, but they put ‘critic’ when it comes to a job title (which seems fair). They are not without ego – and more of that later.

Now we’ve established what to call them – though whisper it, they’ve been called much, much worse in private – who are these people?

Profile of a critic

Up until now nobody has designed a qualification of any kind that must be obtained in order to pass judgement on other people’s art. All you need is a computer and the willingness to publish.

In his autobiography, the English film star Michael Caine tells an amusing story about his time in the theatre as a young actor:

Early in my career, I once wondered who became a critic in the first place. In my days in repertory, after receiving a particularly brutal savaging from the local paper … I set out for the pub where the journalists hung out and located the drama critic. He turned out to be a spotty youth all of nineteen years old who explained to me that he had been forced to review our show because he had been late into work that week more times than any other reporter.

(Caine 1992, 326)

It had been a punishment. Not really what you want to hear as an ambitious performer but not an untypical situation in the regional press, which, collectively, was a hugely influential part of British life post-Second World War. By 1975, for example, the provincial evening newspaper market accounted for 6.5 million copies sold a day across 79 cities and large towns (Seymour-Ure 1991).

The unique selling point of local newspapers in the pre-Internet age was that they covered just about everything that moved – a paper of record, many of them proudly proclaimed – in a world more innocent, where publishing names and photographs really did shift copies. For the newspaper reporter it meant a fair share of night jobs attending a seemingly unstoppable supply of public meetings and a live performance every now and then. Arts coverage usually consisted of turning up to gigs by local bands on the way up and bigger names on the way down; it involved reviewing books and records sent into the office, which would occasionally cause disagreement because the reporter got to keep the freebie, and it involved seeing drama of wildly differing standards. An editor lucky enough to employ a reporter who wanted to watch amateur dramatics or a touring play starring someone vaguely famous would appreciate them; otherwise – as the Caine anecdote showed – it really was a case of avoiding live theatre for the majority of journalists.

This style of reviewing by inexperienced, or even reluctant, observers remains closer to the tradition of reporting rather than criticism, the emphasis being on what happened and who did it rather than any evaluation of what they did. Reporters would show up with the editor’s parting words still ringing in their ears: ‘Get the names, get the names!’

On a wider scale, critics with a national rather than regional outlook have reached their positions from a variety of routes, including listings magazines, job advertisements and stints doing work experience. An Oxbridge education would certainly have opened doors in the past to some forms of arts criticism, helping lead to accusations that the profession was filled by an unofficial club – in 2007 Nicholas Hytner, former artistic director at the National Theatre, despaired at what he saw as ‘dead white men’ (Hoyle 2007) dominating the field of drama criticism – but that is not to suggest all critics across the arts trod a similar path. Pat Long’s history of the NME (2012) describes how this much-loved publication became hugely influential, despite employing writers who found real life difficult.

Going on tour with a rock band, sitting in the stalls five nights a week or drinking in the atmosphere of a rowdy comedy club do not fit a nine-to-five lifestyle, and these worlds will attract their fair share of characters.

Ripping up the rule book in criticism currently are bloggers and, catching up fast, vloggers. Writing and talking from the hip, these newcomers continue to challenge the old guard of the printed review with their conversational tone, experimental style and ability to shine a light on the easily overlooked. Plainly, there is nothing new in being new. It could be argued that two of the greatest arts critics, theatre men Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson, were doing just that when they went against the grain in the 1950s – Tynan, for example, with his creative, groundbreaking style or Hobson in seeing what nobody else could see: the promise of a truly great playwright in one Harold Pinter.

Arts bloggers use social media to draw attention to their work. Mostly they have no formal training in journalism – which could easily apply to large swathes of professional critics, too – and they are often under 30. Working independently or in partnerships or small groups to produce websites/online magazines, these people have caused a new landscape to emerge. Online critics and bloggers are often motivated in different ways from mainstream writers. Their intention may be to showcase something otherwise overlooked or indulge their total belief in the art form, or at least a movement or genre within that form. If their writing serves to highlight their work, perhaps as a springboard for other paid opportunities, then all well and good.

From the Internet explosion of the late 1990s, the arts world still cannot agree whether it is a good or a bad thing that amateur critics now exist. Is there room for the kitchen-table blogger alongside the seasoned professional? As later chapters explore, it’s not so much about whether one is getting paid and the other one not, but the huge shift in power between writer and reader.

Judgement from above

The great editor, writer and essayist Samuel Johnson wrote in 1759 that,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The role of the critic
• 2 A history of arts criticism
• 3 Preparation and research
• 4 Writing the review: Part one
• 5 Writing the review: Part two
• 6 The impact of criticism
• 7 Legal and ethical boundaries
• 8 Everyone’s a critic
• 9 Breaking into the business
• 10 The new reviewer: Making it pay
• Conclusion
• Index