Julian Mesri

This post comes from a personal experience of some very near/dear friends of mine – and it also comes from years of having to live in fear of the critic, particularly in theatre, where our audiences are so scarce and the work we do is so personally-driven, that the well-placed words of a few souls whose subjective experience has been elevated to the point of truth have the ability to shape public opinion and even history more than the works themselves.

How does the subjective experience of a work become the truth of the artwork more than the work itself?  Well, we want to make sure what we choose to see satisfies our need for art – but as Adorno points out this can become startlingly contradictory -

“Insofar as the now typical attitude makes the artwork something factual, even art’s mimetic element, itself incompatible with whatever is purely a thing is bartered off as a commodity. The consumer arbitrarily projects his impulses – mimetic remnants – on what is presented to him. Prior to total administration, the subject who viewed, heard or read a work was to lose himself, forget himself, extinguish himself in the artwork. The identification carried out by the subject was not that of making the artwork like himself, but rather that of making himself like the artwork,”

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (23)

Though these words were written more than 40 years ago, there is a scary truth in them that we have not turned away from. How often than not, amongst a dizzying array of choices do we narrow it down based not on a reflection of who we want to be, or our desire to experience something new, but our desire to find something most like ourselves? Even the newest apps that help us sort through these commodities (Yelp etc.) help us search and filter through to our personal needs even pinpointing our very location and providing us a lens of judgement with which to see them. It becomes the “critics’” role then, not to enter into a critical relationship with the work but to do the work of experience for us. We allow someone else to assume who we are, and in doing so,  transplant the activity of criticism into a surrogate, who is not actually performing any kind of critique but instead formulates a value-judgment based on what defines us – which is primarily determined by the products we consume.

Theatre suffers this especially because it is so short-lived. Here a show is lucky to have 8 performances let alone 3 weeks, and if it extends it is only for a little more than a month in the memory of a year, which has so much more happening in it – and oftentimes the only remnants are these scattershot reviews, written sometimes as nothing more than mere dismissals, whose effort in writing masks the hours of labor, sacrifice and love that artists have put into their work. But the audience outside the theatre sees only the pithy response, that is formulated not to match a response to artistic experience but an evaluation of that audience’s assumed needs.

Now, I am not advocating for an end to the critic, it is necessary - criticism is vital to progress as that which stands against and always against the mere presentation of things. A critic is as essential to art as the artwork itself – but criticism, I would argue, is not tantamount to a “critic”. The function of criticism is not merely a value-judgment on an object, as if it were something on sale at Amazon, but a substantial response to the formal content and ideas in a work. And, in an era where we have turned even more to the personal, we must not act as if only critics can criticize. Artists themselves have every right, and should embrace the opportunity that we now have to bring out what used to live in print as unequivocal, and speak out. And as artists, and audiences we should not condescend and ask us to stay in our place, but rather enter into the debate ourselves.

Criticism, where we see it failing its purpose, should be critiqued, not in an effort to silence criticism but to motivate it past its timidity and conservatism. We must not act as if a critic or an artist is immune to what he/she puts on stage/on page. This is nothing new – two of literature’s greatest minds, absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco and legendary critic Kenneth Tynan had a very vocal dispute on the pages of the London Observer. Here we have artist and critic locking horns, both with incredible contributions to the form, and in some ways both are better from it. Ionesco reaches a different audience and is able to bring his voice in direct confrontation with a critic, and Tynan is forced to defend his claims  - and so the public is witness to a debate on theater of the absurd, one that lives alongside the great works of the genre.

We should not fear this time as the moment that the amateur comes to replace the illustrious critic, but embrace this as a time when no one can rest on their laurels and we all have the right to engage more vocally with each other. We shouldn’t let the institutional structures dull our voices now when our words can ring as brightly on computer screen as that of the grey lady. Criticism, if anything, in this time of complete and utter information overload, is more vital than ever, and because of that we must be as critical as ever of the critic – and keep the task of the critic alive not just in those few people we rush to see on the byline, but in ourselves.

much love,

- J