Critics have feelings, too
by Tim Wilson
To whom is the critic responsible – the artist, the art form, or its audience?
Sitting in her Manhattan apartment, Joan Acocella curls her feet in her shoes. Her movements seem to be part of her conversation, which flows in full paragraphs. She writes conversationally, too, and beautifully, about dance for the New Yorker. She also produces long features for the magazine, but her first love – you can feel it when she writes on the topic – is dance. As someone who has devoted herself to a comparatively embattled art form with a small but vociferous following, does she have problems in common with critics writing in New Zealand on the arts? Oh, yes.
“If you are in a town that has one theatre company, or ballet company, and you don’t like its annual performance …” She pauses, then stage-whispers: “There’s going to be trouble.
“I don’t want to be under the pressure of responding to extra-artistic considerations,” she continues, “but do I say that I’ve never responded to such things? No. For example, the way other people feel about their home town, I feel about ballet.”
The difficulties that Acocella itemises may be familiar to anyone who has attempted to criticise an artist in public. How far ought the stiletto penetrate, and why? Is loyalty to the form a betrayal of the audience? Should the critic nestle with performers, which may provide information about the drama of assembling a performance, even if that means an emotional proximity that shackles their critical faculties?
One rule that Acocella observes is that she avoids writing advance pieces (such as profiles of the performers). “Although it is putatively neutral, it’s not. It humanises the performer … An advance piece never says, ‘Don’t come to the show!’”
But critics cannot maintain complete detachment. While writing of books on choreographer Mark Morris and dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, Acocella became friends with both. A double bind emerges. “The few artists I know,” says Acocella, “I cannot criticise them in print without seeing their faces before my eyes, and I can’t praise them without suspecting myself.”
She says that any barbs she has delivered have not affected her friendship with these people, but they do bring anguish. “Artists are wholly identified with what they do. If you prick their work, they bleed.”
Some artists like to paint critics as misanthropic wannabes, incapable of the demands of performance, hunched in the darkness, exerting their jealous revenge on a plucky few. But if a critic is well-intentioned, then the health of the art form they are reviewing should have great importance. Acocella notes that ballet is having a tough time at present, a situation she feels obligated to meet. “I’m looking right now for young people,” she says. “I’ve got my eye on one whose name I won’t tell you. He seems to me to have real ballet values … a lot of fundamental virtues, and of course I wish him well. And the more I wish him well, the more likely I am to stress his virtues.”
And thus, to fail her audience?
She nods, “To fail my audience.” Acocella pauses. Almost every statement is footnoted. “But let me put it this way. In the piece I just wrote on this guy, I did not say that his pas de deux are less interesting than his ensemble work. But in the next piece I write on him, I will say that.”
Acocella regrets that she didn’t have a musical education; perhaps because of this, she sympathises with critics who are mindful of their limitations, but exercise judgment in good faith. “That lack of academicism produces tolerance for individual talent and a respect for new ideas. Poverty and provincialism create their own virtues: love, loyalty, personal investment. Of course, this can also involve and does always involve special pleading – giving people breaks.”
Once again the discussion has turned to the great critical sin. Not unkindness, but rather an excess of praise, and a dearth of, well, criticism. “Boosterism is a huge problem in a small field and boosterism is basically lying.”
Blast and damn! I’ve done my share of boosting, and it always engenders a saccharine taste in the mouth and – perhaps – the pen. I have wondered if readers can’t spot the break in tone, the almost-public admission that you’re unable or willing to say what you truly think.
Acocella thinks so, with the addendum: “Isn’t that a comforting thought, that you can still recognise when you’re not telling the truth? The language becomes shallow and formulaic. This is not really an argument the critic believes in.”
Performers often complain that contemporary critics are too barbed, too ignorant of the havoc they wreak. Acocella disagrees. “I would say that – despite some very striking instances to the contrary – criticism is much softer now than it was in the past.”
Her evidence is a volume called A Lexicon of Musical Invective by Nicholas Slonimsky. Slonimsky wanted to prove that critics were idiots who were incapable of recognising even modern classics, so he collected (from the 19th century) “vituperative, insulting, scabrous remarks made about Wagner, Debussy and Beethoven”.
Why the gentle tone now? Acocella’s reply will be familiar to most critics, whether they’re in New Zealand or New York. “Because the arts are ill-supported in this country. The society does not love them, and therefore critics feel they must defend them.”
