If I go by
what Ted Gioia has been writing lately “we are winning” on the front of AI
being seen as hated and getting some potential controls
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/we-are-winning
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/we-are-winning-update
So, if we are winning in the sense that corporate suits
have said words to the effect that a bunch of us don’t want to be subjected to
music generated by the spawn of Clippy and Autocorrect that’s a small win, if
that’s really what’s going to happen.
On the other hand, Gioia has a piece asking what is
happening to music criticism and on this front “we” have been losing slowly and
steadily since the end of the Cold War.
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/what-is-happening-to-music-criticism
Many sizable
communities are in even worse shape. They don’t have a single salaried
journalist covering the culture beat.
Yeah, this has been the trajectory for the last thirty or
so years. There was a time when I’d check the classical music coverage of both The
Seattle Weekly and The Stranger. I never met Chris DeLaurenti but Gavin
Borchert and I ran into each other at a few classical music events now and then
in the last twenty years. Seattle is big
enough of a music scene that it’s possible to keep tabs on culture despite
things like covid lockdown protocols because the internet makes it possible to
stay in touch and read coverage of events.
Gioia can’t be “that” surprised in the long run. After all, even by Ted Gioia’s account (all
the way back in 2014), music criticism has been in a bad state. Consider his essay “Music
Criticism Has Degenerated Into Lifestyle Reporting”. One of Gioia’s complaints was that things had
gotten to the point where just using jargon from music theory was scorned. When music criticism has turned into
lifestyle reporting then it’s not about the music it’s about the artist (which
is not exactly the same thing).
I am sympathetic to the idea that a work of criticism can
be a valuable contribution to cultural activities. I even like the idea that, for instance, acts
of citizen journalism about the arts can be of some value to folks. What I am far, far less certain about is the
surmise that the traditional written review is “needed” because somebody at The
New Yorker has cleared his throat and made a spirited literary defense of his
own job, all in the spirit of guild cohesion, perhaps.
Of course, I am referring to Richard Brody’s recent essay
claiming that reviews (as arts criticism) are the most inherently
progressive mode of arts writing (emphasis all his).
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/in-defense-of-the-traditional-review
I’m going to start off by citing Brody and thinking about
his various rabbit trails before I get to my real objection to his silly
pro-critic, pro-review canards.
… When writing reviews,
critics are in the position of the public: watching a movie, attending a
concert, seeing a play, buying a record. Reviews are rooted in the most
fundamental unit of the art business—the personal encounter with individual
works (or exhibits of many works)—and in the economic implications of that
encounter. The specificity of the review is both aesthetic and social. For
starters, it’s a consumer guide, an intrinsic variety of service journalism.
Critics are simultaneously consumers and avatars of consumers; as Pauline
Kael wrote in 1971, in The New Yorker, “Without a few
independent critics, there’s nothing between the public and the advertisers.”
What’s commercially crucial about reviews, which serve as something like a
consumer-protection file, is precisely this independence, both editorial and
textual.
And we know Brody has his finger on the pulse of the
American public, right? While a bunch of Americans were watching that My Little
Pony movie Richard Brody was reviewing the Aronofsky film mother! I’m
not a Brony by any stretch but I did watch the MLP movie and I had fun with it,
seriously. It was fun hearing Emily
Blunt through herself into the secondary antagonist role of the story. Was the story a bit rote? Sure, Celestia and Luna were once again
kidnapped and had to be rescued by the Mane Six with a bit of song and dance
but without a racist barn (let the reader understand!)
Brody begs the question of how and why any critic in
general, let alone he in particular, has this role of being a surrogate for “the
public”.
… Just as the
individual work is what individual artists—whether directors, actors, crew, or
producers—create at a given moment, it’s also how viewers fundamentally seek
out works: one at a time. And what a review embodies, above all, is one
viewer’s experience of it. …
But he’s a parent. He knows this is not really how parents generally
watch films with children. Sometimes you’re actually watching the movie.
Sometimes you tune it out. Sometimes the kids aren’t into it. Sometimes both
you and the kids are into it and sometimes you and the kids hate it (I heard
about this variation from a brother-in-law who said he and all his kids found The
Last Jedi to be “too loud and too stupid”).
Brody probably even knows the story about how when Hayao
Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro was released and when Siskel and Ebert
review it that Ebert raved about the film while Siskel was cautious. So, the account goes (if it happened, that’s
something a critic could confirm or refute), Roger Ebert told Gene Siskel to
give Miyazaki’s movie another viewing and this time watch it with children.
Ebert understood that Miyazaki had made
this movie for children to watch and parents were part of the experience. Siskel revisited the film and suddenly it hit
him that this really was (and still is) a fantastic animated feature length
film for children.
That any randomly selected critic has some sacred role of
being a surrogate of the public engaging with the artwork as an individual
cannot be assumed or surmised by the critic.
What does the review actually do?
Yes, I get that it can be a form of service journalism but what kind of
service journalism? A consumer guide? The
difference between what Richard Brody writes and what you might read on the
Amazon reviews for a product has to do with institutional association and not
with “independence” from advertising. A
critic can say that he or she or they or it is independent of the advertising
apparatus but that can also be said by any random person who has written a
review on Amazon or Goodreads, too. The
difference has to do with prestige and prominence.
Now it’s not a surprise Brody went to the part where the
review Is a form of service journalism in the most journalistic sense. As Shego told Dr. Drakken, “You had to be
there”. There are some things where, once they’ve happened, if you weren’t
actually there the most you can do is describe what happened. That turns out to be what a critic can do, as
someone who was there, for all the people who weren’t:
… reviews, even when
linked to the immediate availability of a particular work or event, leap beyond
that narrow context and offer a chance to live on, to entice and inspire
readers without access to the event in question or coming too late for it. For
instance, it’s a fundamental error of editors and reviewers alike to consider
classical-music concert reviews as mere accounts of performers and
performances. I’ve written some, and the main subject of a review of a
performance of, say, a Beethoven symphony isn’t the musicians but Beethoven and
the symphony. A classical review of merit weighs in on the meaning and the
significance of Beethoven, makes a persuasive case for even performing
Beethoven nearly two centuries after his death. Or, to put it differently,
critics who take Beethoven for granted are doing injustices to readers,
Beethoven, and music—whereas those whose reviews reach deep into the music
itself and renew knowledge, interest, and passion in regard to Beethoven have
thereby broken the limits of time lines and opened readers’ listening pleasures
and perspectives into the future.
And that’s the point of
reviews: the future …
You should have been there!
It was so great! Or maybe you
shouldn’t have been there because it was so lame! But was the role of the critic so
important? A positive or even rave
review tells the public “Oh wow! You really
should have been there!” but that’s what the advertisers were already saying. A negative review says to the public “This
was junk and not worth it” and for many of the people who didn’t bother to go
they can happily say to themselves, “Well, how glad I am that I dodged that
bullet!”
In the film Metropolitan the character Tom explained
how he liked to read criticism because he got a summary of the book as well as
the critic’s thoughts. We, the viewers
who saw the film, quickly catch on that Tom’s ideas are mediated by the critics
he has read and he hasn’t actually read all the things he occasionally talks
about. The best written review by the most esteemed critic has never been a
surrogate for “being there”.
That some people feel there needs to be something said
about Beethoven now can invite us to go back to Slonimsky’s lexicon of musical
and invective to remind ourselves that there were critics of the highest and
noblest and most refined sensibilities who thought Beethoven wrote a bunch of
trash music. Much as I actually do admire Beethoven’s string quartets and piano
sonatas his symphonies can come off as self-important and bloated (there, I did
say it) and his choral music is generally aggravating. Why would I sit through Beethoven’s Missa
Solemnis when I could listen to just about anything by Heinrich Schutz or
Thomas Tallis or William Byrd instead? If Brody had said something about how
critics stake claims and that an important part of their role as critics and
their reviews as literature is that these claims are open to and invite the
possibility of comprehensive refutation then I’d say he had done his due
diligence as an actual critic. He didn’t,
I’m sorry to say. If I say that I think
Haydn has more to teach us in the early twenty-first century about the
opportunities and possibilities for a synergistic relationship between pop and
classical based on his own works then a critic could say “yes” or “no” and that
could invite a conversation. That is
what traditional criticism could, theoretically, “do”. The battles between Team
Wagner and Team Hanslick did have some value.
But let’s shift back to Brody on films. Brody could tell
you that Michael Bay has more fun and gives more fun than George Miller; that
Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2 promoted authoritarian populism; that Josh
Trank’s Fantastic Four could have been an amazing movie if the studio
had not interfered so much (a friend of mine said that the bare prospect of
Trank remaking Chronicle with Marvel characters was not any sign the
project was going to work).
I have, in the last twenty years, paid less and less
attention to what anyone at The New Yorker has to say about much of
anything. I sure do remember Menand’s quip that the Baby Boomers consumed the
pop culture of the 1960s rather than actually making any of it, and that is the
kind of observation a critic can and should make. But Brody’s defense of the review amounts to
a defense of the old saw about journalism being the first draft of history.
Yes, which is why it’s so important among journalists to discuss what stories
didn’t get covered and don’t get covered.
For years Wenatchee The Hatchet published who knows how many words about
an under-covered story dealing with a local megachurch. I know whereof I
speak! I am not exactly disputing Brody’s
hypothetical defense of the role someone with his job can play, I’m needling
him about the begged questions that don’t have clear or compelling answers.
He simply takes it as given that:
… A review by a
responsible critic inherently involves introspection, looking into oneself to
see whether unnoticed or unquestioned personal factors influence or deform
one’s experience of the work at hand. …
Like deciding that even if Woody Allen turns out to have been
guilty of everything he’s been alleged to have done Brody’s still going to
watch Woody Allen movies because they’re art, not like those movies by Louis C.
K. that are not art, have never been art, and can’t possibly be considered art
in the future? Why? Oh, well, never you mind that. Roman Polansky made art, too, and was
apparently remorseful about that one incident so his movies can still be
watched. There’s just something about
art that absolves the artist of some kind of moral guilt because of the art
they made, much like in the theology of the sacraments a priest who properly
administers the sacrament administers a legitimate eucharist even if nobody
partakes of it on the one hand and the priest turns out to have been an evil
person in their private life on the other (ergo the Donatist controversy that
you can read up on at your leisure). Brody wants to be on the side of angels
(critics? Yes, them) but the devil has been in the details. Critics do get things wrong, of course, but
the notion that the review is inherently the most progressive mode of arts
writing doesn’t even answer the question of what “progressive” is and why
anyone should want “progress” or why “progressive” is in any way praiseworthy.
Think of the tens of thousands of years (or merely thousands
of years, if you’re a Christian and a young earth creationist) during which no
reviews were ever written and yet, get this, art happened. Maybe it wasn’t “art”
by the standards of eighteenth-century aesthetics but, whatever, eh? That art
still got made.
If we can look back on the entire history of the human race
and see that the arts managed to thrive without first drafts of history, let’s
ask whether or not the opposite can be established. Has there been a case where
a single bad review threw an entire creative community into chaos for a
generation or two? This one’s too easy and,
if you are familiar with 20th century classical music, I probably
don’t even need to name it. Out of consideration for all the people who are not
Shostakovich listeners, the review “Muddle Instead of Music” that was published
at the behest of Joseph Stalin in response to the opera Lady Macbeth
sent shockwaves throughout the musical communities of the Soviet Union. No one who has even a moderate grasp of the
range of ideas and opinions expressed in reviews and criticism can take Brody’s
celebration of the review as the most inherently progressive modes of arts writing
seriously. That many progressives “can” write arts reviews is boilerplate, that
the mode of writing itself is inherently progressive is comically easy to
disprove, unless Richard Brody wants to claim that Joseph Stalin was inherently
progressive.
If Richard Taruskin were still with us he probably would have written that Brody's song and dance was wrong because "Muddle Instead of Music" happened and have left it at that. If listening to classical music doesn't make us better people how much more true is this of reading reviews!
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