Illuminating Look at Art of Criticism : Media: An essay reviewing contemporary coverage of the performing arts offers insight into the power, passions and pitfalls that come into play.

By SHEILA BENSON

June 4, 1991 12 AM PT

CRITIC AT LARGE

There was a complaint on these pages recently about the perceived power of a critic to close a show. More than anything, what it reinforced was the fact that the world of criticism seems absolutely mysterious from the outside, full of caprice, power, vendettas and “bad days.” Those who work in the field see it in an utterly opposite light, as a challenge, a calling, an ongoing education or, just occasionally, as an admittedly strange way for an adult to occupy himself or herself full time.

If the field of criticism has remained mysterious it’s because the rules of the craft have only rarely been written down or even considered rules. Oh, there are the famous quotes: George Bernard Shaw’s eloquent advice to young critics, “If you want to enjoy masterly acting 20 years hence, you must be very tender to the apprentices and journeymen of today.” And the curmudgeonly ones by Samuel Johnson, in response to a plea to soften a harsh opinion of an artist because of the time that had gone into the work and the difficulty of the effort. “Difficult, do you call it, Sir?” Johnson snorted. “I wish it were impossible.”

But the day-to-day efforts of critics, on newspapers and magazines in particular, have gone relatively unexamined. The writers are almost never considered en masse, and the perils and perks of the job are rarely defined.

No more. The Twentieth Century Fund, in operation since 1919, a “not-for-profit and nonpartisan” Manhattan-based research foundation that publishes essays on matters economic, social and political, has devoted this year’s essay to “The Critic, Power and the Performing Arts” and the lid is off.

This year’s essayist is John E. Booth, a former associate director of the Fund and New York Times staff member who wrote extensively on theater. Booth has rolled up his sleeves and sensibly ventured beyond Broadway, to Atlanta; Boston; Chicago; Los Angeles; Minneapolis; St. Paul, Minn.; San Franciso; Seattle; Washington and Winston-Salem, N.C. Interviewing 300 professionals on both the delivering and receiving side of reviews, he has produced a breathtakingly clear overview of criticism today, as it applies to theater, dance, music and opera.

Eminently readable, his thin book (published by Columbia University Press, $27.95) is specific, sometimes shocking and not very cheery. It paints a generally dismal picture of newspaper arts coverage away from the bigger cities and sometimes within them. (No, not Los Angeles.) It names names and examines charges of influence and prejudice: Agnes de Mille’s broadside at Clive Barnes and David Mamet’s excoriation of Frank Rich make lively reading, to name only two of many.

The New York Times comes in for intense scrutiny. Booth calls the paper’s verdict in the matter of theater the Grand Reality. “A Times review even influences the Times: if the work is reviewed positively, the play, playwright, actors and director are likely to be the subject of numerous feature articles; if negatively, the Times has an Orwellian capability to erase every trace of the work from its pages.”

Most important, Booth sets out in detail the qualities that a good critic, a conscientious arts section and an enlightened editor and publisher must have, if what Booth considers the critic’s formidable power is to be a positive force in the arts.

That is certainly the position of people in the arts. Kennedy Center Chairman Roger L. Stevens says the arts will never be better than the criticism that surrounds them. Addressing critics, Los Angeles Philharmonic General Director Ernest Fleischmann says, “Either you know your material properly or you get out.”

In this light, Booth’s composite picture of the way newspaper critics are recruited is sobering.

Most of them fell into their jobs accidentally, moved like editorial checkers from other fields and declared “critics,” although many had no arts-related experience. Although most theater critics majored in English and the liberal arts, only a quarter of music critics majored in music or studied it at all. Overall, only a few major newspapers made determined efforts to discover well-qualified critics.

They don’t seem to have lured them with heavy money: critics’ salaries across the country range between $600 and $750 a week, while, regularly, “chief sportswriters make more money than chief critics, by a margin wide enough to drive a Maserati through.” Of course. As the managing editor of the Chicago Sun-Times explains, “Baseball is an art form!”

And with articles on multiculturalism still percolating in our minds, it’s interesting that nearly two-thirds of the nation’s critics are male, the median age is around 40, the overwhelming majority are white.

The hazards of the job? You didn’t think there were any? In addition to external forces such as space and money crunches in the newspaper itself, think about conflicts of interest, objectivity, friendships within the field, plus the need to recognize one’s own biases and somehow come to terms with them. As composer William Schuman points out, “The aesthetic predilection of an individual critic is what guides his writing . . . and is imposed on the community he serves for the entire length of his tenure, which can be the bulk of a lifetime of a listener.”

What about wearing too many hats? In nearly all cities outside major centers, critics are required to cover more than one of the arts--theater, music, film, dance and opera--perhaps all five. Consider that while browsing through Harold Clurman’s qualifications for the compleat critic. The late critic of the Nation began his dozen requirements this way: “Besides having cultivated taste, feeling, and a talent for clear observation of people, the critic should know the greater part of classic and contemporary drama, as written and played. Added to this, he must be conversant with general literature: novels, poetry, essays of wide scope.” Eleven more suggestions, none of them frivolous, follow.

There’s also what Booth calls a “time bomb” situation, the newspaper budget that requires writers to play independent-minded critic; friendly, ingratiating interviewer and tough, inquiring reporter, in turn. As one former art critic suggests, “One would have to be lobotomized not to recognize that it’s a problem.” In the other corner, the managing editor of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution finds the notion that critics should not do interviews “preposterous;” to him, it’s simply a matter of “guts.”

And so the duels rage, across all the arts. Quoting liberally from his 300 interviewees, Booth has written a book as cogent and persuasive as Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, the writer’s bible, which is nearly the highest praise I can think of. Its only small drawback is that the interviews were done between 1985-89 and the economic picture has changed radically since then and even more profoundly for newspapers, as one might guess, reading reports of the last, distraught American Society of Newspaper Editors meeting.

All very well to read Booth’s three pages on “the hazards of non-travel” for a critic; on the absolute need for “exposure--to the best, the worst and everything in between--without which the critic will be wandering in a cultural landscape without true bearings.” True bearings, meet the recession.

To end on a positive note, the managing editor of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, who understands full well that his average reader is more likely to see a Rambo movie than hear the Minnesota Orchestra, nevertheless says, “While a newspaper . . . has to reflect its audience’s interest, it also has to lead the audience and represent what might be described as the higher values of life.”

Just imagine where those values are reflected, and whose obligation--and purest pleasure--it is to write about them, if you wonder what keeps critics at their work.