The Economist's new Intelligent Life magazine has a go at making a list of the best critics working today. It's an idiosyncratic compilation, at the very least. To start - there are 10 book critics named, but only one dance critic (The NYT's Alastair Macaulay), two visual art critics (Peter Schjeldahl and TJ Clark), one TV critic (Nancy Banks-Smith) and two classical music critics (the New Yorker's Alex Ross and the Evening Standard's Norman Lebrecht). Lebrecht doesn't even consider himself a critic, and he doesn't, for the most part, review concerts.
My first reaction was to quickly compile a but-what-about list of my own that proves the parochialism of The Economist's 24 writers and editors who voted in this exercise. But in making my list, I realized that these things tend to say a lot more about those making the lists than they do about any definitive standard or ranking.
Next thought. How many critics in any field actually belong on a list of bests? My list of best American classical music critics starts to fall off after nine. But that depends on the criteria. There are probably another dozen who are good serious voices - a solid second tier. After that it's not so pretty.
But then when you add in people writing about classical music on the internet, the list suddenly swells. Sure there's a lot of crap on the web, but there's also lots of interesting writing too.
I tend to think that the vitality of an art form is reflected in the quality of the discourse around it. One of the bad things in American culture in the 80s and 90s was the narrowing of public discourse about the arts. When people stop arguing about the quality of the ideas, those ideas get less relevant.
So how many great critics does it take to make a discourse?
Matt Wolf in The Guardian suggests some other flaws in the list, and makes the inescapable observation:
Fun though it is as a critic to rifle through these assessments, one has to wonder whether the general public gives a fig for such rankings or whether they don't represent the last gasp of a critical enterprise that has been all but submerged in a welter of PR puffery. What becomes particularly apparent from Intelligent Life's article is the number of magazines that no longer regularly review the live arts, such as Time and Newsweek, whose theatre critics (Ted Kalem and Jack Kroll, respectively) were major names in their own right when I was growing up. I myself spent 21 very happy years reviewing and reporting on theatre out of London for the Associated Press, but when I moved on, so - unsurprisingly - did that job.
Everyone loves lists. But as I wrote in a column an embarrassingly long time ago, "Ships list -- before they sink."
A critic's list of critics--could anything be more seductive (or, I suppose, solipsistic)? The list is a bit Brit-centric (what, no Christgau? the ubiquitous John Leonard?), but I'll be tuning in for comments about omissions for a while--to add to my RSS feeds.
The enterprise reminds me of my favorite David Edelstein column, going back to his days at the Village Voice, in which he did a hilarious take on the politics and various psychodramas behind the Top Ten lists of the year.
Matt Wolf's eulogy is sobering, but I always wonder whether the mass-market presence of critics in Time, Newsweek, etc. really made that much a difference. Did they represent a true, egalitarian conversation about the nature of cinema? Or even a public receptive to posing questions about an art form? Or did most readers just scan them for a PR-worthy blurb that would help them decide how to spend their nine bucks?