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Yes Virginia, There Is A Next Generation Of Critics
The Guardian, hands down home to the most ambitious, interesting arts coverage in an English-language newspaper, has just conducted a competition to find the best young critics. Winners were chosen in eight categories.
There were eight categories, split into two age groups: under 14 and 14-18. Most of you wanted to write about film, music and theatre; fewer tackled architecture, classical music and dance. But we were impressed with how you engaged with every genre, whether telling us why the Canary Wharf tower would never fit into a New York skyline, or finding shades of Andrew Lloyd Webber in a Karl Jenkins composition.Artists and some of the newspaper's critics read the entries and chose the best:
What did we learn? That first and last lines are hard, however old you are. That "incredible" and "amazing" are a dead end when it comes to getting to the heart of what makes something wonderful. That the best reviews aren't always the most polished: wherever you had fun, we had fun, too. All winners receive a £25 National Book Token and a Guardian Young Arts Critics certificate. Choosing an overall winner was tough. In the end, we agreed on Tim Davies, visual art winner, because, said our judge Alan Davey, head of Arts Council England, "he caught perfectly the intriguing weirdness" of the boating lake. Thirteen-year-old Robert Hardy was a close second, for making Davey "want to hear 50s blues-rock zombie music and imagine a dying werewolf's growls".Amid the gloom about how critics are disappearing from newspapers, when was the last time we've seen somebody celebrate the best of young critics?
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