February 2011 Archives

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Misha Berson on Intiman Theatre's dire financial straits (The Seattle Times)
Larry Blumenfeld on pianist Arturo O'Farrill in Cuba (The Village Voice)
Robert Campbell reviews the new humanities center at Brandeis (The Boston Globe)
Jeanne Carstensen asks Steve Wozniak about Mike Daisey's Jobs show (The Bay Citizen)
Steve Dollar on Mark Mori's Bettie Page documentary (The Wall Street Journal)
Steve Dollar on Kim Jee-woon's "I Saw the Devil" (GreenCine Daily)
Michael Feingold on Zach Helm's "Interviewing the Audience" (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold on Rinne Groff's "Compulsion" (The Village Voice)
Edward M. Gómez on Yoko Ono's Courage Awards for the Arts (edwardmgomez.com)
Edward M. Gómez on British-born sculptor Gillian Jagger (The Brooklyn Rail)
Christopher Hawthorne on architecture in best-picture nominees (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Even the Rain" ("Tambien la lluvia") (The Washington Post)
Glenn Lovell reviews "The Resident" (CinemaDope.com)
Glenn Lovell reviews "Hall Pass" (CinemaDope.com)
Karen Michel on Oscar-nominated short documentary "Sun Come Up" (NPR)
Anne Midgette on showcasing a diversity of critical opinion (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette reviews WNO's "Madama Butterfly" (The Washington Post)
Craig Seligman reviews Ruth Brandon's "Ugly Beauty" (Bloomberg News)
Craig Seligman reviews Stefan Kanfer's Bogart biography (The Hollywood Reporter)
Jerome Weeks on Tony Award-winning set designer John Arnone (KERA-FM, Dallas)

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Charles Aaron on Radiohead's "The King of Limbs" (Spin)
Martin Bernheimer on Andrea Bocelli and Plácido Domingo (Financial Times)
Martin Bernheimer on the Park Avenue Armory's Tune-In Festival (Financial Times)
Robert Christgau on the Swedish dance artiste Robyn (Barnes & Noble Review)
Laura Collins-Hughes on "Prometheus Bound," the rock musical (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes on Linda Powell, "Ajax" and military life (The Boston Globe)
Michael Feingold reviews A.R. Gurney's "Black Tie" (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold on "Spider-Man" and the theater critics (The Village Voice)
Matthew Gurewitsch on Jonas Kaufmann's DVD of Massenet's "Werther" (Opera News)
Matthew Gurewitsch profiles Korean bass Kwangchul Youn (The New York Times)
John Horn on "The King's Speech" wowing smaller markets (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Unknown" (The Washington Post)
Michael Kimmelman on updating exhibitions at Auschwitz (The New York Times)
Julia M. Klein on "The Invisible Line" (aarp.org)
Glenn Lovell reviews "Unknown" (CinemaDope.com)
Glenn Lovell's "Memo to George Clooney: Ocean's Next Heist?" (CinemaDope.com)
Anne Midgette on opera singers as actors (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette reviews "Anna Nicole" at Covent Garden (The Washington Post)
Tom Moon on Radiohead's "The King of Limbs" (NPR)
Claude Peck reviews "The Balcony" at Nimbus Theatre (Star Tribune, Minneapolis)
Ann Powers on Radiohead's "The King of Limbs" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Powers reviews PJ Harvey's "Let England Shake" (Los Angeles Times)
Lesley Valdes on Mark O'Rowe's "Terminus" (WRTI-FM, Philadelphia)
Lesley Valdes on Gounod at the Opera Company of Philadelphia (WRTI-FM)

As jobs for critics at mainstream publications have disappeared and hundreds of thousands of bloggers, Twitterers and Facebookers have taken to the web expressing their own opinions, many are wondering if there's still a role for the professional critic.

I was a devoted newspaper reader in my youth. Devoured the weekly newsmagazines when they came out. Watched the nightly national news and listened to the CBC hourly newscasts. When the Sunday New York Times finally became available in our town at the newsstand, it seemed that it couldn't get any better. But it did come at a cost. Suddenly the local newspaper seemed a bit paler. Just one perspective didn't do it.

Today I still look at the Times. But it has to compete with everything else. I don't look to the Times first when I want to find out the latest. I turn to aggregator sites and feeds that are constantly monitoring seemingly everything, the Times included. If the Times has something interesting, the trusted aggregator sites pick it up. The Times critics are just a few among many, and, sometimes not the most interesting. Nor are they necessarily the most influential.

So how do you find out what's important? Here's a story from this weekend's Observer about how the internet has changed how news is reported:

More generally, technology has improved the processes of identifying stories that are newsworthy. Feeds from social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter provide a snapshot of events happening around the world from the viewpoint of first-hand witnesses, and blogs and citizen news sources offer analytical perspectives from the ground faster than print or television can provide. Paul Mason, economics editor on BBC2's Newsnight, uses these tools to get an angle on what's happening and what's important. "If you are following 10 key economists on Twitter and some very intelligent blogs," he says, "you can quickly get to where you need to be: the stomach-churning question, 'OK, what do I do to move this story on?'"

That sounds about right. It seems to me that with millions of opinions running around chasing one another, the challenge is to sort out which are the interesting ones. Rather than diminish the importance of really good critics, an ocean of opinion ought to make the great critic stand out as even more valuable. I've always thought of critics as also being curators. They define their territory and report back what's important. Today, what's important also includes what others are saying. Jeff Jarvis has a saying: "Do what you do best and link to the rest." That means being aware of what others are saying, synthesizing it and adding crucial insight. 

The best of the new breed go a step further -- they become the means by which people who are interested in a topic can talk to one another about it. In this model, the critic is at the center of a conversation rather than the preacher at a revival meeting. They're essential to a community because they set agendas and help define what's important. Same as critics always did. Except different.

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Hilton Als on Barbra Streisand's first book (The New Yorker)
Alicia Anstead interviews Bill T. Jones at the ICA/Boston (WGBH Radio)
Alicia Anstead on Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' "Neighbors" (The Huffington Post)
Martin Bernheimer on "La traviata" and "Pelléas et Mélisande" at the Met (Opera)
Misha Berson on Intiman Theatre's $1M emergency fund drive (The Seattle Times)
Larry Blumenfeld on saxophonist Steve Wilson (The Wall Street Journal)
Tony Brown on outrage at "Jerry Springer: The Opera" (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland)
Tony Brown on Catholics and "Jerry Springer" (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland)
Timothy Cahill on the courage and comfort of Elizabeth Bishop (Art & Document)
Robert Campbell on zoning laws impeding better architecture (The Boston Globe)
Carole Carmichael on the pain of Kathryn Stockett's "The Help" (The Seattle Times)
Thomas Conner on "Justin Bieber: Never Say Never" (Chicago Sun-Times)
Steve Dollar asks Susan Sarandon about favorite scenes (The Wall Street Journal)
Steve Dollar reviews Jessica Lea Mayfield's album, "Tell Me" (Time Out Chicago)
Michael Feingold on Kurt Weill's "Lost in the Stars" at Encores! (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold on "The Three Sisters" at CSC (The Village Voice)
John Horn on marketing "Just Go With It" to men and to women (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Just Go With It" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday on filmmaker Jem Cohen (The Washington Post)
Hillel Italie interviews Joyce Carol Oates about her memoir (The Associated Press)
Julia M. Klein on a family dilemma (Obit Magazine)
Julia M. Klein on Joyce Carol Oates' "A Widow's Story" (Obit Magazine)
Glenn Lovell on Lindsay Lohan's defense strategy (CinemaDope.com)
Anne Midgette on mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette reviews "The Gonzales Cantata" (The Washington Post)
Ann Powers reviews Jessica Lea Mayfield and Anna Waronker (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Powers moderates a Grammys roundtable of producers (Los Angeles Times)
Michael Z. Wise on the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (The Wall Street Journal)

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Martin Bernheimer on eighth blackbird at Zankel Hall (Financial Times)
Martin Bernheimer on "Nixon in China" at the Metropolitan Opera (Financial Times)
Jeanne Carstensen on the future of KUSF's music library (The Bay Citizen)
Laura Collins-Hughes on "Terminus" playwright Mark O'Rowe (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes on songwriter Richard M. Sherman (The Boston Globe)
Michael Feingold on David Auburn's "The New York Idea" (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold on Roundabout's "Milk Train" revival (The Village Voice)
Sasha Frere-Jones on PJ Harvey (The New Yorker)
Christopher Hawthorne on "Decolonizing Architecture" (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn asks film directors about life's influence on art (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday interviews filmmaker Eugene Jarecki (The Washington Post)
Joseph Horowitz on pianist Mykola Suk (The Boston Globe)
Anne Midgette reviews "Nixon in China" at the Met (The Washington Post)
Claude Peck on two productions at Steppenwolf (Star Tribune, Minneapolis)
Ann Powers on KUSF and the power of terrestrial radio (Los Angeles Times)
Craig Seligman reviews Kenneth Slawenski's J.D. Salinger bio (Bloomberg News)

In the Feb. 1 Wall Street Journal, Alex Joffe laments the destruction of precious art objects amidst the Egyptian crisis. Though the extent of the losses remains unclear, even a handful is surely too many. The Egyptian Museum contains some of the finest antiquities in the world, and Egypt's archaeological sites are of course about as good as it gets.

In Joffe's wide-ranging discussion of how bad authoritarian regimes are for art's preservation (very), Afghanistan and Iraq get their well-deserved lumps. But then Joffe moves on to Greece. He suggests that Egypt proves all over again that returning the Parthenon Marbles (otherwise known as the Elgin Marbles) is a bad idea. As evidence, he cites the economic riots last year in Athens.