| A Look-back and Guide |
On Criticism & Critics |
| The rise and fall of criticism , Culture of Wales , July 1, 2025 |
“On Criticism & Critics” is made up up of public events, books, tributes and commentary. Articles on critics and criticism below: 3 July 2025: Fictions and Fabrications: Encounters with Artificial Intelligence * * * * 5 June 2025: Claire Dederer “Monsters. What Do We Do With Great Art By Bad People?" * * * * 11 July 2024: Critical Shrinkage “Four themes occur and re-occur. “Culture is a place where societies speak to themselves.” Critical writing is not a response to culture. It is part of culture, it is innate to its ecology. Feedback is engagement is participation. “Criticism, far from sapping the vitality of art, is instead what supplies its lifeblood...not an enemy from which art must be defended, but rather another name-the proper name- for the defence of art itself.” Art and criticism share a common wellspring: “the urge to master and add something to reality...the transformation of awe into understanding.” “Magazines are there to challenge ideas, to shine a light in darkened corners, they are there, first and foremost, to encourage and to stir debate. The moment there is fear of the debate, we are lost...it made me worry for the direction of publishing in Wales....I was questioning whether a poetry periodical, particularly one in receipt of public subsidy, should be “fighting” anything at all.” * * * * 6 May 2021: Equity publishes guidelines for theatre critics * * * * 29 April 2021: David Edgar on the theatre criticism of Eric Bentley “For that strange precinct we call “art” is like a hall full of mirrors or a whispering gallery. Each form conjures up a thousand memories and after-images. No sooner is an image presented as art, than by this very act, a new frame of reference is created which it cannot escape.” “Each book is a world in itself”, said Abell, “and a link in an endless chain.” * * * * 24 February 2021: National Theatre Wales, obsequiousness & drivel language “Our pioneering artistic practice is questioning: What is theatre? Who is it for? How and where is it made? Who makes it?” "Recondite, manifestly of no interest to the Welsh public. No other national theatre in the world follows such a line. Yet it was taken up and parroted by the Arts Council among others. * * * * 20 December 2020: Martin Shipton expelled by Literature Wales “I defended myself by responding robustly to my attackers.”Without giving me the opportunity to explain myself, Literature Wales decided to remove me from the panel of judges for the Welsh Book of the Year awards. I regret the decision, which I find both perverse and contrary to natural justice. “I have always been a strong advocate for Welsh writers and this incident will not change that.” * * * * 14 December 2020: “Looking Out” Essays by Peter Lord “Culture is a place where societies speak to themselves. ” * * * * 25t September 2020: Political Theatre Brecht- “Wanting to show lust for power, must show how politics or business works. But writers are less interested in how things work.” * * * * 1 May 2020: A Culture Without Debate “Wales has, since devolution in 1999, lost its identity rather than modernised the one it already had. It spends millions of pounds on Dylan Thomas or Roald Dahl bypassing investment into artists that are alive and, by that very fact, more relevant.” * * * * 25 January 2020: Wales Arts Review on awful, misogynistic Welsh film “The broadcast critical opinion for Radio Wales ran: “Likewise I felt completely out of step with the Welsh Baftas undoubtedly the worst film I have seen to come out of any country in the past decade....a desolate dumping ground of stilted dialogue, forced colloquialisms, and garbled sentences. I lost count of the times an actor is forced to add an isn’t it? at the end of a line, or a bach, or even a cariad. None of the actors seem convinced by these little tags.” * * * * 12 January 2020: A call for bolder, more candid advertising and promotion “The Sherman issued a press release November 15th 2019. It comprises seven pages and is complete and compendious. Above all it is written for the general reader and is stripped of industry jargon that bedevils purported public communications elsewhere.” * * * * 19 December 2019: Michael Billington- In his own words “One of the things that’s changed is that, when I was growing up, criticism was seen more as an essay; an essay that could take in lots of references. Criticism has become more utilitarian. It’s got to fulfil a function of guidance as to whether a show is worth seeing or not—star ratings are one aspect of this. Reviews are shorter and they’re much more to do with “is this show worth seeing or not worth seeing?” There is less room for digression, speculation and the essayistic approach. “The concept of the critic as artist has pretty much vanished. It’s a vain thing to say, of course, but I think we should still aspire to that. We are reviewing one art, but we are trying to create another one.” * * * * 17 December 2019: Michael Billington: a great writer of theatre “Theatre “has nothing to do with hardware, hydraulic stages, scenic decoration or conspicuous displays of expenditure; but everything to do with narrative, language, ideas and physical skill.” “He confessed his own personal leaning, in a line characteristically both dense yet succinct, as being “instinctively drawn to plays which display moral ambivalence, are rooted in close observation, blend the tragic and the comic and exude the life and energy that Baudelaire thought were the preconditions of any work of art”. * * * * 13 October 2019: Looking at greats Gary Raymond “What is a critic?” “His real rendezvous is with posterity. His review is a letter addressed to the future...Any art can only be truly valued if it is evaluated. I was asked on a radio show recently, ‘Isn’t everybody a critic?’ Well of course everybody’s a critic. But not everybody is a Critic.” “We need to shed these puerile ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and announce to the world that Welsh art – its literature, its theatre, its painting and sculpting and circuses and music and cinema – it is a conversation you’ll want to join in with. Spinoza said that man’s duty, when surveying the world, ‘was neither to laugh nor to weep, but to understand.’ Now is the time to nail that above the doorway. “A Critic is an investor into a culture. As artists we invest in the culture of Wales, not latch onto it; we are working to build it, to brighten it...The eternal conversation is the thing, and you are mistaken if you don’t think Wales deserves a part in it.” * * * * 10 October 2019: Dai Smith on being frightened or cowed into silence by cosy nonsense “Public Intellectuals have, too often, been seen as Public Inconveniences in Wales. By which I mean that we are often frightened or cowed into silence by the cosy nonsense that promotes the Idea of Team Wales or attempts to issue Brand Identities centred on spurious notions of Celticism or hands out badges for linguistic Good Behaviour. “Cultural criticism would be a threat, an exposure of the comfort Welsh blanket with which we are so ready to drape ourselves, all cwtched-up and myopic in the hold-tight, don’t-let-go arms of Mam. I think there are, indeed, cultural reasons for our relative impoverishment...a lack of such essential figures, as Cultural Critics or Public Intellectuals, to a country’s well-being as a functioning Democracy in a broader sense.” “Ed Thomas picked up this echo with “A minority culture is defensive and it’s easy to be defensive from one perspective.” * * * * 01 October 2019: Criticism and the importance of distance “You write what we all think”, said my pavement companion, “but no-one ever says.” “Friendship is the highest of human values. It trumps frankness. Indeed a feature of friendship is that affection usually precludes candour. There is an exception in those few long-lasting and deep friendships. But we are more often hedgehogs, rather scared of intimacy. But criticism without candour is a weakened being. It is evasive and periphrastic. Distance is beneficial.” * * * * 08 June 2019: Critically Speaking Site & Crowdfunding Launch Jafar Iqbal: “All artists, companies, venues and arts organisations depend on critical feedback to guide their process - one can't function properly without the other. I believe I provide balanced, constructive, high-quality criticism; but in 2019, there isn't an organisation willing or able to monetise that hard work.” That is true; he has been Cardiff's best regular critic.” * * * * 01 June 2019: Simon Schama & the four elements of criticism "Critics move across four levels. They home in on the detail. They know their aesthetics intimately, confident in their judgements on form, content, meaning, expression. They have facts at their finger-tips: the life, love, money, or the lack of both, the context of history, the critical climate. And they yoke the first three to personal response. Jejune critical writing, that is swamped with the words “I” and “me”, makes a categorical error, that the subjective takes first place." * * * * 14 March 2019: In Defence of Criticism “The payroll for public relations is many times for that of journalists. The brute constriction on time and budgets forces speed. The allure of cut-and-paste is omnipresent. It is a fact of our age, and advertorial, where it is obvious, is unobjectionable. But it creeps invisibly.” “Dylan Moore was pressed as to the reasons for which he wrote. His response was succinct: to continue the work, to illuminate the context, to see connections. Most of all it is to engage in that most human and civilising of activities; it is conversation.” * * * * 28 February 2019: Wales Arts Review 2nd Critics Round Table “...the culture of profusion or, more rightly, the illusion of profusion...A surface of profusion conceals a spectrum of narrowness. Trollope on critics: “When making their assertions they have given their reasons, explained their causes, and have carried conviction,’ he writes. Their accomplishment, he goes on, is ‘not without infinite study and the labour of many years.’ But a critical response that circles around ‘fab’ and ‘brilliant’ is thin gruel. Again talk to the artists themselves. They want praise; of course, they do because they are human. But the invariable next comment is ‘at least this person has thought about what I was doing.’ * * * * 23 January 2019: Wales Arts Review's 2nd Critics Round Table. “Once it was a Pope or a Medici who gave a thumbs-up or down to a Torrigiano or Ghirlandaio. Today the arts are perforce part-embedded in the public sphere. Women and men of good sense and seriousness, on the hill in Aberystwyth, in Bute Place and Mount Stuart Square, have to make decisions. The process of selection and allocation is helped by comment that is engaged but, most crucially, disinterested.” * * * * 22 January 2019: At Wales Arts Review 2nd Critics Round Table “Criticism matters. It matters for particular reasons, of which three come to the fore. Although they are distinct they share an element in common. They all tend to inattention, inattention to the work itself.” “Crucial for us” says Michael McCarthy of Music Theatre Wales in a public forum at the Critics Round Table. Boswell caught Doctor Johnson on the topic when they journeyed together to the Hebrides in October 1773. “A man who tells me my play is very bad”, opines the Doctor, “is less my enemy than he who lets it die in silence.” When Anthony Trollope received his first review he reveals in his autobiography that he read it so many times he could quote the whole of it in its entirety. * * * * 19 January 2019: John Caird on how directors should view critics Cultures, like individuals, are revealed by their fissures. Peter Brook: “A critic has a far more important role, an essential one, in fact, for an art without critics would be constantly menaced by far greater dangers...our relations with critics may be strained in a superficial sense: but in a deeper one the relationship is absolutely necessary...the critic is part of the whole.” Steve Marmion: “Rightly or wrongly, reviews are the measure of how a show will be judged or remembered by those who were not there. And more often than not, reviewers are right.” “By and large, they are an intelligent and professional tribe. They have their likes and dislikes just as you do, their prejudices, preferences and peccadilloes. But if you consider any of them as being beyond the pale, consider your own likes and dislikes… * * * * 16 January 2019: Letter to an aspiring writer for theatre “Be a person who is more than a writer. The best writers for theatre have been doctors, actors, architects, journalists, psychologists, tree surgeons, theatre producers. If you become an auditor, a games developer, an undertaker you will see in a matter of a few years enough of love, cruelty, greed, folly, ambition, moral compromise to sustain you for decades. “Go to performances. But keep one eye on the audience. When theatre works it has an extraordinary curative effect on snuffles and coughs, wriggles and shuffling feet. See what works. “Learn to love and respect actors. They are the vessel for your words. They may at times irk you. They may at times exasperate you. But more often than not they will astonish and astound you. * * * * 07 January 2019: Writing reviews for 140 months “So too, to be have been there, a watcher of performance of Wales, is to have had the heart raised." * * * * 24 December 2018: The Cambridge Guide to Performance Studies “Attendance at performance is a sensorial and not just an upper cortical activity. It really is the almond and the seahorse. An evaluative approach that avoids this is lacking in fullness.” “Theatre, no longer needing to be a mirror to society and realistic, a job better done on a global scale by television, has now developed into an art form in which the theatre space becomes the exhibiting gallery, its audiences an informed few.” Whether this is a widely held view among the scholars of theatre is known only to themselves.” * * * * 19 December 2018: What directors expect from critics Kate Wasserberg: "Whether they like my show or not, to feel a critic has truly “seen” my work is very valuable to me." Rachel O'Riordan: "Critics are important. What we expect of them is to be able to judge each piece of work on merit, in context and without bias...The really important thing to remember is that critics are writing for audiences; so they are an interpreter of the work they see for them- not for you. As a director, it can be easy to forget that." Erica Eirian: ““I expect critics to come to our work with open minds and a discerning eye and to respond to our work with constructive, insightful judgements rooted in knowledge and experience expressed with lucidity in reviews which give aesthetic pleasure to the reader. “The critic’s responsibility is to the audience, not to the artist. As a director I expect more than a free marketing tool and more than just a personal opinion. I expect well written, informed, considered and honest reviews which place our work in a context and provoke thought and debate around our work. Only if we have a robust critical culture can we expect a robust theatre culture.” * * * * 17 December 2018: A O Scott “Better Living Through Criticism” “Criticism”, at least in the view of Scott, “far from sapping the vitality of art, is instead what supplies its lifeblood.” It is “not an enemy from which art must be defended, but rather another name-the proper name- for the defence of art itself.” We are a long way from the notion of a review. Scott sees a commonality in motive. Both art and criticism originate in “the urge to master and add something to reality”, their wellspring the “transformation of awe into understanding.” * * * * 08 January 2018: London & Wales' critics diverge on “Tiger Bay” “The London critics have depth and writing skills beyond any in Wales. But they are visitors. When an event took place on the Watkin Path the review for Planet Magazine was written by a critic who was also a farmer. Her view ought to be the definitive one but probably is not. Theatre that plays only to Welsh writers lacks rigour. Theatre that plays only to Fleet Street lacks roots.” * * * * 20 December 2016: Twenty-five years of Theatre-Wales There are hardly any print journals standing. Those of Wales are dead men walking, too many of them, with circulations struggling to reach four figures. “Art of worth deserves attention and there is no medium more subtle, complex, emotional and expressive than language.” * * * * 03 August 2016: Sion Jobbins' sparkling essays “Jobbins is ever the punchy essayist. His trawl across the national differences embraces not just neeps and Irn-Bru but law and media. “They have proper grown-up media and press” is how he phrases it with provocation.” * * * * 11 March 2016: Peter Lord Speaking on “the Tradition” at the National Museum “Yet tradition, in Lord's telling, is a story that culture devises to relate to itself. Hence the paradox of a movable history that shifts as the zeitgeist amends it. The notion that Wales was unable to sustain an ecology of painters and patrons is “a historical nonsense.” A tradition becomes itself in the telling. A philosopher, J R Jones, has aided his thinking, as has his experience of the politics of Wales. “Working within Wales in the aftermath of the debacle of the devolution referendum of 1979, it seemed to me that the absence of such institutional and intellectual validation of our own cultural product was among the root causes of our psychological dependency that the referendum result signified.” * * * * 20 December 2013: Nine Things I Like as a Reader of Criticism “ Praise that is informed and expands/ Elaboration not dismissal/ Concision & compression/ Wit & playfulness/ Insight & getting to the essential/ An eye and an ear for the telling detail/ Depth/ Distinctiveness & personality/ Skewering bias and falsity.” * * * * 03 September 2013: The cull of professional arts writers continues “At their peak of employment two thousand cartoonists worked full-time in the American newspaper industry. The number now is forty. The wholesale dismissal of its entire arts staff by the Independent on Sunday prompted a Guardian article, not the first, on 22nd August “Are critics and bloggers on the same side?” * * * * 29 August 2013: Tributes on the retirement of Philip French From cinema Martin Scorsese: He never just described what was on screen, but provided the whole background, reading into the director's intention and so forth…. Whenever I read Philip French's elegant and thoughtful criticism, I felt like I was in the company of someone who not only loved cinema but who felt a sense of responsibility toward it as an art form...it's nice to be appreciated. But it's genuinely heartening, and rare, to be understood.” * * * * 04 July 2013 Peter Lord “Relationship with Pictures” Lord locates Wales too in the most Bloomsbury of utterances on art. Clive Bell may intone that ‘Only artists and educated people of extraordinary sensibility and some savages and children feel the significance of form so acutely that they know how things look.’ This particular critic had his extraordinary sensibility honed at Marlborough and Trinity, Cambridge. Bell’s access to these ruminative pastures has been helped, Lord notes, by the family’s extraordinary sensibility to acquire ownership of coal mines in Neath and Merthyr. * * * * 20 November 2012: Critics Round Table Rebecca West declared her simple reason for writing: “I write books to find out about things.” In his 1982 play “A Map of the World” David Hare gave his Naipaul-like character Victor Mehta a similar line: “I write in order to find out what I believe.” Criticism is engagement, context, insight, description and concern. If it is doing its job political art is about “exposing a deeper feeling about how power works. It opens up connections in the world in a way we had not seen before.” BBC Wales operates in a wholly criticism-free zone. * * * * 10 June 2012 Gary Raymond & Dylan Moore create “the Raconteur: America” “The best of critical writing is a spur to action. “America” made me want to find out why Gore Vidal disliked Updike's “Rabbit” trilogy quite so much. It made me want to discover Allegra Goodman, to blow the dust off travel-worn copies of “Herzog” and “the Bonfire of the Vanities, to seek out Poe and “Moby Dick”. For a book to overflow with enthusiasm; that is no small thing.” * * * * 07 October 2011 Critical Gathering in Cardiff “All praise then to National Theatre of Wales, management and Board alike, for generating their cluster of commentators...The writers from Wales see the work here through a different lens from the writers from London. The London critics possess their far greater awareness of theatre in England and elsewhere. But they will not see theatre that inhabits a Pembrokeshire farm, a Valleys ‘Stute, or a Gwynedd coastal town with the same layer of experience and familiarity.” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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