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Re: Must your criticism be so male?

phillip_andrew_bennett_low — Fri, 12 Feb 2016 11:15:25 -0000

The frustrating reality is that, for as awesome and wide-ranging as I find the local theatre blogging scene to be, I don't really have the impression that it's observed much outside of our own arts community. Publications like the Strib are still among our most effective ways of reaching an audience outside of that, which is why I'm still submitting press releases.

It's also worth noting that there are plenty of niche writers (and I include myself in this) whose product can be considered dense, weird, or inaccessible to casual audiences. (Meaning, I suspect that many of those Guthrie audiences are not going to enjoy much of the work of those amazing small theaters -- they're often doing fundamentally different things.) The few flirtations I've had with mainstream publicity suggest to me that many of us are better off trying to swell our audiences with carefully targeted marketing, rather than courting the big-name critics.

Re: Must your criticism be so male?

phillip_andrew_bennett_low — Fri, 12 Feb 2016 11:00:58 -0000

Another alternate perspective on the positive/negative issue: a few years back, I was performing as part of a local festival (its name isn't important, but its nature means that it was drawing an unusually high proportion of "art-as-therapy" types). The vast bulk of what bloggers and artists were writing was glowing, and there was a marked resistance to any attempts to deconstruct technique, or to talk about how the writers were doing what they were doing.

I found this environment to be creatively frustrating, because I found the readings of what we were doing to be terribly superficial. At one point, a blogger who had given me a glowing review confessed that she never gave anyone less than five stars, out of respect for our "creative fragility". I was frankly insulted. It meant that any positive observations I had received from her were effectively meaningless. She didn't regard me seriously as a craftsman, but rather felt she needed to cater to what she believed to be my frail ego.

Granted, I'm a writer and a neurotic mess and blah blah blah, but from my point of view her uncritical positivity was a slap in the face -- one that cost her her credibility, and me my self-respect.

Re: Must your criticism be so male?

phillip_andrew_bennett_low — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 14:42:38 -0000

I've been writing reviews, both paid and unpaid, for a variety of online publications, for over a decade now. I'm much more comfortable with the "blogger" appellation, rather than "critic", and favor the formats that let me ramble and tangent freely. It seems to me that one of the key roles of art criticism is examining how it provokes and reflects our inner lives, rather than trying to predict consensus judgments (which is often how I see it used).

I may be an outlier here, but when it comes to criticism, I really think that quantity is more important than quality. On the Fringe circuit, I often come to towns that have exactly one paper with exactly one theatre critic, who wields extraordinary power. It's not even that they're a bad critic, it's that they're the only voice, and their influence becomes wildly disproportionate. It's why I'm so resistant every time that someone brings up removing audience reviews from the Fringe site: I'd rather have a handful of one-star reviews then passively hope that I'm one of the half-dozen shows whose press release was fished out of a critic's inbox. If we don't like the responses our work is getting, it seems to me that the answer is that we need more critical voices, not less.

There's a trend that I've noticed evolving over the past couple of years that I've been struggling to articulate: a shift from the defensive "How dare you criticize me!" to an equally defensive "How dare anyone criticize anyone?" I wonder if it isn't symptomatic of an age in which everyone and their grandma has a public platform (a fact that I believe is, for the most part, a very good and very cool thing). But I find it troubling to think that we're growing increasingly facile in the way that we consume entertainment. I wonder if bloggers aren't afflicted with a particularly nasty case of impostor syndrome (i.e. what qualifies me to do this? Answer: nothing, which means you have exactly the same relevant qualifications as any professional critic does, these days), that encourages us to become a support group, rather than calling out lazy, offensive, or thoughtless writing when we see it.

As for the gender distribution issue (which was, y'know, the point of the article): well, I'm a male playwright and a male blogger, so I can't pretend that the current setup has ever harmed me. But it's hard to view the lack of representation without suspecting a larger systemic issue. From what little I understand of the print media world, I suspect that reform there may be a lost cause. (Hell, I suspect that print media itself may be a lost cause.) In the information age, the answer has to be more people from more walks of life taking the initiative to fire up their keyboards and enter the fray, and I'm delighted to see that very thing occurring.

Re: FringeFamous

phillip_andrew_bennett_low — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 02:33:26 -0000

"You're the first libertarian artistic director I've met!"

A-*HEM*.