Criticism

Vladimir: Moron!
Estragon: Vermin!
Vladimir: Abortion!
Estragon: Morpion!
Vladimir: Sewer-rat!
Estragon: Curate!
Vladimir: Cretin!
Estragon: (with finality) Crritic!
Vladimir: Oh!
He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.

(from Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett)

Artists don’t generally have the best opinion of critics, those envious parasites who judge efforts that they cannot match, who wield unwarranted power over the success or failure of any given work of art, and who relish that power more to flatter their own vanity than to enlighten.

In the age of social media, meanwhile, the power of an individual critic to determine success or failure is more limited than ever. The gap in taste between critics and audiences is readily visible on ratings-aggregation sites like Metacritic, Show Score and Rotten Tomatoes; algorithms and affinity groups can outperform critics at telling someone what they will like. The whole activity can seem simultaneously arrogant and futile.

But as both an artist and an audience member as well as a critic, I believe criticism can still be of great value, if it is based in the same process of discovery that animates artistic creation itself. I flatter myself that I try hard to work in that mode, aiming less at evaluation than at understanding, and an honest investigation of the impact a work of art has had on me.

My writing on the arts appears most frequently in Modern Age, where I am the theater and film critic. From 2012 to 2017, it appeared most frequently in The American Conservative, where I was the theater critic. My critical work has also appeared in The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, and The New York Times Book Review.

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