As I See It: Careerism VS Artistic Integrity

Not that I'm planning to derive all my sources of blog-writing inspiration from there, but this is another response to a posting on the Praxis Theatre blog. The question of Careerism versus Artistic Integrity was thrown forth and there were a pretty broad range of responses. Here's mine:

I have to say first off that I have a bit of a problem with this question because it implies a kind of judgement that we as artists feel justified in placing on each other. If someone makes a living making art who the fuck am I to judge the decisions they have made that have brought them to that point? I have no problem with people saying that they like or dislike a particular piece of art or the body of work produced by a particular artist, but to say that someone lacks integrity because they've either chosen or fallen into a path that has brought them financial success is totally unfair. Artists have to deal with enough judgement that is lumped on us by society about what we do. We don't need this shit from each other.

I got into an argument during a panel discussion about playwrights at the LMDA conference a few years back. I can't remember what the exact topic of the panel was because every panel I've ever attended that's about playwrights ends up coming down to the same thesis: that the subscription-season based programming formula doesn't leave room for taking chances or bringing new voices into the mix and that we're all struggling, suffering, and starving because being a playwright is just so damn hard. At the time I was working with bluemouth inc., a company who eschewed traditional models of performance making by working in a site specific context, thereby negating both the need and the desire to work within the traditional system. I suggested to the audience that if what was ultimately important to them was getting their work out there, that the best recourse was to try working outside the established system, rather than fighting to be a part of it. A particular member of the audience responded to me by saying that she "didn't have time to do plays in her back yard with friends" and added that because I was "young" (I still had an absence of grey hair and crows feet back then) that I couldn't possibly understand what she, and other mature artists within the profession were going through while trying to make a living. When I posed the question of why she was making art, if her ultimate goal was to make money, all hell broke loose.

I think I was probably about twenty-five then, and still very much attached to the romantic notion of the starving artist. Now, a few weeks away from my thirtieth birthday, my perspective has changed a bit. A still think that being an artist is a lousy way to make a living from a financial perspective and we have to trade a lot in terms of material comforts and financial gain in order to follow the career path that we want. That said if someone does end up being financially successful through their art work, regardless of what they are making, I have to applaud them for that. Even if it's Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Here's a secret about me; I want to be a successful artist. The definition of success if different for different people but for me translates to having opportunities to create and present my work around the world and to not have to sling drinks or answer phones while I'm doing that to make ends meet. Does that make me a careerist? I sure as hell hope so, because I want to make art as a career. That's not to say I place any judgement on people who make art as a sideline to their regular work or have other jobs to fill in the financial gaps left in their bank account by the inconsistency of their income. They probably have much nicer apartments than I do, take better vacations, have nicer clothes, and dine in nicer restaurants. And a lot of them make really good art. I can only speak for myself and the career path that I want. Since I've started to think about my own career from this perspective, I've all but lost any interest in whether or not other artists have "integrity" or seem to be doing things for "the money". The only artists I care about are the ones who are making work that is interesting to me and the ones who aren't, whether they're making money at it or not, don't show up on my radar. Those artists who are making work that is interesting to me are the ones that I'm going to give my time and money to and whose work I am going to support and write about.

And if Andrew Lloyd Webber lies awake at night feeling unfulfilled because he's been making a shit-load of money pitching spectacular crap on stage for the last several decades, rather than making the experimental site-specific interdisciplinary performance art that he's always secretly dreamed of and feels like he has no integrity as a result, that's his problem to deal with, not mine. I have a sneaking suspicion that he doesn't feel this way, however in the case that he does, he can take it up with his therapist. I'm pretty sure he can afford a good one.
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As I See It: Why We Need Critics

A few weeks back there was a post made to the Praxis Theatre blog, referencing a piece that George Hunka had made on his blog about dismantling the critical apparatus in the theatre world, by either sending all of the critics on one-year vacations or just refusing to let them into our shows. It's taken me a while to figure out exactly how to respond to this, but I'm finally getting around to it.

As someone who straddles the worlds of critic and artist, I've had to put a lot of thought into what exactly the role of the critic should be and I can say with all sincerity that we do not need to get rid of critics. We need more critics. Better critics. What we don't need any more of is reviewers, which is what the major publications of the city have on staff. Writing a piece that tells someone whether or not they should spend money to take in a piece of art is not criticism and the people who pen these articles are not critics, despite the fact that the publications that they work for, in an attempt to grant them some level of legitimacy, assign them this title. While reviews can be humourous, insightful, and (especially when they are scathing) quite fun to read, they do not constitute critical writing and including them in this category diminishes the value and importance of actual theatre criticism.

Criticism, whether written about theatre or any other art form, is writing which is designed to accompany the work, NOT writing designed to tell people whether or not they should see it in the first place. True criticism is written under the assumption that your reading audience has seen or plans to see the work you are talking about and should inform the viewer's experience of the work, not to place a value judgement on the work itself. That doesn't mean that everything a critic has to say about a work is going to be positive, however the minute a critic starts telling their reader that they should or should not see a work, it ceases to become criticism and becomes a review.

Criticism should do several things for its audience. The first is to contextualize the work they are writing about, both within the practice of the particular artist they are covering and also within the greater context of other artists working in the same tradition. Critics who are good at what they do know what is happening on the world art scene. They read voraciously what other critics are writing about art. They travel to see work in different cities. They have an in-depth knowledge of the history of the discipline they are writing about. They also have at least a general sense of what is happening in the art world outside of their particular area of expertise. Perhaps most importantly, they talk to artists about what they are doing with their work.

True criticism should be a guide to the work being talked about. In addition to providing context it should clarify the intention of the artist. The reviews that I find most offensive are the ones that can be summed up with the phrase "I didn't understand this piece and therefore it is bad art". In an academic setting, which is about the only place in Canada where true theatre criticism takes place, if a paper was presented where the author said that they didn't understand a piece of work and that it therefore had no value they would be laughed off the stage. It is your job as a critic to understand the work you are writing about inside and out, as well as having a clear grasp of the artist's intention behind it. It's fine to judge the intention and execution of the piece in relation to the artist's practice and context in which they are working, but to simply throw up your hands, shrug your shoulders, and tell people it sucks is stupid, lazy, offensive, and is the thing I believe artists should truly be intolerant of.

When I say we need more critics, what I mean is that we need more people generating the kind of writing about theatre I've outlined above. I would love it if at every show I went to see, I was handed a critical essay along with the ticket and program that would actually engage me in the work in a way that I might not be if I just saw the work on its own. I would surmise that if this kind of writing was provided to reviewers, in addition to the company bios and flashy photos that normally pad a press-kit, we might also see a reduction in bad reviews as it would improve their understanding of what they are seeing. I would also suggest that this would be a considerably more effective tactic in dealing with the phenomenon of bad reviews than banning reviewers from seeing our shows. There have been a few companies that have tried this in the past and it hasn't worked. If a publication wants a journalist to cover a show, they'll get them in the door one way or another, even if it means having them pay for a ticket rather then getting them a media comp or having them go in disguise as Kate Taylor used to when she attended shows at companies that had banned her.

Ultimately, unless you're producing work for a large company that has a huge budget for marketing, you need to get reviews of your work as they are the primary means of reaching your audience. Rather than hate the reviewers, try to work with them by providing them with as much information as possible about your work and the context in which you are working, assuming they haven't gone to the trouble to do this themselves. Find a critic to generate this material and include it in your press kit. Have your publicist follow-up with them to ask if they had questions about the piece or found things confusing and offer to talk to them about it. And perhaps most importantly, don't hate them. Reviewers are just doing a job that they get paid for which, by the way, is the lowest paying form of journalism. It's not going to guarantee that you'll never have a bad review of your work, but at the very least it will ensure that you won't have a bad review simply because the person writing your show doesn't have a fucking clue what they are talking about. And if we can, at the very least, avoid those kinds of the reviews it's worth the effort.
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As I See It: The Problem With Arts Journalism

I don't read the papers much, even though I should. I know it's both artistically and journalistically sound to keep up to date with what people are saying about art in the city, but I just never seem to get around to it. Maybe it's because the environmentalist in me can't stand having to deal with all that paper. Maybe it's that so much of the content isn't of interest to me and I have to wade through pages and pages of crap to get to the three or four pages in the arts section. Or maybe it's because every time I do read them, I end up getting mad. When I read Susan Walker's review of Dancemakers' Double Bill #1 in the Toronto Star last Friday, I realized that it's likely option number three that's the cause of my avoidance.

I think this review is a perfect example of the problem with arts journalism right now. Walker talks about these two pieces in such an uneducated manner, it's an embarrassment to her publication. I won't take issue with Walker's taste, as it's pretty obvious we're on opposite ends of the spectrum, but I will say that I think her lack of understanding of this particular aesthetic of contemporary dance is upsetting, given the fact that she's a dance critic for one of the largest papers in the country. If Ame Henderson and Michael Trent were creating a kind of work completely unheard of before, I might be more inclined to ignore Walker's ignorance about the aesthetic in which they are working. However there are lots of other choreographers out there who are creating in this manner, though most of them are working in Europe at the moment. Part of your job as an arts writer is to keep up to date, not just with what's happening in your city, but with what's happening around the world, so that you can provide your reading audience with an enlightened and educated view point about the work you are writing about. In this particular instance, Walker has failed at her job.

Art is many things to many people and as a critic it is vital that you learn to understand the difference between a show that is not within your personal taste and that's just plain bad. In this case, Walker simply took the easy way out that so many journalists do; she didn't understand the show and rather than take the time to do some research and maybe even (gasp!) contact the artists to get a bit more information about what they were trying to do, she just gave the show a shit review and called it a day. This is irresponsible journalism.

To be fair, I don't think this type of scenario (which is all too common) is entirely the fault of the writers. When you're reviewing work for a daily publication, your copy is normally due the day after you see the show, meaning there is virtually no time to do any research between seeing the performance and submitting your review. Writing for a weekly may buy you an extra day or two, but it's still hardly any time to process the work you've seen, find out answers to the questions you have, and write an engaging and interesting piece that your editor will be satisfied with. That said, journalists who decide to work for those publications need to take responsibility for preparing themselves as much as possible before they see a show. In the case of these works in particular, just glancing over the program notes that Jacob Zimmer wrote would have answered some of the questions that Walker had. Based on the holes in what she had to say about the performance, I would have surmised she didn't get a copy of the program, except that she actually references Zimmer's notes in her review.

I'm not saying that there shouldn't be bad reviews. God knows there's lots of bad work out there. What I am saying is that not understanding a piece of work because you lack the proper background and context, is absolutely no excuse for giving it a bad review. In an academic context, would it ever be acceptable to submit an essay to a professor about a piece of work saying that you fundamentally didn't understand it and it was therefore intrinsically bad? Of course not. And we need to start holding arts journalists (Critics as they like to call themselves) to the same standards.

I don't intend to harp on Walker endlessly. She and I have a very different aesthetic of work that we like, and it's not fair to blame her for simply not liking these pieces. I do think that this article is a good example of the larger systemic problems that exist within mainstream publications when it comes to arts writing. Most papers employ two or three writers at the most for their performing arts sections. People don't stop to question this, but when you compare performing arts to other art forms the problem becomes obvious.

Let's take NOW Magazine as an example. The performing arts section, has two principal writers and one or two others who occasionally pen things. In contrast, the music section has over a dozen writers, who regularly contribute. The suggestion here is that while music can fall into many different categories, performance falls into only two or three. Another great example it the music blog Pitchfork which employs upwards of forty different writers, even though they are actually very limited in what genres of music they cover. The simple lack of different voices in performing arts writing may be the biggest problem that publications and artists face today.

Most arts writers are trained as journalists, but have no formal training in the arts. As someone who works as both an artist and a journalist, I can say with absolute certainty that having credentials in one area, does not automatically make you an expert in the other. One would hope that over time, writers would take the time to learn about different forms of work, to travel, and to get a sense of the overall context in which the artists they are talking about are working. I don't think any of these writers are stupid. I think a lot of them are actually very good writers. However, I do think that in many cases they have become lazy, and don't bother to educate themselves or expose themselves to a wide range of different kinds of work, or to challenge themselves to expand their personal tastes.

None of this would actually matter except for one thing; artists working in performance rely on reviews as the primary means of marketing their work and selling tickets to their performances, because none of them have enough money for large scale advertising campaigns. Whether we like it or not, we must have our work reviewed, because it's the only way that people will hear about it. Can you imagine the shape that any other industry would be in if it's entire marketing campaign was based around things written about their product by a third party source that was in many ways totally uneducated about their product? The suggestion that companies selling cars or cell phones or big blockbuster films would use only these means to market their products sounds absurd, but as artists we've just decided to accept this. The spirit of the artist is used to being downtrodden, beaten-up, and abused, and I think in some ways that leaves us in the position of not feeling up to fighting against the systems that oppress us and prevent us from creating and showing our work.

I don't know the exact solution to this problem, though if I did, I'm sure I'd be a hugely successful artist by now. What I do know is that it's time for us as artists to start addressing the critical climate in which we work and to start challenging what people have to say about us. We've all had those occasions where we've presented work, gotten a bad review, but known full well that we deserved it. In those cases, the best bet is just to lick you wounds and try to do better the next time. But the next time you create a piece that gets a bad review you feel was undeserved and uninformed, write the publication. Take the time to challenge what the journalist had to say about it and point out the holes in their arguments. Similarly, if you see a piece of work that's great, but gets a bad review from an uninformed writer, challenge them on behalf of the artist getting the bad review. And don't let a bad review scare you off. If a piece of work seems interesting to you, but got a bad review, don't let that one person's potentially uniformed perspective influence your decision to buy a ticket to the show.

Essentially what I'm saying with all this is that I believe we as artists must create our own critical system within our community. If you see a show you love, take the time to tell your friends and colleagues about it. If you are curious about an artist's work, but don't totally understand it, call them and ask them about what they're doing. Putting the responsibility for understanding each other's work into our own hands won't eliminate the review systems of the mainstream publications but it will allow us to challenge our own assumptions about what we do and how to make our work better. And no matter your perspective, you can't argue that's a bad thing.
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