Critical Futures

In a January 2016 op-ed, New York Times film critic A. O. Scott articulates what has come to be a mantra of the digital age. “Everybody’s a critic. And that’s how it should be,” his headline reads. Scott explains:

On the Internet, everyone is a critic—a Yelp-fueled takedown artist, an Amazon scholar, a cheerleader empowered by social media to Like and to Share. The inflated, always suspect authority of ink-stained wretches like me has been leveled by digital anarchy. Who needs a cranky nag when you have a friendly algorithm telling you, based on your previous purchases, that there is something You May Also Like, and legions of Facebook friends affirming the wisdom of your choice?

Scott’s tongue-in-cheek pronouncement of the “all-powerful” critic’s end of days is, by now, accepted as fact. Recent writing on theatre criticism—as evidenced in the pages of this issue of Canadian Theatre Review—has focused on how the unbridled growth of the blogosphere and the concurrent erosion of print media have unsettled the authority of traditional pundits and tastemakers and dispersed their power to the masses. The pros and cons of this changing state of theatre criticism have been much debated by artists, critics, audiences, and scholars. Some decry the dystopia of a world without experts to facilitate our appreciation and understanding of art; others declare “good riddance!” to the old guard and celebrate the proliferation of new critical voices online. Many, like Karen Fricker and myself, co-editors of this issue of CTR, fall in between these two poles, asking how criticism can evolve and diversify, and what roles it might play in this shifting landscape in order to survive.

But concerns surrounding the uncertain future of theatre criticism are not new. The last issue of CTR dedicated to theatre criticism was published in 1988. Edited by Robert Wallace, who, two years later, authored what remains one of the only scholarly monographs on theatre criticism in Canada,¹ CTR 57 confronted the “serious” and “complex” problems affecting critical practice at the time (Wallace, “Critical Practice”). In his introduction to the issue, Wallace writes, “The current devaluation of theatre criticism by the Canadian media establishment is possible in a climate that simultaneously marginalizes cultural production as an elitist activity and necessitates that it prove itself in the commercial marketplace.” Among the articles included in CTR 57 is a short piece by Aline Gélinas, a freelance writer who had been let go by La Presse the previous year. Gélinas describes the shrinking space devoted to dance and theatre reviews in the Montreal paper in the 1980s and her eventual termination because her editors felt her column was “‘written too much for experts’” rather than “‘accessible’ to a ‘popular’ audience” (22). In an open letter she wrote to La Presse, translated and reprinted alongside her article, she warns of the consequences of the dearth of informed criticism in Quebec for its burgeoning performing arts scene, concluding, “These deficiencies, I fear, will vitiate the force of our artists: their works will be born into an uninformed world and their social and spiritual functions will go largely unappreciated. We shall all be impoverished” (23).

Nearly thirty years later, Wallace’s and Gélinas’s accounts of the devaluation of criticism continue to resonate, as Canada grapples with the aftermath of the Harper government’s cuts to arts and culture, and as neo-liberal values such as competition and privatization impact working conditions for artists and critics alike. As the regional reports commissioned for the present issue demonstrate, decreased space for arts coverage in mainstream media outlets; the replacement of expert criticism with short features, roundups, listings, and interviews; and the elimination of reviewers’ positions altogether are realities from coast to coast. If, at its best, criticism should nurture art—an ideal noted by several contributors to the “Artists on Critics” section in this issue—then its disappearance should be of major concern.

However, while criticism is disappearing from the pages of our newspapers, its reappearance in new and innovative forms online might offer some consolation for those mourning its death...