Corinthians Against Prop. 8

On the LA Times' new arts blog Culture Monster, I caught this lovely two-minute anti-anti-gay-marriage proposition video by Dave Barton of Rude Guerrilla Theatre. I know this post is likely to reach mainly the converted and/or non-California voters, but it seems well worth reposting here, there, and everywhere (to lead a better life).

Sun Sets

I hold no brief for the politics of The New York Sun, which has officially folded, but I will miss its arts coverage--particularly the astute reviews my colleague, Eric Grode, one of the finest in the business. His last review: a fine, nuanced reading of Equus.

Quote for Today

I'm reading Jane Jacobs' classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which is about urban planning but ultimately about so much more, and this quote from Eugene Raskin, an architecture professor at Columbia, explaining how a neigborhood's aesthetic monotony can't be concealed by superficial flourishes, popped out and stopped me cold:

Art is the one medium in which one cannot lie successfully.

Positively Wildean.

I know it's wrong, but...

...the only thing getting me and the better half through this surreal campaign is the nonstop snark at Wonkette.

Mac World

Mac Wellman goes into orbit with 1965UU, though I found the results curiously, and somewhat endearingly earthbound.

(Photo of Paul Lazar by the Chocolate Factory.)

At Long Last, TKTS

On Oct. 16, the new TKTS booth and redone Duffy Square will at last reopen. I've been hearing about the new booth ever since I started at TDFin Oct., 2006, so this is a big deal. A promising write-up here.

Criticism for Its Own Sake

For a talk I'm giving later this week, I searched for what I remembered as one of the best pieces I've ever read on the proper role of critics in our media-saturated age; I used to distribute copies of it to cub critics at Back Stage West, and to anyone else who asked. I still occasionally quote the 84 percent figure from an eye-opening study cited in the piece (see below).

Well, I couldn't find my hard copy, but some digging on the Web turned it up. It was written by the Irish theater critic Fintan O'Toole, on invitation by The Economist. And though it's 12 years old, it rings ever true. A clarifying sample:

Critics should be honest enough to accept that they represent nobody but themselves--not the art form, not even in any real sense the newspapers that employ them. Their job is not to report on how a work was received by an audience. It is not to sell books or tickets. It is not to reform or mould the practice of theatre or music or poetry. And it is not to maintain, as arbiters of taste and value, the authority of the institutions who print their opinions.

The job of the critic is to try to ignore the magnifying effect of print and hyperbole, to preserve a sense of proportion, and to give a genuinely individual opinion. It is a modest but by no means a contemptible task. And it is one that is inextricable from the artistic process itself.

As for that study:

An American sociologist, Wesley Monroe Shrum, in a recent study of the relationship between critics and performers at the Edinburgh Festival fringe, provides some empirical evidence for the belief that critics often say what artists think. He asked 43 directors and actors to say what was good and bad about their own show. The vast majority (84%) used "phrases or comments" that were similar to those used by one or more of the critics. Some of the artists were much more dismissive of their own work than the critics were. In one play, for instance, the critic praised the acting but the director thought it was "nervous" and "patchy."

The whole thing is well worth your time.