By Bill Marx

Back in February of this year I began to write a weekly column for the newsletter on Substack. A few readers have asked that I post these opinion pieces in the magazine.  Here is a selection of my favorites.

February 7, 2024

A recent Yale Review article by veteran rock commentator Greil Marcus about why criticism of the arts is valuable reminded me that reviewing has been (and should be) much more than consumer guide advice. For Marcus, “art produces revelations that you might be unable to explain or pass on to anyone else, but revelations that, if you are a writer, you might try desperately to share, in your own words, in your own work.” Critics, through the language of judgment, articulate art’s quicksilver epiphanies.

And that suggests critics are inevitably cultural disrupters because art’s revelations are not about reinforcing comfortable views of the world. According to Marcus, “what art does, maybe what art does most completely, is to tell us, make us feel, that what we think we know we don’t. That’s what it’s for — to show you that what you think can be erased, cancelled, turned on its head, by something you weren’t prepared for.” Critics tap into the power of the topsy-turvy — they verbalize how art disorders order.

February 14, 2024

In a New Yorker newsletter, Matthew Goldstein, a media consultant, is quoted about what the tidal wave of 2023 layoffs in broadcast, print, and digital news media will mean. He sees “a potential extinction-level event in the future.” Why? “Goldstein cited several factors for this prediction: consumers are burned out by the news, social-media sites have moved away from promoting news articles, and Google’s rollout of A.I.-integrated search threatens to further reduce site traffic.”

For arts journalists, this is old news — extinction has come and gone. Over the past two decades a tsunami in the mainstream media has swept away arts writers and critics. Nobody — artists, readers, publishers — seemed to care all that much about their departure. The consensus: let algorithms dictate our leisure time activities. Will vacant news rooms generate more anger? It should — if we want a healthy democracy, among other reasons.

Has the end of substantial cultural critique been good for the arts? In 1891, Oscar Wilde warned that an age without criticism is “either an age in which art is immobile, hieratic, and confined to the reproduction of formal types, or an age that possesses no art at all.” Oscar may have been a prophet as well as a wit. This week, Bob Abelman comments on the besieged state of arts criticism, while I draw connections between the downturn in the fortunes of local theaters and the fact that there is no serious criticism of our stages in the Boston media.

March 6, 2024

The snapshot above is of the bottom of the program for the American Repertory Theater’s production of Becoming a Man. It would be tantalizing to speculate why a philanthropic organization like the Barr Foundation would be called on to fund (in part) a talkback at the end of the show. But the move is business as usual for A.R.T. artistic director/ace entrepreneur Diane Paulus, who is brilliant at finding ways to dovetail branding opportunities and theatrical virtue signaling. No, it is the “Media Support is provided by WBUR” I would like to scrutinize. In the A.R.T. program, the arrangement with the radio station is clear. But WBUR’s review of Becoming a Man doesn’t state that connection. And that matters.

Critic Jacquinn Sinclair has every right to be very positive about the production. But the critique of the show (as of this writing) does not inform readers that the NPR outlet is supplying the A.R.T. with “Media Support,” which is defined as those media being “used to reinforce messages sent to target markets through other more ‘dominant’ and/or more traditional media.” It is a matter of editorial honesty. The station should be upfront with readers: it has some sort of marketing agreement with the A.R.T.

The issue is about maintaining precious credibility. Polls suggest that the public has become skeptical of mainstream journalism, increasingly suspicious of its claims of independence and fairness. I would posit the media is not only cutting back on its arts coverage, but treating what it does provide as publicity. NPR has a reputation for integrity — its branding “halo” — and that is undercut by the implication, in this case, that its arts criticism may be a means to serve up “reinforcing messages to target markets.” Letting readers know that there is a mutually supportive setup with the A.R.T. — so they can make up their own minds — addresses the issue. Transparency is key.

March 13, 2024

When Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán visited Donald Trump last week there was, predictably, a lot of talk about how conservative-driven culture wars could be used to win and consolidate governmental power. But how is culture itself faring in what has been described as an authoritarian country? According to NPR, a 2022 report by the Artistic Freedom Initiative concluded that “Christian and nationalist ideas have created ‘existential crises’ among individual artists and cultural institutions … that Orbán and his party, FIDESZ, have achieved this through a combination of consolidated state power and pressure on artists that has resulted in self-censorship.”

I wanted to get a sense of how things are going. I emailed a pair of English-speaking Hungarian stage directors and an American student who has recently studied in the country. Protests by artists against Orbán broke out in 2013, but the public was not interested. There is now a two-tiered system. Official cultural events draw on funds from the government, such as Art Market Budapest, “central and Eastern Europe’s leading international art fair.” In 2023 the event “presented some 100 art galleries and exhibitors from 30 countries in four continents including for the first time the Far East.” According to a fair organizer, the gathering “serves as a platform for shaping image and promot[ing] culture with the spotlight put this year on contemporary Roma art, on the art of design and on fine arts, and on visual culture in our digital age.”

In contrast to a fair in which a chunk of the international community aids and abets a government using the arts as a means to propagandize itself, artists who have chosen to remain in Hungary have come up with a brave alternative: “A lot of the Budapest art scene is genuinely quite underground — young artist collectives, cafes which host secret artist events at night, etc.” The OFF Biennale is a nongovernment-funded art fair dedicated to strengthening “the local independent art scene” in a way that helps sustain “a democratic institution in the civil sphere.”

What lessons does this bifurcation have for us, particularly if the political winds in November blow to the right and existential crises inevitably follow? What is going on in Hungary is a valuable reminder of our need to nurture free-spirited homegrown art and artists that are not dependent on government funding or corporate beneficence.

March 20, 2024

Proof that we shouldn’t let sleeping giants lie. Ironically, An Enemy of the People has been condescended to as the runt among Henrik Ibsen’s masterpieces, dismissed by critics as a didactic potboiler penned by the dramatist to deal with his anger over the public hoo-ha that greeted Ghosts’ attack on moral hypocrisy. Does anyone doubt that the climate crisis propelled the successful Broadway production of the 1882 script? Thomas Stockmann — fighting to assert scientific fact against an army of self-interested deniers — has come into his own. The protagonist is a truth-teller (the issue is water pollution, and there are lives at stake) and he is besieged from every ideological side to stay silent: by politicos, businessmen, journalists, spreaders of disinformation (19th-century version), and the solid majority. Ibsen, who admired rebels, would not have had a problem with Extinction Rebellion’s recent disruption of a performance of Enemy (during the town hall scene!) at NYC’s Circle in the Square Theatre. Theatergoers deserve a taste of reality: the prognosis for the earth’s health — and society’s will to protect it — has darkened considerably in nearly a century and a half.

Unsurprisingly, productions of Enemy have been springing up around the globe, though not in New England. In 2017 I reviewed a very fine staging at Yale Rep. Barrington Stage Company’s 2014 production of Arthur Miller’s 1950 version of Enemy only underlined Ibsen’s theatrical genius. Miller idealizes Stockmann, painting him as an angelic victim of proto-McCarthyism. Ibsen’s surly antihero preaches an ersatz brand of Nietzschean elitism: the noble few should lead; the powerful should be discarded and the rabble castigated. Stockmann is a comic turn on a trait that will turn tragic (or tragicomic) in the Ibsen plays to follow: the megalomania that comes when you think you have the power of the truth (or nobility) on your side.

When it comes to their programming, Boston’s theaters follow where New York leads. Perhaps we will see a production of Enemy here? Be still my beating heart. My advice is not to stage the original, or the Miller adaptation, but to take a hint from Scottish playwright Kieran Hurley’s provocative 2021 update, The Enemy. Here Stockmann is a woman, and we are in a high tech world of cell phones and character assassination via social media. As for Ibsen’s exposé of corruption, opportunistic cowardice, capitalistic self-destruction, self-deluded demagoguery, and rampant environmental degradation, no updating is necessary.

March 27, 2024

I argued in a recent commentary that Boston’s theaters have become “fearful and defensive … curling up into provincial balls — and squeezing the imaginative life out of themselves.” Case in point: the dearth of stage productions that present the voices of playwrights and theater companies in Israel and Gaza. The dramatic pickings from the Middle East have been depressingly slim since Israeli Stage called it quits in 2019. Artistic director Guy Ben-Aharon said that the purpose of the company was to create “a cultural bridge.” There’s nothing there now but a vacuum.

A month ago, Shakespeare & Company staged a revival of Golda’s Balcony, William Gibson’s 2002 salute to Golda Meir. The play became the longest running one-woman show in Broadway history. Two decades ago, a Boston-area production starred Annette Miller as Meir, and she was terrific. No doubt Miller was powerful in her reprisal of the role now. But is this the best Boston can do? Granted, a Yom Kippur War drama suggesting that an Israeli prime minister used the threat of the atomic bomb to harness the support of the US isn’t a complete antique: there’s a perverse, Putin-esque kick there. But I am confident Israeli dramatists have written far more penetrating, less nostalgia-ridden plays. Might there not be a script out there that dares to probe the right-wing leadership of Bibi Netanyahu? A production of that would generate challenging debate. Or is that what we are afraid of?

As for Palestinian drama, the only recent production in the Boston area took place earlier in March: Palestine, written and performed by Najla Said, was presented by The Center for Arabic Culture. The script dates from 2010. The 2020 anthology Stories Under Occupation and Other Plays from Palestine (Seagull Press) contains seven forceful, stylistically varied plays that are more up-to-date. In his preface, co-editor Gary M. English asserts that “taken together these plays portray how men, women, and children struggle with their moral consciousness in circumstances that have kept them trapped in delimited lives with little chance of physical or spiritual movement.” Cultural bridges like these — from Israel and Palestine — should be produced. As should the plays that will be penned by both sides grappling with the Israel-Hamas War.

Errata: Last week’s column on An Enemy of the People claimed that there had been no recent productions of the play in New England. I overlooked Gamm Theatre’s 2021 staging of A Lie Agreed Upon, a new version of Ibsen’s script written and directed by the company’s artistic director, Tony Estrella. Providence and now New York — it would seem to be Boston’s turn.

April 10, 2024

Hot on the heels of learning that John Barth had died at the age of 93 on April 2, Library of America informed me in an email that fellow metafictionalist Donald Barthleme would have turned 93 the same week. What irritated me is that — while Barthleme deserves a volume of his stories in LoA — precious few of his kindred gifted postmodernists are in the series, which keeps the work of its chosen authors in print. Among the meritorious missing: Barth, William Gass, John Hawkes, Paul West, Robert Coover, William Gaddis, Stanley Elkin, and Thomas Pynchon. Barth is somewhat fortunate: some of his major novels (Sot-Weed Factor, Chimera) are in print through the good graces of Dalkey Archive Press, though not his essays and criticism. Aside from Pynchon and Coover, who are still publishing, most of the others in that rebellious generation of the ’60s (aside from Kurt Vonnegut) are fading away. Rather than coming back into fashion or generating nostalgia, they are seen as detours into the amoral byways of intellectualized aesthetic excess. And that is a cultural disgrace.

Why is Barthleme represented and the others ignored? Snobbery for one. Because he regularly contributed to the New Yorker, Barthleme had the stamp of approval of the establishment. What’s more, in terms of prose style, Barthleme was a minimalist (as was Vonnegut) rather than a mangy maximalist — his enigmas were compressed. Amalgamations of Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges, Barth and his self-conscious company specialized in creating the gargantuan and the unruly. Barth declared that metafictionalists “rejected the familiar for the amazing” and “embraced artifice and extravagance.” Seeing narrative as offering an opportunity to scamper —with surreal abandon — across lexical playgrounds cuts against the American grain of realism. It thumbs its nose at our dedication to moral earnestness.

Critic Tony Tanner’s still provocative book on Barth and company, 1971’s City of Words, argues that the era’s metafictionalists believed that there was emotional/ intellectual liberation in the act of “dissolving reality,” that the games they played with language, at times cut loose from reality, were about enhancing consciousness. Unfortunately, mainstream attacks on these writers — as pessimists, nihilists, and depressives — have stuck, as has the challenge to readers posed by their wild word-wrangling. But, as Tanner argues, one should turn to Barth and his fellow linguistic gamesters constantly, as a way “to renew one’s sense of the various and wonderful things which may be gathered together under the wide wings of language.”

April 17, 2024

Among the many grim American realities our theater ignores, mass shootings may be the most inexcusable. We are universally repulsed at the carnage, but the continual eruptions of gun violence have become accepted as an intractable phenomenon. And, of course, that is just where — at Sophocles’s “bloody crossroads” — great drama is found. The repetition of the heinous crime seems primal, its mechanized mayhem painfully heightened by our inability to do what might be done to mitigate, if not eliminate, the mass killings. Over the past few years there have been a smattering of stage productions of note on this tragic issue, none of them produced, as far as I can tell, in Boston.

That neglect was a driving force behind posting this week’s piece on the world premiere production of Dan O’Brien’s play Newtown at Geva Theater in Rochester, New York (through May 12). The script, which I have read, is based on the shooting that occurred on December 14, 2012, at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School In this drama, O’Brien makes use of his docudrama approach, an amalgamation of nonfiction and imagination that also inspired his True Stories: A Trilogy and The Ballad of George Zimmerman. The first part of Newtown is a monologue delivered by a character based on Nancy Lanza, the mother, caregiver, and deceased victim of Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter. Part two presents a meeting between a mother and father of a child killed at Sandy Hook, and the shooter’s father. (The dramatist says this section “derives in part from Alissa Parker’s memoir An Unseen Angel, in which Parker briefly describes the meeting she and her husband had with Peter Lanza five weeks after the Sandy Hook shooting.”)

O’Brien’s fusion of unbearable fact and moral reflection is valuable now because the approach represents one way our theaters could pull away from their glib homages to empowerment. Docudrama seems to compel a more direct confrontation with the discordant challenges of a bedeviled world. Critic Janelle Reinelt argues that “documentary theater is often politically engaged; although its effects may not match its intentions, it does summon public consideration of aspects of reality in a spirit of critical reasoning.” The real-life spirit of Newtown is as chilling as it is urgent.

April 24, 2024

For those overcome by sadness, anger, and helplessness at the genocidal savagery of the war in Gaza, Boston-area theaters, which tout themselves as “adventurous” and “bold,” have offered nothing of dramatic substance, aside from a revival of William Gibson’s Golda’s Balcony, no doubt prized for its serving of heroic uplift. Judging from upcoming season announcements, even antiwar plays are deemed to be too risky for skittish theater patrons. Companies must not take sides, after all. The prowar crowd buys tickets. This indifference to famine and mass killing makes Bread + Puppet’s spring touring production — which focuses on the plight of the innocent victims of Israel’s siege (over 13,000 children according to UNICEF) — a true outlier. The Hope Principle Show: Citizens’ Shame + Hope in the Time of Genocide, which played in Somerville’s Arts at the Armory last week, was a reminder that theater can be a place for dissent, that it can sound alarms systematically stifled in mainstream debate.

The thrust of the show was to condemn the war and the dehumanization of the Palestinians. Mayhem, indignation, longing for peace, and death were evoked in a succession of monochrome images. Music and readings accompanied the slo-mo procession of various-sized puppets, including elegant white caribou. We heard selections from Palestinian writers, including poet Mahmoud Darwish, and from Tariq M. Haddad’s heartbreaking letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. (Haddad has lost nearly 100 relatives in Gaza.) There wasn’t much humor amid the nonstop earnestness, but there were moments of beauty and pity in what was an opportunity for collective lamentation. It was particularly poignant given that the youth of the performers linked them with the students at MIT, Emerson, and Tufts who have set up encampments in solidarity with students at Columbia protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Despite some upbeat imagery, such as flowers blooming out of a skeleton, shame seemed to overwhelm hope. Midway through the Armory presentation an audience member stood up in rage and stomped out of the room. “This is not what I signed up for!” she shouted to us all. That was followed by an obscenity. I am not sure what the woman’s specific objection to the show was, but it could be argued that her agonized exclamation will resonate across the ideological and geopolitical spectrum for years to come. Eventually, this horrific war will end and — as the Greeks knew so well — the time for moral and legal judgments will begin. Theater artists of courage will be part of that reckoning.

May 8, 2024

Literary critic Helen Vendler died on April 23 at the age of 90. She was a chemistry major in college, and that background in science, she said in her 1996 interview for Paris Review, trained her “to look for evidence. You have to write up evidence for your hypothesis in a very clear way; your equations have to come out even; the left side has to be balanced by the right side. One thing has to lead to the next, things have to add up to a total picture. I think that’s a natural thing to do with literature too. I feel very strongly that anything you say should be backed by evidence from the text, so that you follow a constant loop between generalizations and evidence. I don’t like criticism that is simply rhetorically assertive at a very high level without much reference to evidence in the text.” She was a powerful critic because her justifications were backed up by nuanced examinations of linguistic specifics, judgments buttressed by reasoned close reading.

My personal favorite among Vendler’s books is 2010’s Last Looks, Last Books. Her analytical laser beams generate considerable poignance as she probes the robustly elegiac meditations of five American poets in their final books: Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill. As usual for Vendler, criticism comes down to adjudicating balance: “The poet, still alive but aware of the imminence of death, wishes to enact that deeply shadowed but still vividly alert moment: but how can the manner of a poem do justice to both the looming presence of death and the unabated vitality of spirit?”

The chapter on Stevens’s The Rock ends beautifully: “But in the poems I have singled out here, he finds, in the tragic end-stage of life, modern and disturbing styles of farewell, both structural and stylistic, which delineate not only the stasis, horror, and unreality of that end-stage but also its inquisitive appetite for knowledge, its lullabies in the midst of burial, and, even in its worst mental rigor mortis, the unexpected and solacing sensual warmth of memory.” Vendler was an empiricist, not a sentimentalist: note that phrase “lullabies in the midst of burial.” Her critical aim was to arrive at the “total picture.”

Vendler was obviously amused during her Paris Review interview when poet Henri Cole asked if she had a personal motto. She responded with two from Wallace Stevens: “We say God and the imagination are one …” and “How high that highest candle lights the dark”.

May 15, 2024

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” This quotation of Maya Angelou’s has been given too much mileage of late, especially in the political realm. But it fits our far too easy acceptance of Apple’s apology for its revelatory iPad Pro advertisement, whose recent release triggered a huge backlash on social media. Entitled “Crush!,” the ad presents a hydraulic press slowly pulverizing — into multicolored smithereens — various instruments of art-making, among them a trumpet, a metronome, a globe, paint cans and tubes, a typewriter, books, a piano, a guitar, and an aged TV set. Once the flattening is finished, the press rises to reveal — on a clear and sanitized surface —the new, thinnest of the thin iPad Pro. The soundtrack for the mayhem is Sonny and Cher’s “All I Ever Need Is You.” But just who is you? Note that various anthropomorphic figures — including eyeballed tennis balls, small manikins, and the head of a statue — are steamrolled into pancakes.

Apple says the ad is a misfire, but I beg to differ. For the corporation, the value of the human imagination is monetary. It can be cut down to size — shrink-wrapped so it can be reborn, sleekly repackaged for AI automation. “Crush” is a chilling playlet of mechanized death and resurrection worthy of Samuel Beckett at his most parodically apocalyptic, though the absurdity is much more pitiless because human beings have been extracted. Who is in charge of the hydraulic press? Apple, most likely, unless it is the Godot of technology. Everything in view is completely squashed — paint sprays everywhere, picture tubes are shattered — but there is no debris, no mess, no sweat. Who did the cleaning up? And this fable about high tech “creative destruction” ends with a bit of religious hype: the dead and obliterated comes back to gleaming life — in spirit if not in letter? — in a form that is more profitable for Apple, if not mankind.

“Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry,” Apple explained to Ad Age. Au contraire — the megacorporation needn’t be contrite about its homage to forced miniaturization. Apple’s hydraulic press is slowly lowered down on a vulnerable bull’s-eye — a two-ton curtain falling on the future of the creative class.

May 22, 2024

Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan’s recent New Republic commentary about what arts and culture might look like in a second Trump term is very welcome. Political prophecies from both left and right sides projecting utopias and dystopias abound. But speculation about how the arts will fare is rare. That said, Corrigan ends up waffling. She details Trump’s educational background, then admits it will have no effect on future policy: “Trump doesn’t care about culture—as opposed to celebrity.” Republicans will renew their efforts to zero out funding for the NEA, the NEH, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, while “big money donors, both Republican and Democratic, [will] keep the high-end cultural monuments of urban life — opera companies, symphonies, flagship museums — afloat.” This is mild hand-wringing, considering that the magazine claims an American fascist state might be on its way.

Corrigan doesn’t consider that we can already glimpse the future of arts and culture under Trump. Courtesy of its self-serving apathy — not both-sides-ism but no-sides-ism. The New Republic and other media outlets insist democracy is in danger — a crisis is at hand. But, in the world of arts and culture, who is sounding the alarm? The bet is that it will be business as usual — no matter who wins. Corrigan sees the increase in dystopian fiction as evidence of an “oppositional,” but she doesn’t connect visions of despair with political efficacy. The schedules of Boston-area theaters for next season’s shows — when Trump might well be ascendant — are chockablock with standard fare. On our stages, didacticism is a matter of fashion: grappling with identity and gender is on the front burner; empowering prodemocratic forces is out in the cold.

Perhaps deep down, the powers-that-be in arts and culture agree with the fat cats of the right wing. It won’t be bad for business if Trump is reelected: fears of fascism may be overblown and a boogeyman in office might be damned good for ticket sales and funding. The indifferent can sit back and enjoy irresponsibly, arguing that the arts transcend the fate of democracy. That is the way it works in semiauthoritarian states, such as the Hungary of Republican fave Viktor Orbán. Corrigan should have taken a gander at its internecine culture war. Arts and culture survives by kowtowing to heavy-handed government patronage that demands self-imposed censorship. The strategy is textbook divide and conquer among artists: “collaborationists” are pitted against “progressives” whose funding requests are guaranteed to be nixed. The latter either leave the country or go underground — to sound an alarm that should be loud enough for us to hear.

May 29, 2024

The American Repertory Theater’s Broadway-bound musical Gatsby, along with a Brattle Theatre film series called “Fitzgerald & the Jazz Age,” are attempts to look back, nostalgically, at the Roaring Twenties. Given today’s political bollix, Bertolt Brecht’s indictment of avarice and apathy, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, would probably be a more relevant candidate for theatrical rejiggering than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tragi-romantic hymn to the spirit of the age. Also marking its centenary this year: an ugly pillar of American xenophobia, the Immigration Act of 1924, a law that greatly restricted immigration, ensuring that arriving immigrants were mostly from Northern and Western Europe. It played a key role in shutting down the previous era of largely unrestricted immigration, sharply curtailing the size of the country’s foreign-born population for four decades.

In contrast, I would like to pay homage to a milestone of journalistic iconoclasm. January marked the 100th anniversary of H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan’s founding of the the American Mercury. In that era, movies and radio dominated public opinion — aside from this monthly publication, with its distinctive green cover. Until the early ’30s, the American Mercury boasted a circulation of around 80,000 a month. Its pages featured pieces by authors such as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, Sherwood Anderson, and Fitzgerald. As impressive was the publication’s regular lambasting of blather about the country’s regressive fusion of white nationalist Christian values and 100 percent Americanism.

“Every flapper carries one of the green-backed journals conspicuously when it is necessary for her to travel in a train or other public conveyance,” noted a West Virginia newspaper. “To be surprised carrying The American Mercury or caught reading it at odd moments is now absolutely ‘The Thing.’” Why the Mercury? Partly because Mencken fulfilled his critical mission — to scourge a “booboisie” unfit to govern itself — with such exuberant, swashbuckling zest. Readers, particularly the young, were entertained as well as provoked by a Rabelaisian gadfly who trumpeted that our capitalist democracy could be depended on to use every means at its disposal, legal and illegal, to destroy its perceived enemies. Mencken denounced America’s hypocrisy and faux moralism, labeling our country “the greatest robber nation in history.” Given that, at the moment, we are allowing our culture and politics to be stolen by algorithms, influencers, AI, and TikTok, this example of fearless editorial independence back in the Jazz Age is well worth remembering — and emulating.

June 26, 2024

I immediately fell in love with this Ibo Yam Knife mask, the slice-and-dice power emblem of a critic if I ever saw one, when I saw it in the Fitchburg Art Museum. The piece was worn by young people during a performance in which they would critique, most likely sharply, the conduct of the geriatric. It is a beautiful African mask, but it looks to me as if it would fit perfectly on one or more of the ridiculers in the satiric comedies of Aristophanes, particularly The Wasps. The museum’s description is apt: the mask gives the critics in the play “dramatic license” — the freedom to be honest without fear of reprisal. The value of challenging criticism, on stage or off, depends on its independence, protected, in this case, by the anonymity conferred by the mask.

It is a mask, so I wonder — most likely because I am now in my seniorhood — if it might be worn by a person of any age. Wouldn’t the chronological age of the wearer be a mystery? Critique needn’t go in any one generational direction. The point is that someone of any age should be free to chop through the obfuscating privilege and nonsense posed by any position. “Sharpness is all,” to adjust a Shakespearean adage. The mask reflects a bedrock reality: criticism must risk being cutting if it is to play its clarifying cultural role.

Alas, criticism of the arts is dulling itself down. Blunting — rather than sharpening — blades has become de rigueur. The image of the critic as “a pig, an uncouth if mildly intelligent animal rolling in its own sweet filth,” as Merve Emre puts it in her “The Critic as Friend” essay for the current Yale Review, is long gone. There is not much cultural capital in being unpleasant, so let’s be pals. As Lauren Oyler concludes in her book No Judgment, “critics have decided that it is no longer a risk to be sincere, soft, banal. It is completely safe.” Artists and critics rolling in the collective “sweet filth.”

July 24, 2024

Back from a busily relaxing time in Paris, Bordeaux, and Berlin. Don’t worry, no “my summer vacation” ruminations will be offered. But I did find a theatrical model for American stages that — during this time of political crisis — are interested in doing more than mount productions that placate, pacify, or change the subject.

July is a slow month for theater productions in France and Germany. But in Berlin I visited The Small Grosz Museum, a renovated gas station dedicated to displaying the savagely satiric pictures of artist George Grosz — best known for exposing in his art Germany’s moral decay during the period between World War I and Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. A special exhibit offered a lesson for theaters who want to confront (rather than ignore) issues such as war and looming autocracy. Entitled What Times Are These? – Grosz, Brecht, & Piscator, the show contains a sampling of the drawings Grosz contributed to a 1927 multimedia production of Bertolt Brecht’s adaptation of Jaroslav Hašek’s epic comic novel The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik in the Theater am Nollendorfplatz. Ferociously antiwar, pitilessly scathing, the deliciously acidic exhibition is chockablock with grotesquely caricatured takedowns of the monied, military, religious, and governmental powers that were. The Schweik production turned out to be successful. Take note, purveyors of innocuous entertainment.

Grosz’s drawing above, of Christ in a gas mask, was made for the Schweik production. Authorities deemed it, as well as other images in the show, blasphemous. A series of trials took place at a time of increasing censorship; the legal proceedings generated attention around the world. An artist pursuing good trouble. Today, democracy finds itself under authoritarian threat — time for all hands on deck, right? Not on Boston’s complacent and compliant stages. As its lead-up to the crucial election, the American Repertory Theater is presenting Romeo and Juliet. A Lyric Stage Company production of the ’60s warhorse Hello Dolly! is set for next spring. Ironically, the musical may hit the boards at the time that Trump, if he is elected, will kick off his promised mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Hello Dolly! Goodbye Immigrants!

July 31, 2024

One of the finest American writers of the 20th century, William H. Gass, would have turned 100 yesterday. (Born in Fargo, North Dakota, he died in 2017 at the age of 93. Vincent Czyz wrote this for the Fuse after the “wizard of the word” passed.) Doubters should immediately turn to Gass’s 1968 short story collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country ( read“The Pedersen Kid” — a masterpiece), followed by his 1966 novel, Omensetter’s Luck, then to his 1998 collection of novellas, Cartesian Sonata (it contains Robert Coover’s favorite Gass yarn, “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s”) and finally to 1996’s massive poetic probe of a neo-Nazi sensibility in the American heartland, The Tunnel. These are the standouts, for me, among Gass’s seven volumes of fiction. A professor of philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, he was also a mental- muscular-to-the max literary critic/theorist, publishing nine volumes of essays. For those who like dipping in and out of heady selections of fiction and nonfiction, there’s the 906 page The William H. Gass Reader.

Gass has been an undervalued, even denigrated, literary artist for many reasons. He was one of the more aggressive proselytizers of a generation of prose maximalists, high priests of the sentence, which included Coover, Stanley Elkin, William Gaddis, Paul West, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon. These writers scoffed at conventional beliefs about the appeal of plot and character, morality and manners. They idolized language as an end itself, raising prose to a hyper-purply pitch. Barth recognized a kindred soul in Omensetter’s Luck after he was delighted by the images Gass used to describe a Midwestern country picnic: “all kinds of containers sat about the table in sullen disconnection. Some steamed despite the hot day; others enclosed pools of green brine where pickles drowsed like crocodiles.” Pickles drowsed like crocodiles … the real deal.

At its best, Gass’s fiction pulls off a shotgun marriage: Vladimir Nabokov’s aesthetic tingle meets the linguistic insularity of Gertrude Stein. His prose was tailored to be as exhilarating as it was difficult. His vision of the world was generally bleak: “the evil that men do every day far outweighs the good — the goods being great art and profound knowledge scientifically obtained.” Gass asked that writers be true to their idyllic calling: to hosanna the imagination via the inventive power of language. That was an endearing good in itself: “the aim of the artist ought to be to bring into the world objects which do not already exist there, and objects which are especially worthy of love.… Works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we should try to understand them as we try to understand anyone — in order to know them better, not in order to know something else.”

August 7, 2024

Advice like “If you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all” works in family gatherings, but not in professional journalism, particularly when it comes to covering arts and culture. Niceness is an inevitable recipe for blandness, the kind of informative but innocuous talk served up by GBH’s The Culture Show, where art and artists are swaddled in the commercial cotton of self-marketing. Excising criticism dooms coverage of the arts to terminal boredom. Alas, nobody notices when it fades away, including media watchdogs. They are up-in-arms when it is announced that resources for news reporting shrinks, but they could not care less when cultural reviews and commentaries vanish.

But attention should be paid to how puffery is elbowing movie criticism aside in the Boston Globe. The paper published two publicity pieces on Annie Baker’s film Janet Planet. But it did not review what is sure to be an Oscar-nominated effort. Could that be because, in a story on the New York Film Festival, Globe critic Odie Henderson wrote: “The worst movie I saw? Janet Planet. Despite a great lead performance by Zoe Ziegler as an 11-year-old confused by the adults around her, this cinematic debut by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (and Massachusetts native) Annie Baker was a long, long slog. It’s the kind of twee, new-agey indie movie critics tend to love (indeed, I am in the minority for hating it). But there are three things I’m dangerously allergic to: avocados, bees, and whimsy. That last allergy explains my negative reaction.” The Globe didn’t have the editorial nerve to publish a review that countered two pieces of adoration. That might have promoted healthy debate. The truth is, happy talk is spreading like kudzu through the Globe’s dwarf-sized arts section: the paper’s coverage of documentaries and film festivals continues to dwindle, now amounting to no more than a couple of PR-friendly interviews.

Here is a partial list of recent films not reviewed by the Boston Globe, mostly of the nonmainstream, foreign, indie, or otherwise challenging variety, many directed by women and first-time directors: Green Border (Agnieszka Holland), Perfect Days (Wim Wenders), Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt), Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Pham Thien An), Widow Clicquot (Thomas Napper), MaXXXine (Ti West), The Dead Don’t Hurt (Viggo Mortensen), Wildcat (Ethan Hawke interview), The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (Joanna Arnow), Housekeeping for Beginners (Goran Stolevski), Sometimes I Think About Dying (Rachel Lambert), Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik), R.M.N. (Cristian Mungiu), Pacifiction (Albert Serra), and Tori and Lokita (Dardenne Brothers). The Globe bills itself as “New England’s best source for news, sports, opinion and entertainment.” But when it comes to film criticism, that is an empty promise: unless you want the latest scuttlebutt on Deadpool & Wolverine (one review and two publicity pieces), you are increasingly out of luck.

August 14, 2024

On occasion, a comment pulls me up short. CJ Kelly’s (now deleted) Facebook response to Jon Garelick’s fine review of Andrew Lamb’s performance at the Inman Square club Lilypad stunned me for a moment: “This review of another NY artist is wonderful, but it would be really swell if more writers would review resident jazz artists. It’s amazing how many are producing exciting work.” Of course, she is right, and she points to a failure in our media that connects with last week’s critique of The Boston Globe’s shrinking commitment to reviews of non-mainstream films. The local jazz community has been hit hard — by COVID and its aftermath, dwindling spaces for live performance, and the debilitating economics of streaming — and it has been struggling. Given this crisis, Boston’s arts journalists (those who are left, after years of meltdown) should be hard at work, posting expert reviews, commentaries, features, interviews, etc. But CJ Kelly has a point: WBUR, GBH, The Boston Globe, and yes, I am ashamed to say, this august magazine, are neglecting Boston-area jazz musicians and clubs.

On occasion, our major media offers jazz coverage. But it is rare. Reviews are a thing of the past. Cushy interviews are customary, often of “big names” (usually from out-of-town), headliners at festivals, or musicians cocooned in a political agenda. Jazz-related pickings at GBH’s The Culture Show over the past 2 1/2 months were typically slim: Ivanna Cuesta, a Dominican jazz drummer/composer; NALEDI, a vocalist/composer/ educator from Johannesburg; Vijay Iyer, saxophonist and Harvard prof on the debut of a composition of his for orchestra; saxophonist Ken Field, leader of the Revolutionary Snake Ensemble; and Will Dailey, an ‘artist-in-residence’ at the Omni Boston Hotel in the Seaport. Dailey “curates a soundscape for the hotel, orchestrating a lineup of local artists who perform throughout the space.” Great, but why does The Culture Show ignore the not-so-Omni places where Boston jazz musicians ply their besieged trade, The Mad Monkfish, Wally’s, Scullers, the Regattabar, and Arrow Street Arts among others.

The Boston Globe prefers recommendation listicles over critical coverage. As for WBUR, a report last April about threats to local jazz venues commended the start up of Thursday night jazz performances at the Long Live Roxbury brewery. Features on recordings released by two local musicians followed. There were no reviews of live shows. And there should be, particularly from local media that has the resources but, for some reason, lacks the editorial will. The Arts Fuse hasn’t deep pockets, but it has the will. If you are knowledgeable about jazz, and would like to write about it, contact me. I have some clubs to send you to.

August 21, 2024

I recently received an email from Ergo Phizmiz, the stage name of UK based composer, writer, collagist, opera maker, radio playwright, songwriter, and visual artist Dominic Robertson. He asked that the magazine post something on Samih Madhoun’s Oud Music from Gaza. “Samih is a 17 year old composer and musician living in the Gaza strip. All recordings on the album have been recorded during the horrific events in their part of the world. The music press is extremely reluctant to cover this and I am trying to find music writers who might actually want to place themselves on the right side of history.” The media’s reluctance is symptomatic of the growing censorship — in the US and elsewhere — of the work of Palestinian artists, supercharged after October 7. A fresh example: more than 750 artists signed an open letter criticising Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts for “anti-Palestinian censorship” after it removed two artworks related to the Israel-Gaza conflict from its Young Artists’ Summer Show.

A guide to instances in the United States of censorship of Palestinian artists is available. The National Coalition Against Censorship has put together an ongoing map of “cases in which institutions expressly canceled, withdrew, abandoned, or restricted a program or work after plans to present it had been communicated, and where the reason for the withdrawal was related to the perceived political content of the work, the personal politics of the artist, the national or cultural associations tied up in the content of the work or the general tense political atmosphere related to the Israeli Palestinian conflict.” Amid the current crop of political protests aimed at efforts at censorship, particularly removing books from our public libraries, there is scarce mention of the repression of Palestinian art and artists. Is it too much to ask that self-declared champions of imaginative freedom be consistent?

As for Oud Music from Gaza, I am not an expert evaluator of those who play the instrument. But listening to the album’s 12 tracks (the longest runs just over two minutes) is a powerfully moving experience. It is an example of a visceral ‘field recording’: Madhoun’s performances are accompanied by contributions from exultant friends and family members. Middle East Monitor posted the following on Madhoun’s Instagram: “Another displaced person lent him the oud he uses in these videos after his own instrument was stolen from his family home in Gaza City, which has now been destroyed. The family – Salih’s father, mother and two brothers – have managed to stay together, although they have been displaced 5 times since 7 October and face being forced to flee once again as Israel’s invasion of Rafah intensifies.” All proceeds raised from this release go directly to Madhoun, who wishes to continue his musical education.

August 28, 2024

Labor Day is approaching, so it is an apt time to note a consequential moment in the ongoing assertion of the working-class voice in American culture. Ninety years ago, Tillie Lerner published — in the New Republic and, a month later, in revised form, in The Partisan Review — a Modernist-inflected essay that powerfully detailed her arrest, jailing, and trial at the hands of the San Francisco authorities. (The piece was first called “Thousand-Dollar Vagrant”; it was retitled “The Strike” when it appeared in PR.) Lerner had been among those rounded-up for participating in the San Francisco General Strike, labor’s massive response to “Bloody Thursday,” when the city’s police had shot into a crowd of protesting workers, killing two. The action stopped all work for four days in the major port city, a paralysis that eventually led to the settlement of the West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike.

It would be nearly 30 years before Lerner, the child of Russian Jewish immigrant parents who settled in Omaha, Nebraska, would publish again, as Tillie Olsen, long after she had taken her husband’s name. A volume of short stories, the critically lauded Tell Me a Riddle, came out in 1961, after her youngest child had begun school. In the ‘30s Olsen had begun writing a novel, even publishing a chapter in The Partisan Review. But Yonnondio: From the Thirties — its protagonists a working-class family navigating dire economic straits during the 1920s —didn’t appear in print until 1974. The book offers a grimly alternative view of the Jazz Age, far from the glitter of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the middle-class satire of Sinclair Lewis.

Early on, Olsen articulated the ways that the fight for survival among those on the lower rung — dealing with poverty, family, and the daily grind — silenced thousands of working-class activists, who would remain invisible to history. She lamented that those lacking the prerequisite privileges — of education and sufficient leisure —did not have the opportunity to develop their artistic ambitions. In her 1978 non-fiction collection Silences, Olsen wrote about “mute inglorious Miltons: those whose waking hours are all struggle for existence.” As of 2023, according to the World Bank, nearly 241 million workers lived in extreme poverty. No doubt there are many thousands of ‘mute Miltons” among them.

September 4, 2024

A provocative Washington Post article by Rosa Boshier González raises some crucial questions about how artistic institutions such as art museums, though not limited to them, should best react to the climate crisis as it grows increasingly destructive. The immediate cause for alarm: the damage Hurricane Beryl did to the renowned Rothko Chapel in Houston. Because of damage to the building’s roof, walls, and three Rothko panels, the site will be closed until further notice. Writes Gonzalez: “damage to the chapel represents a new normal in the relationship between art and climate, which the greater art world will be forced to grapple with sooner or later.” She goes on to point out that “the National Centers for Environmental Information reported that the United States has experienced 376 weather and climate disasters since 1980, costing a total of $2.7 trillion when adjusted for inflation.” She also reports that “only half of museum directors surveyed have prepared their institutions for climate change. This lack of foresight or resources (or both) leaves a significant amount of the nation’s arts collection at risk.”

Too many of our museums and other institutions aren’t dealing with the new normal because they refuse to acknowledge that the old normal is history. Numerous Boston arts institutions remain in the grip of a consumer mentality that decrees that the arts be limited to providing entertainment, fashionable political point-scoring, and silent contemplation. But it is becoming increasingly clear that that is not good enough. Not when the American Repertory Theater — pledged to “Broadway or Bust” — may have to provide patrons with scuba gear as well as tickets at some point in the near future: “32 U.S. cities, including New York and San Francisco, are sinking into the ocean and face major flood risks by 2050.”

Instead of hugging the same old same old, our arts institutions need to reconsider the power of culture. González suggests art could be used as a way to help people “change their minds,” to assist them in moving past the status quo. Reacting to the climate crisis should be about more than mitigating its impact on buildings or lessening the considerable damage it inflicts on our lives. For arts institutions, it offers a “chance to rethink” and refocus, to see the arts “more as community activators,” to understand that they can “lead by example, showing how to respond to disaster and create a sense of community.” That challenge — to move beyond consumerist passivity — has yet to be fully grasped by America’s arts and culture establishment. But sooner or later it will have to be confronted. There are so many more storms on the horizon.

September 11, 2024

This year marks the 100th birthday of a pair of my favorite postwar authors. Their fiction is challenging, eccentric, and non-commercial: just the way I like it. Back in July, I applauded the bedazzling American prose of William Gass. The centenary of New Zealand writer Janet Frame came in late August. She is best known here for her magnificent three-volume autobiography, the basis for Jane Campion’s 1990 film An Angel on my Table. The movie’s success continues — at least in part — to taint a proper appreciation of Frame’s novels, short stories, and poetry. Frame was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic in her late teens; a scheduled leucotomy (the New Zealand version of a lobotomy) was scratched after doctors learned that her debut collection, The Lagoon and Other Stories, had just won a prestigious literary award. “Is it little wonder,” Frame writes in her autobiography, “that I value writing as a way of life when it actually saved my life?”

Campion’s movie turns Frame into a likeable eccentric, but the writer’s picture of the mentally ill is harder-edged than she has been given credit for: she rejects comforting pieties about victimhood. Frame’s best novels — Owls Do Cry (1957), Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963), Intensive Care (1970), Daughter Buffalo (1972), and The Carpathians (1988) — are fierce struggles to conjure up a language that expresses the mysteries of inwardness. Existence is about naming rather than possessing. Scented Gardens for the Blind eschews the warm gush of “mere animal cries, demands for warmth, food, and love, nor human pleas for forgiveness, salvation, peace of mind, but the speech which arranges the dance and pattern of the most complicated ideas and feelings of man in relation to truth; truth; it, the center; the circus; the crack of the whip, the feeding time of the spirit …” Her radical quest for a transcendent language — powered by crick-crackling alphabets — poses readerly difficulties. But her imaginative vision nourishes the spirit, at least it has mine. (For those curious about Frame’s fiction, Fitzcarraldo Editions has just released an edition of her 1962 novel The Edge of the Alphabet.)

Some wrongly dismiss Frame’s word-crazed introspection as narcissistic verbosity. But, if conscience is our capacity to reflect on our actions in the light of our sense of justice, than linguistic sorcerers, such as Gass and Frame, take us just where we need, perhaps kicking and screaming, to go: the rough hewn edges of human consciousness. Their revelatory narratives of self-examination play a vital role in civilization making good on its commitment to moral and ethical inquiry. These are writers who excavate the soul. Wallace Stevens articulates why their mission is so valuable in his poem “Chocorua To Its Neighbor”: “To speak humanly from the height or from the depth/ Of human things, that is acutest speech.” And that was Janet Frame’s lingua franca.

September 18, 2024

In an arts review, who is “we”? That question popped into my head while reading the Boston Globe’s rave review of the American Repertory Theater’s production of Romeo and Juliet. Here is one instance: “By the second half, when his joy about catching up on news of Verona turns to crushing despair, [Rudy] Pankow is fully invested in this young man and we ache with him. And when he kisses his wife in the tomb where she rests, we, too, are devastated by the depth of his loss.” Who is this “we” who can’t help but “ache” and then be “devastated”? If it is A.R.T. audience members, the answer is obvious – somehow the reviewer has sensed a unanimous reaction. Via a telepathic link with theatergoers? A post-show poll? Might there not be exceptions? I, for one, was not “devastated” by Romeo’s grief over the death of Juliet in this staging. Moved, yes, but not to an extreme. Isn’t it somewhat arrogant — perhaps a bit dangerous — for a critic to posit what spectators feel, particularly given that theater audiences are becoming increasingly diverse?

In the past, “we” has been used by critics as a rhetorical cudgel. The implication is that if you are not part of “we” — the right-emoting group — your response is limited, subpar. In her film reviews, Pauline Kael was a master of this kind of high-handed bullying, asserting what “we” should feel as a way of dividing the hip sheep from the square goats. After attending a screening of the film Shoeshine, Kael proudly wrote about loudly challenging a woman as she left the theater. Why didn’t she cry at the end? What was wrong with her? The chutzpah it takes to announce what audiences feel can degenerate into a smug suggestion that it is how they should feel.

The point is, when it comes to arts criticism, there is no strength in numbers. The critic makes an individual judgment, and goes on to persuade the reader, through evidence and analysis, of the power of their verdict. Bringing in “we” negates that responsibility because it neglects that task. The reviewer’s duty is to articulate how the actor or scene generated the emotions they did — to the critic — not to reduce evaluation to a proclamation that “we” all feel the same thing. Placing the emphasis on “I,” rather than “we,” is an elementary rule in professionally reviewing the arts. Understandably, the Boston Globe’s editors and critics are a tad rusty, given that the newspaper is running fewer reviews and more features.

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Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of the Arts Fuse. For four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and the Boston Globe. He created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created the Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England.