How much do you really know about a critic if all you have on record is what he or she likes and why? At some point staying mum about the negative looks less like tenderhearted support or good manners and more like cowardice or a lack of seriousness.

By Bill Marx

Dance Critic Deborah Jowitt — leaving THE VILLAGE VOICE after decades.

The news that veteran, award-winning dance critic Deborah Jowitt will no longer regularly review for The Village Voice, though she will still contribute occasional features and interviews to the newspaper, leaves me more puzzled than upset. The incident has more to do with misconceptions about the purposes of criticism (as well as its diminished power) than a clash of principle. As long as our definition of criticism is shaped by intellectual wobbliness (critic as consumer guide or axe-grinding blogger) and a lack of imagination (shared, alas, by critics and editors alike), we will have these pseudo-conflicts, followed by sobs from some readers about the end of a golden era. The irony is that the Web supplies an efficient and positive solution to the sticky Jowitt/VV situation. Too bad neither party appears to have thought of it.

Granted, the editorial chops of VV Arts and Culture editor Brian Parks, billed as an “award-winning playwright who also oversees food coverage and supervises the food blog” (Note: how do you supervise a blog?) look a bit shaky. But his statement about Jowitt’s decision to leave her post contains a trenchant argument. He writes that her reviews of dance are generally positive and that an ever sunny approach does not reflect reality: “But of course all of us in arts journalism know that every arts field has all sorts of bad or mediocre work going on, many times by established figures and in prominent venues. This work needs to be addressed and challenged by a paper’s critics, just as the good work needs to be saluted. That’s part of a newspaper’s vigorous critical practice . . .” That is absolutely true—criticism lacks credibility if it only finds things to admire, partly because we evaluate critics based on how well they back up, with evidence and reasons, the judgments they make.

How much do you really know about a critic if all you have on record is what he or she likes and why? At some point staying mum about the negative looks less like tenderhearted support or good manners and more like cowardice or a lack of seriousness.

The truth is that that the majority of what is churned out in the arts every year (books, plays, dance performances, etc) is mediocre. If critics like all or a majority of what they review, it undercuts public perceptions of the honesty and independence of their verdicts—commercial and editorial pressures (the call to please artists and editors in order to keep positions or to remain well liked in the arts community) trump the need to make (and explain) hard aesthetic judgments.

There is an interesting complication. Jowitt, I suspect, sees criticism as a necessary means to support dance as an art form. She doesn’t challenge Park’s characterization of her reviews, and her vision of criticism as a means for encouraging analysis rather than judgment is a respected part of the history of arts criticism. For some important critics in the past, the purpose of criticism is to illuminate, educate, and engage audiences, not risk turning them off. Generally, the most powerful supportive critics have used their writing to fight for art that they felt was being unfairly neglected by mainstream culture—the rhetorical strategy is to make audiences aware of the difficult talent on the margins, to explore the compelling value of art that, because of moral or stylistic reasons, puts off audiences who, given sufficient understanding, would see what they were missing.

A scene in Village Voice editor Brian Parks’ play AMERICAN ABSURDUM

This is a valuable task for criticism, despite the dangers to intellectual independence that it poses. But those supportive reviewers, while they champion a certain kind of art, also wrote negative reviews of work they considered was unfairly overvalued by other critics and the culture. As Eric Bentley insists, the responsibility of the reviewer is exclaim from time to time to the mesmerized crowds that the Emperor Has No Clothes, if only because he or she doesn’t want the public to waste its time on inferior work but turn its attention to genuinely exciting creative accomplishments. In that sense, the critic must set him or herself against the machinery of publicity and fashion to point out where real value lies. This has always been a crucial part of the job.

But Jowitt champions the art form of dance in her reviews, which inevitably raises the issue of credibility that Parks points out. All-out supportive critics believe that the art they critique survives by fragile means, its existence under dire economic siege, so it must be protected and bolstered by generally positive notices. Culture queen Joyce Carol Oates has written that she will only review books that she likes. There are not enough readers she points out—why discourage any? The slippery intellectual and ethical slope is obvious: we have local theater enthusiasts who say that they will not include anything negative in their observations of productions—instead, they bring their reservations to the director. Alas, the reader is not part of that friendly conversation.

But Jowitt, a respected dance historian and author, is light years away from your common theater groupie. The answer is not to have Jowitt withdraw from the VV because they want her to change her approach, but for Parks and Jowitt to recognize the educational value of her stance and balance it in a wider dialogue about the value of dance today. Granted, column inches are limited in the paper version of VV, but that is dying out. So is the idea that publications need to foster an all-powerful critic who represents the “brand” of the publication? More and more people are looking for credible places to find arts criticism online: why not include Jowitt’s reviews, written as she would like them, with more judgment pieces by others on the same dance performance?

By doing this, VV would present an edited page that enhances critical thinking on dance productions. Some fiery dance critics will no doubt want to be affiliated with the VV, and if Parks picks knowledgeable reviewers who write and think well, backing up their discriminating judgments (both good and bad), with discerning analysis, then Jowitt will have a provocative home for her ideas. It seems to me that online offers a superb opportunity to include, rather than exclude, different approaches to reviewing. There was a time, decades ago, when VV expanded our conception of arts criticism—it could do so again.

Bill Marx is the Editor-in-chief of the Arts Fuse. For over three 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.