Critical condition

In the 1950 movie “All About Eve,” the theater critic is a dapper, cynical charmer with the Old World moniker Addison DeWitt. He’s no hero, but his wry assessments can make or break a production. Characters repeat his phrases throughout the film, in both scornful and reverent tones.

Almost a half-century later, the television show “The Critic” presented an animated schlemiel, paunchy and balding, voiced by the nerdy comic endomorph Jon Lovitz. This character’s influence on the world in which he lives is nonexistent: His impact comes down to serving as the butt of jokes.

Does the 1994-95 series tell us something about the way Americans view those who make cultural judgments for a living? In the decade since that show’s run, many critics report, they’ve gotten even less respect. Or ceased to matter entirely.

“You gets arts journalists together these days,” says Doug McLennan, editor of Arts Journal.com and a longtime Seattle music writer, “and it’s what they talk about: their declining influence. They say Frank Rich was the last critic who could close a show.” Most remember when Time and Newsweek had full rosters of arts critics.

What happened? Besides the Internet and its rash of blogs, suspected culprits include the culture of celebrity, anti-intellectual populism, stingy newspaper owners and what some critics say is a loss of vitality or visibility in their art forms. While many lament the situation, some think the decentralization of authority means the arts -- and the conversation around them -- will flourish without these stern, doctrinaire figures.

But many newspaper and magazine critics pine for a golden age when giants walked the Earth: When the imposing Clement Greenberg was shaping modernism in painting, the biting H.L. Mencken was exhuming the reputation of Theodore Dreiser, and the impious Leslie Fiedler found unsettling Freudian meanings in the novels of Mark Twain.

The nonprofit arts, with their limited marketing budgets, have typically depended more on criticism than the promotion-driven world of entertainment, which is sometimes called “critic-proof.” But as late as the 1970s, the feisty Pauline Kael was spurring American outlaw filmmakers toward their most daring work.

But it’s less common, critics say, for one of their kind to make a reputation, draw an audience’s attention to an overlooked work or uncover dark cultural truths. Some arts critics, such as Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker, Charles Rosen of the New York Review of Books and former Time critic Robert Hughes, retain their followings, but the country’s most powerful critic may be Robert Parker, whose Wine Advocate has rocked the world’s wine markets and made him controversial from Sonoma to Chianti.

Part of the problem seems to be the general tarnishing of the press in recent years. “Two decades ago,” concludes “Trends 2005,” a Pew Research Center study, “just 16% of readers said they could believe little or nothing of what they read in their daily paper; in the most recent survey, that number nearly tripled, to 45%.” It’s no secret that circulation is falling too.

Meanwhile, the Internet has developed number-crunching tools that end-run criticism’s service as a consumer guide. Amazon provides tips for selecting books or records, for example, and Metacritic.com offers reviews and “scores” that quantify critical response.

At the same time, the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge and the National Endowment for the Arts are launching critics institutes to train a new generation of commentators. And this week sees the first National Critics Conference, with hundreds of critics in dance, classical music, theater, jazz and visual art descending on downtown L.A. to discuss the fate of their fields.

Dave Hickey, an art critic best known for the book “Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy,” doesn’t think the Internet is the problem. “But I do think that we’re over,” he says. “Being an art critic was one of those jobs like nighttime disk jockey or sewing machine repairman: It was a one- or two-generation job.”

For Hickey, art criticism lost its luster and excitement the same time art did. “There was a sense that things had a forward tilt,” he says of American art after World War II, when it seemed to be moving toward a consummation. “Jackson Pollock changed the way the world looked, Andy Warhol changed the way the world looked.”

But the high couldn’t last forever, and the power went to the curators.

“I’m like Wolfman Jack,” Hickey groans. “The times have passed me by.”

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‘THE BEST OF TIMES’

ISSUES such as cultural reach and aesthetic impact are hard to document, but Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program has attempted to quantify the situation.

“It should be the best of times,” says program director Andras Szanto, who oversaw a dour study called Reporting the Arts II that compared arts coverage in newspapers from 1998 and 2003.

“We have the most affluent and educated population in the United States, in history,” he says, adding that when baby boomers retire, they’ll have lots of time on their hands when they could visit major arts centers or symphony halls.

“Never in this country,” Szanto says, “have the arts and entertainment been as celebrated, as central, as they are today.”

But the study, published last fall, tracks how cultural coverage in 10 mostly midsize city newspapers has declined or held steady while the participation of Americans in arts life has increased. Even when space for culture has held its ground, half the coverage, on average, is devoted to listings rather than criticism and reporting. The stories that appear tend to be shorter. (The study mentions that a few papers, such as the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, have added critics during that period.)

“The audience for the arts is going up in this country,” says ArtsJournal.com’s McLennan. “And we’ve gone through a decade where the building of arts edifices all over the country has totaled billions and billions of dollars. Clearly the field is not shrinking. And yet the influence of critics is.”

Could it be the critics’ fault? Former critic Joseph Horowitz, author of “Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall,” participated in an NEA symposium with classical music critics last fall.

“What surprised me was the style of most of their writing,” he says, describing it as “no style at all. It’s important for a critic to have a personal style; it’s part of his ammunition, his way of expressing himself and having impact.”

In some cases, Horowitz says, the flatness probably came from the urging of editors. (McLennan thinks cultural noise against “bias” in the press made editors and writers skittish.) Whatever its cause, Horowitz says, writers didn’t seem to have put up much of a fight. And their thinking was no more distinctive than their writing.

This contrasts, he says, with the turn of the 20th century, when American criticism was fiercely alive. Horowitz’s hero is Henry Krehbiel, who wrote for the New York Tribune from the 1880s through the 1920s, when the city had about a dozen critics, many of whom could be identified after just a few sentences.

Besides knowing more than anyone else about black and American Indian music and having a deep sense of Greek drama and Germanic myths, Krehbiel was friends with key composers and conductors -- in a way that would be judged a conflict of interest today.

“He was determined,” Horowitz says, “to lead taste.”

So what happened? The change, he says, comes from an art form that’s lost its direction.

“Here we are, in a musical high culture that doesn’t have a lot of government guidance and subsidy like Europe’s. So there are two things that can take its place: either individuals of vision, or the marketplace. Classical music in the United States was shaped by individuals, and then later, as it is today, predominantly shaped by the marketplace.”

Today, he says, the visionary critics and impresarios who steered the art form are gone.

Dana Gioia, NEA chairman and a former poetry critic, lays the blame elsewhere. “People talk about globalization as if it only affects the Third World,” he says. “The globalization of entertainment affects local performances taking place in a specific time and place. It’s gotten so all-pervasive that it has eclipsed most other cultural activities.”

A problem specific to criticism, says Gioia, whose writing helped establish the reputations of poets Weldon Kees and current poet laureate Ted Kooser, comes from a different direction.

“During the last 50 years there has been a collapse in the tradition of intellectuals reaching a broad audience by writing in a public idiom,” he says. “Most of our intellectuals work in the university system where they are encouraged to write and speak in professional jargon.”

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RIDING NEW WAVES

Writers in literature and the arts often pine for the 1940s and ‘50s, what the poet-critic Randall Jarrell called the “age of criticism.”

Kit Rachlis, who has overseen arts coverage at the Boston Phoenix and Village Voice and is now editor of Los Angeles magazine, refers a bit facetiously to “the era of the giant critic” -- the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the heyday for critics of rock music and film.

But in both periods, he says, the art forms seemed to be ascending, in popularity or maturity or both. “It’s no coincidence that Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael came in with the rise of American film in the ‘70s,” Rachlis says. “And that Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs and Ellen Willis were all present at the creation to some degree” as rock music gained new depth and became something that benefited from explaining.

“And while you couldn’t make the argument that there weren’t great American painters before World War II, it reached a presence in the marketplace and the popular imagination” in the postwar era over which Greenberg presided.

As the works championed by critics faded from the center of the culture, so did the criticism. It’s brought us to what he calls the “Zagatization” of criticism, after the restaurant guide that collects rating from consumers.

Szanto points out that critics tend to have their strongest impact when an art form is in its period of modernism, when they serve as high priests, or salesmen, to the movement. “This is especially true of visual arts criticism,” he says, “but it’s to some extent true in other art forms.

“The ideas governing art at that time were relatively clear, and there was a strong back-and-forth between the system of aesthetics and art-making. If you go back to Clement Greenberg, critics were basically saying, ‘This represents an advance over that. Art history is moving forward.’ It was like science.”

But we’ve now reached, he says, the point that Nation critic Arthur Danto calls the end of art.

Today, “an era of great aesthetic pluralism,” the connection between criticism and art-making is much looser, Szanto says, and the critics after modernism are less didactic.

“In fact, anything now can be art, from a ray of light to a bit of feces in a plastic box. But it has ultimately enfeebled the critic in that traditional chest-thumping, oracular way, where he or she can prescribe or pass judgment. If the very premise of the art world is that anything goes, what do you base judgments on?”

To Robert Brustein, founding artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre and drama critic for a half-century, the problem is more sweeping.

When Brustein started writing criticism in the late 1950s, he and a handful of other magazine critics championed a “Pirandello-like” play called “The Connection,” which had been trashed by New York’s newspaper reviewers. The Jack Gelber play not only found its audience, it essentially birthed the off-Broadway movement.

It’s tough, Brustein says, to imagine anything comparable happening today.

Part of this has to do with the theater in specific.

“When I left drama criticism at the end of 1993,” says Frank Rich of the New York Times, “it was a different world. Disney had not yet come to Broadway, Clear Channel wasn’t on Broadway. It was still a handmade business with kind of backward marketing.

“That began to change in the mid-’90s,” Rich says, “as Disney entered and brought marketing muscle the way it had previously applied it to theme parks or movies.” Shows could now operate much more independent of the critics.

Increasingly in theater, as in pop culture, “The line between publicity -- the whole People magazine, Entertainment Tonight, In Touch gestalt -- and reviews has been obliterated,” he says.

To Brustein, it’s high culture itself that’s been obliterated: Its discrediting has hurt the critical sphere, in a theater scene otherwise vital and full of talent.

“America has always had this problem: I think we were perfectly content for high culture to be a marginal expression. Then Sputnik happened, and suddenly America felt it was behind the Russians.”

Besides the push in math and science, “There was money for the humanities and money for the arts, and a great new interest in culture. Foundations were creating theater companies.” A great empire needed a prestigious culture.

In the ‘60s and ‘70s, off-Broadway and resident theaters thrived, as did the criticism around them. But in the 1980s, he says, as the religious right flexed its muscles and the academic left began to dismiss “Eurocentric” art, there was an attack on the very idea of high culture from both sides of the political spectrum.

“That’s where the left and right seem to meet,” Brustein says.

“The word ‘elitism,’ I think, is one of the most pernicious words ever introduced to the English language. Imagine to use that as an expletive! What it means is leadership, and without leaders you don’t have any arts -- without people who don’t have ideas that nobody’s had before.”

Arts critics, who air their opinions about culture for a living, may be the consummate “elitists” in the eyes of the public. And that’s not a good place to be right now, says Lee Siegel, book critic for the Nation, TV critic for the New Republic, and art critic for Slate.

“People are in a rage against other people they perceive as being ‘above’ them in any way,” Siegel says. “There’s little tolerance nowadays for authority figures in any realm of life.”

The tone in politics, as well as the Web, Siegel says, tends to be reflexively adversarial. “Much of the energy of the blogosphere,” he says, “is poured into deflation.”

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NET’S WEIGHT

According to the Columbia study, 2003 was the first year Americans spent more time online than reading newspapers, a development Szanto connects to declines in book reading.

Some apprehension that crept over film criticism in the early days of Harry Knowles -- the chubby redhead whose culty, impassioned Ain’t It Cool news site once worried the establishment press -- has come to the world of fine arts.

But most arts observers, including Szanto, say the Internet is a solution to current problems in print -- not their cause. “A lot of the interesting stuff you used to find in newspapers has shifted to the Web,” says McLennan of ArtsJournal.com. “There’s a robust critics sphere alive and well in the blogs, and elsewhere,” since the recent introduction of programs such as Movable Type and Blogger.

The diffusion of authority may not be entirely a bad thing. In a day when most cities have one newspaper, McLennan says, the Web allows discourse about the arts to become a larger conversation. ArtsJournal.com, for instance, runs blogs around aesthetic questions that draw almost 20,000 viewers. The site often posts stories from the blog MobyLives.com and offers blogs on nonprofit management, dance and contemporary art.

Gioia praises “the Able Muse, a literary and art site run by a Nigerian software engineer in Silicon Valley.”

Alex Ross straddles this divide in an unusual way: The New Yorker’s classical music critic, Ross also runs a blog called the Rest Is Noise. He doesn’t think websites are cutting into the readership of papers and magazines; rather, they appeal to “people who devour media in any form -- they’re just addicted to information.”

And he started his site not as a path off the sinking ship of print but because he wanted to give classical music the presence on the Net that rock criticism has with fan chat rooms. Classical musicians, such as Emanuel Ax and Hilary Hahn, have blogs.

“It’s a way to refashion the art form,” Ross says, “from hopelessly anachronistic to a thriving, tech-savvy form.”

Similarly, art critic Tyler Green, who writes for Bloomberg News and runs the Modern Art Notes blog, says newspapers still matter. A print critic can have “a broad, agenda-setting role,” he says, but too few write with the combative, independent spirit necessary. Into that vacuum come bloggers, who arrive fully armed.

“The writing is sharper, more pointed,” he says. “And if there’s something that needs play, I can get it into my site in 20 minutes -- even if I sometimes make a fool of myself.”

Still, the Net has made so much available that it’s undercut one of the critic’s crucial roles: turning audiences on to something obscure or unknown. These days, for example, if you purchase a record by Interpol on a consumer website, you’ll be told that their heroes are Joy Division and the Velvet Underground. It’s the kind of thing that would have been done only by a rock critic a decade ago.

Perhaps the most tangible impact of the Net is a new tone transferring to the world of print, says Laura Miller, who helped found Salon and has written for daily newspapers and weeklies.

Editors and critics who’ve moved from places such as Salon and Slate to newspapers have brought some of their spontaneous, more vernacular style to print journalism, Miller says. “It’s not like the Internet invented that. But the Internet made it easier to find them.”

Some of that iconoclastic tone drives Foetry, a website run by Alan Cordle -- a Portland (Ore.) Community College research librarian who recently gave up his anonymity -- that polices cronyism in the poetry world. It’s taken on a gadfly role ignored by most print journals.

Rich says it’s no tragedy if critics are fading. “The only thing that bothers me is that serious criticism is disappearing from newspapers and magazines. There has to be an alternate discussion of art, including works of popular culture, that is not tied to merchandizing. It’s fine to have the endless canned junket of interviews with stars, but it’s also helpful to have writers discussing the ideas and the craft and the quality.

“I’m not saying critics should have a life-or-death vote on a piece’s success or failure. I’ve never felt that, even when that role has been ascribed to me.”

Horowitz is more assertive about criticism’s importance.

“We need it. We’re a very confused culture right now, as far as the arts. There are conflicting signs of where we are and where we’re going. A critic can provide a necessary service in helping us figure out what we’re doing and what we should be doing. I don’t think we can figure it out by ourselves.”

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Contact Scott Timberg at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.