Critic-o-Meter: Grading, or Degrading?

Theater blog brings all the reviews together, for better or worse

Comments (0) By Steven Leigh Morris Tuesday, Dec 9 2008

Silent Nic responded to Eisler that he wasn’t complaining about Internet writing but about the devolution of the theater review. (Where have you gone, Walter Kerr? Eric Bentley? Robert Brustein?) Mikhail Shvitkoy, former minister of culture for the Russian Federation, once remarked that every culture produces the art that reflects it. Yes, and every culture also produces the arts criticism that reflects it.

Ours is a culture with a prevalent and public rush to judgment, to a letter grade or score, a thumbs-up or thumbs-down mentality that appears to be replacing the love of investigation, which comes from curiosity. L.A. Weekly’s own restaurant critic, Jonathan Gold, earned his Pulitzer Prize not by grading eateries but by connecting food to the culture at large. He said last week that merely scoring restaurants on some scale holds no interest for him.

Justin Renteria

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Teachers have been complaining for a decade that the test-scores results mandated by the No Child Left Behind program are an irrelevant reflection of a child, of his or her abilities and potential. A theater production, too, is a kind of child, intricate and multidimensional, born of a family history lodged in some cultural context. To assess a play with a grade is mildly insulting to the critic but deeply insulting to the creators.

Critic-o-Meter has captured the pulse of the culture, and offers a one-click-fits-all service. At the same time, it exposes a philosophical divide between criticism that investigates and that which judges — a divide that recalls Vaclav Havel’s advice to Czech schoolchildren: “Stay by those who are seeking the truth; flee from those who claim to have found it.”