Critical mass: the shifting balance

In the age of bloggers, Amazon and Rotten Tomatoes, are professional critics an endangered species?

Film critics Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton on the set of of ABC Television's At The Movies. Picture: Alan Pryke

In the age of bloggers, Amazon and Rotten Tomatoes, are professional critics an endangered species?

EARLIER this year, A.O. Scott, a film reviewer for The New York Times, attended a conference in Atlanta to talk about the future of criticism. There was one, he argued; an increasingly unorthodox position in an era of sweeping newspaper cutbacks and the "we're all critics now" ethos of the internet. "The countervailing evidence is hard to avoid . . . Maybe criticism mattered once, but the conventional wisdom insists that it doesn't any more," he said.

Soon enough, Scott found himself choking on the fighting words he had uttered in Atlanta. Days after delivering his speech he was told that a television review program he co-hosted was being axed. Called At the Movies, it was founded by renowned critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel in the 1970s and syndicated by Disney.

In March, Time critic Richard Schickel whipped up gusts of indignation when he played the contrarian and declared (bizarrely, for someone who has reviewed movies for 43 years): "I don't know honestly the function of reviewing anything." Then Hollywood trade journal Variety stunned the film and media worlds when it sacked its chief film and theatre reviewers and replaced them with freelancers. This took to 65 the number of full-time film critics who have lost jobs on American newspapers and magazines since 2006.

Weeks ago, many revelled in the news that despite receiving uniformly bad reviews from once-omnipotent Broadway critics, a musical version of The Addams Family was proving to be a surprise hit. "The only coffins in sight are the ones being prepared for Broadway's critics," jeered a reporter from London's The Sunday Times.

All this has provoked a fresh round of soul-searching and lamentation among critics who are facing an unprecedented loss of full-time jobs, editorial space and status as newspapers and magazines grapple with the triple whammy of the global financial downturn, the flight of advertising to the internet and the rise of the citizen reviewer online. In The Washington Post, columnist Howard Kurtz observed: "A few short decades ago, critics ruled. Whether it was [food writer] Craig Claiborne at The Times [in New York] or [film critic] Pauline Kael at The New Yorker, they were part of an elite corps of tastemakers. The culture has changed, the five-star reviewers are less influential and the masses have stormed the gates."

Australia has recently seen hefty cutbacks among its coterie of film critics while all professional pundits must contend with the reality that, in the age of the blogosphere, Amazon and Rotten Tomatoes, they are not necessarily the seminal cultural arbiters they once were. True, the decline of traditional criticism has not been as dramatic here as in the US, largely because Australian newspapers rarely employed critics as full-time staff members to begin with, opting instead to engage them as part-time contributors. Nevertheless, are critics, scribbling away in their spiral notebooks in darkened auditoriums, an endangered species?

Probably, answers high-profile theatre producer John Frost. Says the man who brought the multimillion-dollar production Wicked to Melbourne and Sydney: "I would like to think critics have a vital role to play but the way things are, I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years shows weren't reviewed . . . It would be a crying shame if it did happen. It's just dumbing down."

Frost has just opened the musical Fame, complete with an imported New York yellow cab, in Melbourne. He says it garnered good reviews in The Age and The Australian and "a stinker" in the Sunday Herald Sun, but the latter's drubbing "didn't damage us at all".

According to Frost, this contrasts starkly with the 70s when, if a big show copped a bad review from a leading Melbourne newspaper, "you were in trouble". Then again, a 70s review of a significant musical would have been positioned more prominently than were some of the recent, brief Fame reviews. Today, the producer complains, blockbusters apart, "the shrinking of the space and the positioning of the [theatre and musicals] reviews is terrible". But aren't online opinionistas filling the void? Web critics, says Frost matter-of-factly, aren't influential enough to make or break a show.

The chill winds of change are also rattling the urbane world of book reviewing. Last year The Washington Post shocked the literary world by closing its prestigious, stand-alone Sunday book review section, which is now published exclusively online. In 2007, perturbed by shrinking literary sections, America's Book Critics Circle launched a campaign to save the book review.

Australian broadsheets, including this one, still see serious review coverage as central to their core readership and identity, but the diminishing status of traditional criticism is starkly evident at Melbourne's The Sunday Age. The Fairfax broadsheet runs only one substantial book review a week (it's framed by 150-word capsule reviews) and shoehorns its theatre, dance, visual art and CD reviews on to one tabloid page. Across town, the mass market Herald Sun has just "reshaped" and relaunched its arts and entertainment coverage after it laid off its long-time arts editor, Alison Barclay, and a specialist arts writer this month.

The ranks of local film critics are thinning dramatically. Until recently, News Limited tabloids The Courier-Mail in Brisbane, Adelaide's The Advertiser, Sydney's The Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun each employed their own film reviewer. That total of four has been reduced to one critic, Leigh Paatsch, based in Melbourne. The Sunday tabloids produced by News Limited are increasingly sharing the same film reviews, as are The Sunday Age and Fairfax tabloid The Sun-Herald. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age also share many of the same book reviews. An insider says of this cull of critical voices: "It's really alarming. One bad review now carries an awful lot of readership."

On television, the ABC's At the Movies is all that remains of three film reviewing forums -- the others were SBS's The Movie Show and an extended film review segment on Nine's now defunct Sunday program -- that aired as recently as 2008. Nicolas Whatson, general manager of Palace Films, says of this: "I worry about film criticism. I worry about the gradual disappearance of the critics' imprint. I think it's something that all arts criticism is facing. I don't think it's unique to film."

But seasoned film critic David Stratton believes the rise of new technologies "has, if anything, enhanced interest in films", and by extension, film reviewing. He recently discovered that At the Movies is the most vodcasted -- that is video downloaded -- program on the ABC: "The figures, are quite astonishing, actually." Stratton, who also writes for Review, explains that an iPhone app offers his and co-host Margaret Pomeranz's reviews, which are linked to session times at cinemas. "That sort of thing is taking off, even for old farts like Margaret and myself," he jokes.

Pomeranz says At the Movies' ratings are "diminishing somewhat" on ABC1, yet expanding overall, given that the show is repeated on ABC2 and available on several online platforms. "It's actually mind-boggling how ubiquitous we are," she says, clearly impressed by technology's capacity to breathe new life into a relatively old TV format. But she is not so optimistic about the future of criticism in more traditional outlets. She tells Review: "I think that when [an] internationally renowned critic like Todd McCarthy, chief reviewer for Variety, is fired, gracelessly, I might add, then we have serious cause for worry. Variety didn't seem to care that his enormous credibility was of value . . . [which] was shattering, to put it mildly." Pomeranz says "serious criticism is in danger in newspapers, or at the very least, the range of serious voices is becoming very restricted . . . That David and I are just about the only voices left speaking about film on free-to-air television is also a worry. I want something to watch when I retire!"

Alison Croggon, a poet, blogger and Melbourne theatre critic for The Australian, doesn't believe it's curtains for print critics. But she does argue that "things are in enormous flux and there are so many things at play it is hard to know what is going to happen". Croggon remembers that when she started reviewing for The Bulletin in 1989, her theatre reviews were 800 words. They had been cut to 400 words by the time the magazine folded in 2008. This phenomenon is not limited to Australia: Britain's The Guardian newspaper routinely gives theatre bloggers more words than its theatre critics.

Croggon was recently named by The Guardian as "a must-read critic" alongside luminaries such as Kael, Susan Sontag, James Wood and Clive James. She points out that as long ago as 1988, German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger predicted the demise of bourgeois criticism. As serious art became less significant within Western culture, it followed that analysis of that art would also lose its exalted status. "What has happened since the rise of the internet has made that plain," says Croggon. "I think there has been this complete shift in what we have thought of as traditional modes of authority. Literature and theatre were high art forms and they have become less important as social strata have been disturbed. I can't see that as an unalloyed bad thing . . . The internet has allowed in a way, a rebirth of serious criticism." But the net also has a downside: lack of quality control. "What is awful," complains Croggon, "is just being drowned by sludge."

A recent scandal that has transfixed the academic and literary worlds highlights another common problem with online reviewing: lack of transparency. In April, leading British historian Orlando Figes was revealed to be the harsh Amazon critic who wrote reviews under the pseudonym Historian. For months, unbeknown to readers, Historian had been busy demolishing the otherwise well-regarded books of his rivals. At one point, he gushed while reviewing his own book, The Whisperers: "I hope he writes forever." When Historian was unmasked, Figes initially claimed his lawyer wife wrote the anonymous, poison-pen reviews, before 'fessing up. Say what you like about over-entitled, grey-haired print pundits who couldn't tell an ISP from a URL, but it's hard to imagine a newspaper falling for such brazen fraud.

Despite the assumption that online and offline critics are mortal enemies, in Australia many prominent arts blogs and websites are written by print critics or former print critics (Croggon, Diana Simmonds, Lynden Barber, James Waites, Andrew L. Urban, James Bradley).

Most, however, do not make money, unlike the website run by perhaps the canniest reviewer of all, Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times's veteran film critic. His site attracts almost 100 million visits a year.

Yet even Ebert has despaired about the state of criticism. In 2008, he wrote that considered cultural criticism was being squeezed out by the media's crazed obsession with celebrities: "The CelebCult virus is eating our culture alive," he said.

A couple of months ago, Ebert underwent a radical change of heart. He asserted that "this is a golden age for film criticism. Never before have more critics written more or better words for more readers about more films." There is a catch: the vast majority of these writers publish exclusively online and are unpaid. Ebert says they represent "a class of literate, gifted" amateurs, adding knowingly: "Film criticism is still a profession, but it's no longer an occupation."

Experts agree that while Australia's critics have little effect on Hollywood blockbusters, they still exert huge influence over independent and local films. Even director Bruce Beresford -- who has very little time for critics or reviews -- tells Review: "Films are totally dependent on reviews if they don't have a studio behind them."

Says Palace Films' Whatson: "Without local critical support, an independent film can be dead in the water after its first four days." Whatson, who has been involved in the exhibition and distribution of independent and Australian films for almost 18 years, argues that, in the 21st century, the competition for influence isn't between professional critics and bloggers but between critics and Hollywood studios, which are co-opting the web as a marketing tool.

"The online strategy is almost front and centre with any release [and is] . . . involving film lovers at a much earlier stage of production," he explains.

In Australia there are notable exceptions to the bleak landscape of budget, job and space cuts for print reviewers. The Australian and The Age now run two daily arts pages, rather than the traditional single page; The Australian has also invested heavily in a redesign of Review and, in 2006, revived its monthly literary journal, The Australian Literary Review. Morry Schwartz's The Monthly magazine, established five years ago, runs lengthy book, film and CD reviews, while ABC1's book review show The First Tuesday Book Club has been screening for four years. Even so, in March, author, critic and journalist Gideon Haigh tore into Australia's book-reviewing scene. Books reviews these days were so short, he said, they entrenched a culture of shallow reviewing. In the new journal Kill Your Darlings Haigh argued that the books pages of Australian newspapers and magazines were a "wasteland . . . hodgepodges of conventional wisdom and middlebrow advertorial" and that "the besetting sin of Australian book reviewing . . . is its sheer dullness and inexpertise". (He did not say whether his criticisms applied to his own reviews.)

Does this mean literary reviewers have brought their decline on themselves? Haigh dodges the question. "I feel a bit sorry for literary editors," he tells Review, sounding a little sheepish. "I was probably a bit harsh on them. I think their pages are a bit neglected by the bores and philistines who make decisions on newspapers these days." Does traditional cultural criticism have the same traction it used to? "There is no doubt the answer is no." But Haigh is not particularly taken with online criticism, either: "You read the reviews on Amazon and IMDb [the film website] and you think, 'Really, these aren't reviews, they're just responses to things'." Haigh thinks the underlying problem is that Australia has never had a sophisticated tradition of cultural criticism: "I don't think cultural criticism has ever had deep roots here." Instead, he argues that we have a "best buy" reviewing mentality.

Text Publishing managing director Michael Heyward agrees Australia hasn't traditionally had a deep, critical culture. Heyward is convinced the most potent factor in a book's sales is word of mouth rather than reviews. "Word of mouth is everything . . . the decision to buy is deeply integrated with people's social and family structures."

Simmonds, former arts editor of The Bulletin and The Sunday Telegraph, says technology has made word of mouth far more influential than it was in the era when print critics ruled. Audience members can tweet their friends with their thoughts even before they have left the stalls, she observes. Meanwhile, "I think criticism has been made less relevant in this country, especially because there is less [editorial] space."

About four years ago, Simmonds left Sydney's The Sunday Telegraph because she wanted to start an arts news and reviews website and "you can't say anything meaningful in [the newspaper] in 200 words".

She says of her website, Stage Noise, "I just thought I'd do it for a bit of fun, but it is taken very seriously." She doesn't, however, buy into the hype surrounding bloggers, arguing that the attention a blog or website attracts depends on how well it is written, as is the case with print critics. "Anybody can write a blog and who cares, really?"

Ronan McDonald, author of the book The Death of the Critic (2007), points out that enlightened reviewers have played a key role in bringing celebrated artists such as Samuel Beckett and Jackson Pollock to a resistant public. But the role of the critic as instructor and harbinger of the new is under threat, says the British academic.

In his book McDonald argues that the notion, widely embraced by academics, that all judgments about art are subjective and relative, has undermined the role of the public critic. He warns that this relativism, combined with the popular view that anyone can be a critic, will result in a culture that values conservatism, banality and repetition, as people heed only those critics who reinforce their existing likes and dislikes. McDonald's conclusion: "The death of the critic is to be mourned."

In a recent poll that seemed to herald more bad news, The Stage, a British theatre newspaper and website, asked readers: "Does the theatre industry or the public even need professional criticism any more?" Last month the results were released, and, surprisingly, respondents had given critics a resounding thumbs-up. Almost 90 per cent said traditional critics still played a valuable role, though almost half said they were less important than they had been a decade ago.

Still, an overwhelming majority believed drama critics would still be around in 10 years.

The obituaries, it seems, are premature.