In a recent article, Rainer Jozeps [In Daily, Adelaide], bemoaned the dearth of fearless arts critics in Adelaide. The word ’fearless’ is contentious in this context. Calling out the ‘bullshit’ is one thing but providing insight, perhaps even insight of which the artist/performer was not aware, it quite another. History is littered with the vitriol aimed at the new by both learned practitioners and outright amateurs with a poison quill. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring as reviewed by Le Figaro’s critic, Henri Quittard and described as “Laborious and puerile barbarity,” sits alongside the critic Louis Leroy who used Monet’s Impression Sunrise to lambast a whole generation of artists. El Greco, the Spanish artist said that Michaelangelo couldn’t paint, not that anyone believed him. President Roosevelt felt compelled to label Duchamp’s work as repellent. Mark Twain described a painting by Turner as a ‘tortoise shell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatos’ and poor old Barnett Newman has copped it from all directions [a child could do that] and had his work vandalised. The critic who labelled Vlaminck and his friends as Fauves [wild beasts] of course went down in history, not for his critical faculties, but for adding a title that could be quoted in the art journals and in the popular press ad nauseam. I have no doubt that all of these critics were fearless if not sadistic. Did they provide anything insightful? Doubtful.

I’ve read a lot of reviews of work in all mediums over time. My own dance productions have traditionally attracted two types of review – one that is no more than description [the first dancer, dressed in blue….] and others decrying what the production was not [it wasn’t ballet – actually, it said in the program that it was contemporary dance and contemporary dance may benefit from ballet training but in the end is undefinable]. A review of any kind is welcome when you are trying to get bums on seats to pay the bills, but one star out of five and a twenty-five word condemnation is a death knell. This is a phenomenon I’m all too familiar with during the annual Adelaide Fringe. With up to 1500 acts in recent years, all alongside the Adelaide Festival, getting a review at all is a rarity but having your show shot down on its opening night by one of a roving band of sometime critics who pop up once a year, much to the bemusement of director and cast, can be soul destroying. Most cover all fields and are far from specialists.

The same vitriolic verbiage however doesn’t apply to productions at the Adelaide Festival by the way. When you are paying a fortune to bring the latest rendition of Tristan and Isolde half-way around the world and staging it in the prestigious Festival Theatre, the only response apparently, is unqualified praise in sheer gratitude for having made the effort. These are undoubtedly world-class productions, but I’ve witnessed the empty seats after the interval too many times not to criticise the audience who turn up with little understanding or patience. Coincidentally, I’m reading the final book of Marcel Proust, written a century ago, and he was complaining about the same thing. The public…..fail to assimilate what is so nourishing in art? They are victims of a morbid hunger which is never satisfied, so they go to a concert to applaud as though it’s a duty to put in an appearance whatever is being performed. [Time Regained p294]

Restaurant reviews can also be notoriously brutal as well. The food writer in The Australian newspaper, John Lethlean, reviewed Cheong Liew’s Grange restaurant in Adelaide in 2008 which led to its ultimate closure. Cheong was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the 1999 Queen’s Birthday Honours “for service to the food and restaurant industry through involvement in developing and influencing the style of contemporary Australian cuisine.” None of that counted when it came to Lethlean who was undoubtedly fearless. Adelaide Oval’s Hill of Grace restaurant was forced into a name change by the same critic and if you are really lucky Gordon Ramsay turns up with a camera crew and points you in the right direction with an expletive-laden assessment of your menu and establishment. It all makes for excellent television in an age where critical appraisal comes down to abuse – and fearlessness.

Recently I attended the swan song of Garry Stewart as head of the world-famous Australian Dance Theatre which is based in Adelaide. His nature series received rapturous applause in the press [it’s the ADT after all] but on the night I was there, the overall mood was indifference unless you counted the six people who felt the need to stand up and applaud while shouting ‘bravo’. I was bemused by just how much was wrong with the production from the wrong choice of venue [the rejuventated Her Majesty’s Theatre was simply too big – it would have been better off in the Space but with only a fraction of the seating and covid restrictions they went for the bigger venue], the set [too big by a mile and an impediment to coherence and movement – the pulsating form that began centre stage could only be pushed into the corner for the rest of the performance while the hanging forms did nothing to help], the staging [too many tableaux centre stage or close to it] and choreography I’d seen a few too many times before. There were moments also when I thought I was watching the Lion King with human hybrid animals traversing the Serengheti and at other, Bangarra Dance [the premier Aboriginal dance company] with ants scurrying about on the desert floor. It wasn’t the fault of the dancers. The same was true of West side Story when it visited a year or so ago. The magnificent three storey, three-dimensional set stood there doing nothing for most of the two hours and the choreography, such as it was, was simply cheer leader theatrics. I saw nothing in print to agree with me on either production but then again, I’m not a critic.

Jozeps suggests that   ‘Adelaide needs fearless critics who put everything in the crosshairs – creators, interpreters, the audience and the reviewer – and the arts needs more of them’.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending how you look at, everyone is a critic and has an opinion. Films, books, music, and even art, get eviscerated by people who will tell you earnestly that they don’t know much about anything but know what they like. Without some knowledge, the opinion, as opposed to the analytical effort required to critique anything in the arts, is worthless.  Proust wrote for a paper such as Le Figaro from the basis of a profound knowledge of theatre and literature. Robert Storr in the US knew most it not all of the artists he wrote about in his twenty years as a critic and of course Clement Greenberg redirected the thinking of an entire country as it grappled with abstraction. I am eternally grateful that Christopher Allan, who writes a weekly column in the Australian, bases his critiques on a truly profound and far-reaching knowledge. No doubt all of them got to listen to audiences expressing their collective thoughts in the foyer and were generally appalled at the cliches trotted out.  Not much has changed.

Art reviews should provide illumination, interpretation and evaluation while contextualising the work and acknowledging the artist. That requires effort and knowledge based upon an innate understanding. What it doesn’t require is bias. As difficult as objectivity can be, it has to be the aim of the critic. Unfortunately, the term critic has come to mean pointing out what is wrong and while critics need to keep creators and their audiences focussed on quality, it’s not just about highlighting weaknesses, although berating an audience for accepting self-indulgence, the mediocre or the unimaginative, should be par for the course. Applauding over your head and shouting ‘bravo’ needs to be based on more than just a knee-jerk reaction.

Fearlessness is all well and good but when the criteria for critical appraisal are based not on objectivity, profound knowledge, understanding and an ability to express all of that in terms that elucidate and not obfuscate, what you are left with is simply opinion.