urban excavations

[article as originally published in The Clyde Fitch Report, February 12, 2017.]

It is fashionable to debate the importance of cultural criticism. The debate questions what criticism is, who is and is not a critic, challenges us to imagine what the audience for criticism should be and to think about proper critical comportment. We believe critics themselves must not be sidelined from the debate. In our occasional series Critical I, critics tell their own stories and offer their own views of criticism. Our latest interview in this series is with arts journalist and critic William Hirschman.

Please provide a personal statement of +/-150 words.

Bill Hirschman is a Florida critic and arts journalist and current chairman of the executive committee of the American Theatre Critics Association. The veteran newspaperman responded in 2011 to cuts in arts coverage by creating an advertising-supported website, Florida Theater On Stage.

What city or town do you live in? Where did you grow up? Where’s your favorite place on Earth?

I live in Plantation west of Fort Lauderdale, and have been a Floridian for over 20 years. I grew up and was educated in Westchester County, NY, and worked for 25 years in Missouri, Oklahoma and Kansas.

As a critic, what is your main area of expertise? How did you acquire it?

While theater is my primary area, I also review opera, was a book reviewer for 20-plus years, and once had a nerd’s encyclopedic knowledge of film and TV. I’ve spent much of my conscious life with one foot in journalism and one foot in theater. Besides being an insatiable theater patron, I took numerous courses in college, have read countless volumes, interviewed hundreds of artists — much of any critic’s expertise is acquired through on-the-job training and acquisition of knowledge. On and off through my life (when it did not create any whiff of conflict of interest because I was a government and crime reporter, not a critic), I have been an actor, singer, playwright, director and producer, mostly in amateur-level productions.

In what year was your first professional review published? What was the publication?

Probably book reviews in The Wichita Eagle in the late 1970s and then for The Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale through the late 1990s. I regularly began filing theater reviews and arts features in 1998, with a smattering earlier in my career.

Which areas of cultural criticism have you not covered but wish to try? Why?

I have rarely covered film, which is a branch of art and entertainment that I have been immersed in since childhood and one I think I have the ability to cover as a critic. I have never covered dance or the fine arts except as a reporter; I don’t think I have the adequate knowledge to provide the proper evaluation and context, other than the basic analytical skills that any critic brings to the job. I do not believe that a rose is a rose is a rose in high-quality arts criticism.

Can anyone be a critic? Why or why not?

That’s like asking can anybody be a brain surgeon. Yes, they can, but I wouldn’t want them to operate on me. There’s that old scatological saying, “Opinions are like (well, you know); everybody’s got one.” An opinion is not criticism; it’s not even good reviewing. Even critics learning their craft attempt to apply their analytical skills, more basic knowledge than the average patron, and honed abilities to communicate clearly and to put the piece in context of past art and present day. Neither the 14-year-old fanboy who has set up his own blog, nor the 44-year-old fanboy holding forth on a chat room, is what I categorize as a critic. Are their views valid and valuable? Of course. It’s crucial for traditional dead tree media critics to acknowledge that fine genuine criticism is being delivered on cyber platforms by insightful skilled practitioners who we might not have thought of as critics back in the day. One key is that many fanboys are venting for their own self-aggrandizement or just to blow off steam. Critics are journalists (a word that can be defined in non-traditional ways) whose first responsibility is to their readers, people who are concerned about accuracy, ethics, context and wide array of other factors.

Which living critics, in your own or other field(s) of expertise, do you admire? Why?

There are dozens and dozens. I admire Ben Brantley and Charles Isherwood’s ability to see, to identify those details on stage that buttress their contentions, and which recreate the sensory experience of being at that performance. I am in awe of A.O. Scott and Mahnola Dargis’ ability to see the cinematic forest and not get lost in cataloguing the trees, and the ability to see where that forest is located in broader world. I hate Entertainment Weekly trying to summarize a work in a few paragraphs, and yet you have to admit that they do it very well. But there are so many others: Chris Jones in Chicago, Charles McNulty in LA, Christine Dolen in Miami, John Thomason who works for me.