Do we need art critics?
If you ask Bob Hicks, executive editor of Oregon ArtsWatch, he says “critic” is a dumb word. As he argues in his recently published piece, the role of art criticism isn’t to be the final say in whether a piece of work is good or bad, but rather to be the start of a conversation.
At the same time, arts journalism as a whole has faced a number of setbacks in the industry this year, including the Associated Press ending its book reviews, Vanity Fair eliminating its reviews and the Chicago Tribune losing full-time movie reviewer Michael Phillips.
But as Portland-based arts and culture writer Justin Duyao writes in his piece in response to Hicks, arts and cultural criticism isn’t dead, but has evolved to online spaces, including social media.
Hicks and Duyao both join us to share their thoughts on modern day criticism.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Bob Hicks has written about arts and culture in the Northwest for nearly 50 years. He is the executive editor for Oregon ArtsWatch now, but don’t call him an “arts critic.” He prefers the term “arts writer.” As he wrote in a recent essay, he doesn’t want to have the final say on whether a piece of work is good or bad. He really wants to start a conversation. He joins us now to talk about the evolving role of arts writing in society. We’re joined as well by Justin Duyao, a fellow Portland-based arts and culture writer. He wrote a response to the original essay in Oregon ArtsWatch, and they both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.
Bob Hicks: Great to be here.
Justin Duyao: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Miller: Bob, I didn’t mention in that intro just there that you actually wrote the essay that prompted today’s conversation back in 2011. What made you want to put it into the world, 14 years later?
Hicks: Well, it was an accident. I was looking for something else on my computer, I can’t even remember what it was. And in some deep little pocket of the place, I found this thing and started reading it, and I didn’t remember it, but it sounded like me. I think it possibly ran in the first year that ArtsWatch existed, but I’m not sure where it ran. I looked at it, I thought, gee, one of the things we wanna do at ArtsWatch is really engage with our readers and have conversations. I think about it as a long-distance conversation. That’s what this piece did, and I thought, well, stands up pretty well, why don’t we just run that?
Miller: Do you feel any differently now than the writer of this piece, which happens to be you, 14 years ago?
Hicks: No, it’s pretty much me, and it’s great that Justin’s here because Justin, that piece is 14 years old. Justin is a different generation, and he has a really interesting view of where we’re headed now. I think the two pieces made for a really pretty delightful package.
Miller: Justin, what went through your mind when you read Bob’s piece?
Duyao: The timing was perfect. I had kind of already been tinkering with a version of the piece that I wrote, and then Bob published his and I got to read it, and I was thinking, man, we are on the exact same page, even though he wrote it so long ago. The kind of digital landscape has been evolving so much since then and I’m a lot younger, so I spend a lot more time on social media.
So it’s a question I ask a lot as an arts writer, what’s the best way to engage with people through those different platforms, and how you can look back at the decades of arts criticism over the years, but understanding how it’s changed, perhaps for the better, perhaps for the worse, that’s a really important conversation to have. So I think publishing our essays in tandem did a lot of work towards starting that conversation.
Miller: Justin, Bob wrote that ideally criticism will offer an audience “fresh perspective, a new way of entering into the discussion that any decent work of art invites.” What do you aspire to do with your writing on art?
Duyao: I think he put it perfectly. Elsewhere in the essay he wrote that art writing should just be a window that you open to broader understanding. And I think the best art criticism I’ve ever read, the best art writing out there, doesn’t pretend to be the authoritative voice on the meaning or the importance of a piece of work, but it just starts a conversation, and it allows for readers or viewers to engage with the piece in a new way.
I think the best art writing I’ve ever read has done that, and that’s really what I aspire to do in my own writing, is open new doors for understanding, offer potential context if that’s needed, but also just to kind of get the ball rolling and have a lot of trust in your readers that they’re gonna pick up that ball and run with it.
Miller: Bob, you wrote at the beginning of the piece that people over the years would call you a critic, and you’d correct them. You’d say, no, I’m a writer. I happen to be now a writer, writing about theater. It could have been about music or visual art or whatever. Why did you shy away from the word critic?
Hicks: You know, that’s a really good question. I think first because I do consider myself a writer first and foremost. And what do I write about? Well, I happen to write about arts and culture. I’ve written a lot of criticism. I guess I don’t like the word much because it implies this great authoritative voice from on high that is going to correct all of you silly artists who don’t really quite know what you’re doing. And I don’t feel that way. I think there’s a partnership, the writing about art is part of the whole artistic process. So I’m a writer. I write about art.
Miller: One of the commenters to, to your piece, Bob, came from David McLean. He was very complimentary, and he did say that he thought there was a big question you didn’t address. His question is, who are you writing for? How would you answer that?
Hicks: That was a good point. I would answer – and Justin and I were actually talking about this a little earlier – that ideally, anyone who wants to read us should be able to read us, and we should have that conversation.
Miller: Meaning that it should be intelligible and approachable by anybody who wants to engage with it?
Hicks: It is absolutely approachable, right in plain English.
Miller: It’s funny you mentioned that because Justin, that was one of the main points that you brought up. How do you think language of some criticism or in particular maybe in the visual art world in the last couple of decades, how do you think that plays into what we’re talking about now?
Duyao: It’s important to note there are a lot of different kinds of art criticism. If you pick up the New York Times and read a review, that’s gonna be a lot different than if you pick up an academic journal and read an essay about a work of art, but there is a trend toward a kind of art criticism that is very academic, it’s very kind of encumbered by academic jargon, big words that aren’t necessarily gonna deliver the point in the way that they could.
I do think, and the way I think about art criticism as a language project is interesting because like we were talking about, if the point of writing about art is to connect people and ideas, if that’s the whole point, using language as a stumbling block or a roadblock, a barrier to understanding defeats the whole purpose of it. And even if there are different kinds of art criticism, I would argue if the point is to open windows to new ways of understanding, we should use language to the best of our ability to do that.
Miller: Bob, you wrote that you’ve always felt that your bottom line on whether a work of art is “good” or “bad” is the least interesting thing that you could write in most stories, but that you’d better address it in one way or another because readers expect it and you write that they have that right. Do you think that reader expectations have changed over the course of your career?
Hicks: I think that when I began, that whole sense of the high and mighty critic was dominant. I’m more democratic than that. I think that everybody has a point of view, and what in my writing, and what in ArtsWatch’s many writers approach is important, is to start that conversation and to connect the art to the larger culture. Because art is part of everything, and so how you do that no longer has to be there are these standards that we have and it met this, but it didn’t meet this and it didn’t meet this, and boy, what were they thinking about? It’s what are these connections? How does this piece of art connect with the rest of the world? I have my ideas and you will have your ideas, and I’m hoping that my ideas will spur your thoughts. And it will just keep going. We’re part of a process.
Miller: Justin, I imagine that that a caveman or a cavewoman who saw some, I don’t know, a picture of a lion in a cave, they hopefully they had thoughts about that drawing, but they had very different access to share those thoughts with the world than we have now with social media, obviously. How do you think that changes the role of “professional” arts writers like you? Everybody has a soapbox, but this is your job.
Duyao: Yeah, social media has really changed everything, really. Bob and I were talking about this before. When I was kind of growing up, the idea –
Miller: Someday we’re gonna mic that room where guests can hang out ahead of time. And then it was very easy, much easier, I’ll just play that and go have lunch during the show.
Duyao: No, it was a great conversation, but what’s interesting about the difference in our generation is I came of age reading a lot of books, reading print journalism. I’ve been a huge fan of OPB for a long time, but also like essays in the New Yorker, like I’m very comfortable with long form writing, and that’s completely changed. Everything is short form now, and it’s a lot of trends and the way you engage with ideas is based on an algorithm and so it’s a completely different landscape.
Talking about art with that landscape in mind, we also discussed it’s an evolving question. It’s not a question we can answer right now, it’s something that’s continuing to change. What matters is that we keep talking about it, because – and a big question here is, how do you find a trustworthy voice on social media if these people aren’t vetted by a major outlet, if they haven’t gone through the same credentials that people used to have to become an art critic, how do you find a trustworthy voice?
Miller: What does trustworthy even mean when you say that? If we’re talking about, is it as simple as I find this person’s take on this song, this movie, this fashion trend, this poem, this book, it made me think about the world in a different way. Is that enough? I guess, let me put it this way. I think that’s enough, and I don’t even know if trustworthy enters into it if we’re talking about writing about arts. I care more about someone’s take changing my idea of the world in a way that moves me.
Duyao: That’s brilliantly put, and I think, Bob, what you said about the illusion that an art critic has to be the authoritative voice, has to answer a definitive question about the value of a work of art. I think that’s a lot less important than like what you were saying, just starting a conversation. And if somebody’s two- to three-minute rant about a movie gets you thinking about a movie in a different way. Even if their perspective isn’t rock solid, I think, yeah, the conversation is what matters.
Miller: There was an interesting essay, Bob, in the New Yorker recently by the music writer Kelefa Sanneh. The title of the piece was “How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge,” and he was basically lamenting what he called the creeping niceness of reviews. This was about pop music in particular, but I’ve seen other versions of this recently, people saying I miss the days when there were more interesting, not just mean-spirited, but interesting and brave takedowns of stuff. Do you subscribe to this idea?
Hicks: Occasionally. I think that times have changed with the exception of two or three national newspapers. There are very, very few who pay attention to all of the stuff that’s going on. When you have that kind of takedown, you’re looking at the entire art form and you or somebody else or a lot of other people have been writing about it. Now, I think that people pick and choose what they’re going to write about. And I think with fewer options, fewer outlets, you tend to pick and choose ones that either you are interested in, or you think are the ones that are more worthy of having a conversation about. That does take some of the edge off. Now, there are times when something just doesn’t work and sometimes you just have to say that.
Miller: Justin, I think that the way I’ve seen this described is that now there’s so many fans writing about work that has taken over a lot of the realm that used to be the world of criticism. You have one minute to respond to that.
Duyao: It’s an interesting take, and it’s true that if you’re scrolling on TikTok or Instagram, you’re gonna stumble upon a lot of, like, let’s say Taylor Swift drops a new album, they’re gonna be a lot of Swifties that praise it kind of unequivocally.
Miller: And Swifties who will scream at a reviewer if they don’t praise it.
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Duyao: Right. There’s a lot of vitriol potentially on that side, but I also think it’s true, it’s very common for Marvel to drop a dud of a movie and for it to get review bombed. I don’t think that there aren’t negative reviews out there. I do think that as social media has kind of democratized people’s access to these conversations about cultural artifacts, it’s maybe diversified the kinds of voices that you have access to. And what’s interesting is with your algorithm, you might be kind of ushered into a bit of a content bubble where you only see one side of the argument. And I think all that matters is that you, as a consumer of information, do a good job looking outside of your own comfort zone.
Miller: Justin and Bob, thanks very much.
Duyao: Thank you so much.
Hicks: Yeah, thank you.
Miller: Justin Duyao is a Portland-based arts and culture writer. Bob Hicks is the executive editor of Oregon ArtsWatch.
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