An ex-critic discovers Rule Number One...too late.

Love music, hold the criticism - The Boston Globe
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I have to admit I was kind of excited when I came across a link to Steve Almond's essay (link annoying formatted above...) but it was, in short, a loser. I keep looking for missing pieces to an essay I've been working for years called "Why I'm not a critic", and all I really learned from Almond was that he should never have been one.

Why not? Rule number of one criticism: it's not about you. It's not about the snarky put downs you come up with, or about how clever you are, or about what you can connect the stuff you're writing about to. Criticism is always best when it's about the work and the world it lives in. When Almond writes about realizing that people were (*gasp*) enjoying a concert he'd already written off, he reveals that he was never qualified for his job in the first place. Criticism, you see, is about love. To criticize, you must be deeply enthralled, infatuated, head over heals with the art form you write about...or else you haven't any reason to criticize it.

I say this after a day of giving crits at an art school in town, a day in which I asked no fewer than a half dozen times (in increasingly impolite terms), why am I expected to care about this? Too often we expect some inherent quality in the work to make it matter...or else rely on the charitable disposition of an audience to accept an expression as 'interesting' (the Siberian chill of criticism). In these cases, I felt more engaged in the artists' work than they were. A sad state. What Almond realized is that when an artist (yes, he's talking about MC Hammer, but you work with what you've got) actually freakin' cares about something, it starts to matter to other people. Criticism isn't the judgment of authority passed on art (or music, or literature, or food, or movies, or whatever) by timeless authority, it's the battleground on which competing visions of the world are articulated. And to play in that arena, it's got to matter to you.

So I am so glad I never actually saw Almond's criticism when I lived in Boston and read the papers there...I'm so glad I had the chance to read people like David Bonetti writing about art, and Lloyd Schwartz writing about classical music. Writers who disappeared into the act of describing and evaluating what they wrote about. Wait...none of them were at the Globe? Hmmm...go figure.