 is being, to me, I didn't see it as a panel discussion. I didn't see it as a debate. I didn't see it as a bunch of people sitting around talking heads, talking about things. I saw it as a rally. I think people who are here automatically for the love of arts criticism care about arts criticism. And if you care about arts criticism, then you no doubt know that arts criticism is under siege, under pressure, and is being pushed out of newspapers and magazines and elsewhere. So to me, this is more of a rally. I wanted to talk about the past a bit. I mean, I'm old. So I'll talk about what it used to be like in the 80s. Then I'll talk a little bit about what has happened since then to talk about the present and the problems that we currently have. Then I was hoping after that to have some people talk about the meaning of arts criticism. I was hoping to have artists and critics. I think hopefully maybe we'll have other meetings past this one so I can get some more artists and people to talk about what art criticism is meant to them. And then after that, I wanted to have a half hour or so or maybe 45 minutes. I have some ideas and we can brainstorm. And what can we do? What action can we take? What things can we begin to organize? And then when I have subsequent meetings, hopefully in the next couple of months, we can solidify and get those things done. And I'm interested in hearing people's ideas about what you can do about putting some pressure or at least shouting and making some sort of noise, some sort of pain, some sort of angst, some sort of reaction to the fact that arts criticism is sort of, I would say, dying or is fading away or is slowly but surely vanishing. And part of what I want to do is assert its value and that if this part of the ecology is going to go under, then I think it should not go under quietly. I think that we should make a fuss about it and we should do our best to try to cultivate it and strengthen it. I have some ideas for doing that and I'm hoping you guys have ideas and between us maybe we can start hopefully working towards something. So I see this as a invitation to activism rather than as a sort of panel discussion or just to talk about criticism. So let me talk a little bit about the past. When I go back to the 80s, in the past I was, I wrote for the Boston Phoenix, we had a number of small alternative papers, we had the real paper, we had the Cambridge Express, we had a lot of magazines that all of them had very vibrant, live arts criticism and art staffs. They often had editors, they had critics and generally the discussion was not are we going to do a review of something? The question was generally are we going to do, are we going to do a feature on something because we assume we're going to do a review. The assumption was first and foremost that the arts were important and serious, they were news and that they should be critiqued. And we often had, certainly at the Phoenix, we had a first-stringer and we had a number of other critics underneath the first-stringer to carry and do all the other smaller shows that the first-stringer was not doing. And that created a situation where you had a string of critics so you had critics who were learning from one another. So we sort of had mentors, right? And you would come in and you would work with the first-string critic and the first-string critic would edit you. I was edited by Karen Clay and by a number of other critics along the way. They all made me a better critic. So there was also a system involved too. So it was the value of criticism. There was a value of a system where people were learning from one another how to write reviews. And reviews were of a certain, some people thought in the 80s the Phoenix reviews were a little too long, but they could be thousands of words off. You know, you could have a 2,000-word review of a production at the Huntington or at the ART. When Carolyn got going, it could even be 3,000. So you had a lot of words and people thought that was perfectly fine. Perfectly fine. In fact, at the Phoenix, arts was on par with or was in parity with the news. We were that important. Arts and culture and the commentary on arts and culture was considered to be important and serious and to be taken care of and treated seriously. So we had critics for dance, for classical music, for jazz and so forth, because that was seen as a vibrant and important part of reporting the news and thinking about what was going on in the city. So keep in mind those are certain things that have changed. A, the arts were considered sort of on par with the news. It was considered important. We had a staff of critics who would learn with one another. Critics were given enough words in terms of column inches to actually not only render a verdict, thumbs up or thumbs down, but were given and were encouraged to be able to give reasons behind their judgments so that they could persuade, inform both the theater company, in the case of theater or the dance company, and the reader, right? Of exactly how they came to that verdict and believe it or not, we had a very vibrant disagreement among critics. You had the Boston Herald, you had the Globe, you had Cambridge Express, you had all these little papers and they were actively reading each other and calling each other out, right? And one of my best friends, Arthur Friedman, wonderful theater critic, was he called people out and he sort of showed me somewhat the value of that to the extent that critics like everyone else need to be criticized in order maybe to get better, to become a little bit more aware of what their strengths and weaknesses were. So when critics were doing that, it was not only just sort of like to get at one another, but it was also in a way to hone their own skills and also the discussion was good for culture itself, for Boston arts itself, right? Because suddenly critics were taking the arts seriously, critics were arguing with one another about the significance of a certain show or the dance performance or classical music, and that would then transfer to the readers who would think there's something going on here, right? This is interesting, people are arguing about this, people are taking it seriously, right? Through the act of evaluation, people were learning also among themselves to be able to evaluate the arts better themselves. I mean, again, I don't want to say that there was, it was a golden age part of the problem which remains true today, but I should mention it and maybe as we bridge the present, is that freelance critics at that point were not paid very well. So you're often getting very little per review, right? I mean, in fact, I mean, I don't want to shoot too forward to the present, but I heard there are people who are writing for the globe recently who were making about the amount of money I was making writing for the Phoenix in the 90s, right? In terms of a freelance review. So the value of criticism is high, but the valuation of the people doing the criticism to pay them to do this, to have the background and the experience, right? To be able to articulate their judgments has never been as valued as much as I thought it would be. But at least in the 80s and maybe even in the 90s, you were given the space, the somewhat the respect, right? To be able to do, you know, feel like you're doing a job and that you're doing an important job, but it was an important part of the ecology. So I'll leave it there in terms of the golden age. I could do a little bit more, but I think I made most of the major points. Now, I've done the work and you can do it yourself. I went through the, I took a week in the 90s. I think it was like maybe in 1996 or 97. I looked at the Boston Globe a week and I just counted every arts piece that was in there. I measured the column inches. I evaluated whether it was positive or not. I looked at the placement on the page and then I jumped 10 years. So I went from 96 to, you know, 2006, same week. I measured the column inches, looked at the number of reviews and it was fairly terrifying then in terms of the shrinkage, in terms of the space and the pages and the number of critics. Suddenly what was going on is that in the old days it was like, hey, it's gonna get a review. Will we give it a feature? Suddenly that was beginning to reverse and it was, let's see if it gets a feature and more and more the idea of getting a review became more and more iffy. More and more and the reviews themselves were shrinking and we're getting smaller and we're being placed further down on the page while the pictures with the features were being thrown up top. So a lot of things that I said are happening earlier in the 80s now as you can see as we get to the present and you include technology and social media, the rise of consumer guide, right? You're beginning to see that everything that I was talking about earlier is now reversed. Suddenly features are what's wanted. Reviews are no longer considered as viable or serious or interesting because the arts themselves I would argue are no longer suddenly being demoted and no longer considered as important or as serious or as interesting or as compelling as what was going on in the news. When I first started at BOR, just to go to BOR for a moment, this was back in the 80s. We had a news, there was a news editor and there was an arts editor. There's like an arts are along with the news are. So the arts are basically brought in all the critics and made sure all the reviews that would come into the station. Eventually by the end of the 80s, the arts are was gone. The news are was ascended and suddenly the amount of space and time and interest that would go into the arts reviewing on the station. This is at that point was sort of this is before artery and this is around the time in 2000 I'd be in my online arts magazine. And that was partly in reaction to that, you know, was considered, you know, passe. So a lot of the things that came earlier have now reversed. So, you know, I can, the globe now, what's partly triggered what was going on in the present now is the two freelance critics at reviewing theater for the globe are let go. So now we're beginning not only a space shrinking, the only is the importance of arts being demoted, but now freelance critics who as I've already pointed out to you are not that expensive to keep, really. You know, we're talking 100, you know, for me it was like $150 a review and suddenly to save money apparently we must cut them loose. It's fairly inexpensive. And when you think about going online, right, I mean they have their, the globe has its online entity as does WBUR as does GBH. There's no reason that they could not post reviews, you know, thoughtful reviews in those places. I would argue that they are not. And we can sort of talk about why that, you know, why that is or why they're not doing, why they're not doing more of that. But so a lot of what we saw in the 80s has now been reversed. The arts are no longer being seen as serious. Arts criticism is being demoted. It's not necessarily for economic reasons. And we can talk about why some of those reasons are because as I said, the freelance critics are fairly cheap to have. Also the rise of technology has turned everyone into a critic. So we have the idea that on Facebook we have like thumbs up and thumbs down. And for whatever reason, editors are accepting that and are far more willing to accept the idea of sort of popular verdict on criticism rather than, you know, having what you would say professional or expert critics do it. You know, why we need criticism? I mean, maybe I can, well, let's talk a little bit. So we have the globe basically cutting critics and essentially cutting reviews and not having as many reviews. And I would welcome you to simply do my, I didn't have a chance at this time but maybe give me a little more time where I might get somebody at the Archfuse to do it. Just do my 10 year study and look at it from a decade ago and look at it now and you will see exactly the breakdown and that it's getting more and more serious and that the kind of productions that are getting features tend to be the bigger productions but are known productions. It becomes a matter of access, right? You have access to the globe. Are they willing to write a feature about you and you are overjoyed? You no longer now can assume that you're going to get a review because they now have one theater critic. I'm talking about theater here. And if he becomes ill as he was one weekend, then the shows that are being given that weekend will not be covered because he's ill and he can't make it. And you know, some people are wondering, is he ever, will he be ill during an opening of the ART or would he be ill during the opening of the Huntington or would they somehow bring him in with an oxygen mask and get him there to review it? I would love to see it. That would be great. The also what's happened is that as we move from the sort of newspaper ethos that I was talking about, you know, the editors, editing critics and having thoughtful criticism, we're getting what I call the TV model and that's also moving in where we're having sort of TV and we all know how much arts coverage they have on TV let alone theater, let alone reviews. I mean, they have no very little arts coverage on television, certainly on cable TV and certainly no reviews at all. So you have, I mean, on WGBH, you have like one person, one critic, the arts editor and he's sort of a Renaissance man, a Renaissance critic who apparently is critiquing just about every art under the sun. When he's doing any critiquing, often he's doing features, right? And he's doing reporting. So we're seeing reporting and feature writing but we're not seeing thoughtful evaluation. And when the reviews are being done, they're being done in the sort of consumer guide mode, meaning that, you know, you're hearing him on the radio saying, you know, he likes or doesn't like something and for whatever reason and those things are being posted online. And if you go to WGBH arts online, you will see extremely, I mean, I'm trying, I'll be diplomatic, I mean, a very sparse site. I mean, I went there and looked today and I saw on their books page, they had a book interview up that's about three years old and this is like up near the, no, like three spots down. So essentially they're just taking things into doing on, you know, on air and they're posting it on page. They're not doing any, that I can see very much, no original criticism that I can see. Someone can call me on that. But when I was looking, I didn't see it and they're mostly, when they do anything original online, it tends to be features. And the features tend to be very, you know, very, you know, informative, but not particularly hard hitting. So again, the idea that reviews are one way in which we challenge people about the arts, we raise ideas about the arts, that we assert the seriousness of the arts is lost because it simply becomes a matter of telling you, you should go to, you know, access. We decided to do this show and you're gonna read about this show and you're gonna wanna go to this show rather than being about criticism. And I would say, artery is somewhat a hybrid but there is somewhat of the sort of TV idea that's involved in artery as well, to the extent that it's over heavy on features. Lacks having a lot of critical thought, criticism. There are some reviews there. They tend to be very positive. We were looking over the last, I don't know what was the last month or so, Matt, what did you do last three months? And this again is not scientific but I would say seven out of 10 were thumbs up, right? But you say that seven out of 10. The general ratio tended to be three features to one review, right? Again, you tell me, you know, I mean, he did the work, I didn't have time to do it this time. But so the idea is that again, features are being put forward, reviews are being pushed back. Neither the reviews at WGBH or the reviews at the artery or I would argue the reviews at the globe or what I would call challenging, exciting or incisive reviews. They're doing the job but they're not really generating what I would hope good reviewing would do. And it's certainly not generating a good dialogue, you know, a good back and forth among the critics in the city, right? They tend to have a very much of a sort of homogeneous feel to that, right? At least for me, there is no real back and forth, which I think would be interesting and would suggest that there's something to discuss and think about when it comes to criticism. So that's sort of the present, you know? I mean, it is the discouraging present where reviews are shrinking, critics are being kicked out. The editors or the people who are in charge of working at, you know, it's let's say, GBH at the artery and at the globe are not really, do not seem to be particularly interested in sustaining criticism, you know? Whenever you ask, well, why are you doing what you're doing? Usually the answer is, they usually don't talk to me but the people who I go between, they will often say, well, essentially what we're doing is that people want features, people, you know, don't want reviews, they don't want to hear about whether something is good or bad, they just want to learn about something that they need to go to. Now on the one hand, I know arts organizations love features and it's really good for them and I'm not knocking them, they can be informative and sometimes when they're really well written they can't be somewhat challenging. But I guess I'm gonna make my pitch here that we need to even out the disbursement between features and reviews because reviews are necessary for a, I mean, I've already sort of hinted at a number of them but for me the ultimate reason that we need reviews is that we need reviews because reviews articulate the value of arts to us and our society and our world. They articulate their value and the articulation of their value means that everyone is not gonna recognize the same value with every artwork. We're gonna discuss it, we're gonna argue about it and we're gonna discriminate but it's not just discriminate, it's not like going oh I have to go to see this show because I've heard that it's good but the idea is the critic goes and then explains this is why I think it's good or this is why I think it's bad and that it's through the act of discrimination or evaluation that we learn to appreciate the arts. Think about the news, take away the commentaries, take away the editorials, take away the pundits, God, I'd love to have pundits for arts, right? Take away the pundits, of course we take politics seriously, we take that seriously enough so that we have commentary, we have people arguing, right? Trump, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, whatever, right? But the arts, it feels to me it's all one homogeneous note, right? We're not having commentary, we're not having argument, we're not having discussion, we're not having discrimination and evaluation in a way that's going to educate and excite readers and people who care about the arts. Now I'm not up on the latest so I couldn't be wrong but the last time I heard some stats about people coming to Boston performance spaces, I heard that it was sort of holding its own but maybe even slipping of it, now that might have changed, right? So obviously the current system where we're going to have mainstream media basically just, you know, do so many features, so many do this, do this, go to this, may not necessarily be working, right? Maybe it would be worthwhile exploring the alternative, right? Evening up and having more reviews and criticism so that we can generate some real thought and ideas and love and passion, passion about theater or about the arts. Because one good thing about criticism that usually if it's a good critic, they're passionate about their criticism, they're passionate about the arts. There's a great quote from Kenneth Tynan who says that criticism is at its best when you feel something is at stake. Something is at stake, something is meaningful. It's not just a matter of, gee, you should go see this, right, or you should see that. Something's at stake in the argument that this is a good piece of art or a good piece of theater piece or not. To me, features can't get at that. Features can tell you, go see, and this is why it's interesting and this is important and telling it's important, but criticism in there is challenging and making you think about why something is important. Because the critic has made his or her argument about it. So I would like, I've always said this, I've always, it would be great to have arts pages, arts coverage pages that have the vitality and the strength of the news pages, that we would have people back and forth and that we need more voices, not fewer voices. We need more diverse voices of criticism. Instead of getting rid of critics, which is where we're going, it is where we're going. I'm convinced that in a decade, we will have arts blogs, we'll have people blogging and I'm not, but I just talked about the mainstream media here that have the resources to be able to pay and sustain professional criticism. I'm convinced that might just be completely fading away. I mean, I teach students at BU and I teach an arts criticism class. Most of them don't know what a review is. They don't know what criticism is because they've grown up in the Facebook, like, no like, thumbs up, thumbs down world. They haven't read, they haven't read Paul and Kale. They haven't read James Agee. They haven't read any critics to see what criticism can do. To me, that offers an enormous opportunity for the good because online, we can do that kind of thing. We can have the Pauline Kale's and James Agee's of the future if we're willing to invest something in them and training them and having people following them and we don't need millions of people to be able to do it. We just need enough people who care about the arts and care about writing well about them. So I think that's long enough. I've probably hit my okay. All right, so that's enough. I'm stopping. Thanks. So what I'd like to do now is that we're going to have, we have our, people can come up and introduce themselves and I want people to talk about, I've asked them at least, I mean, they can continue my tirade if they wish, but they can, I would really like them to talk about the value of arts criticism. And this is another thing that I think is important. We just, I mean, if they cut news reporters, right? You usually have someone pro-publica starts, you know, you have people screaming on NPR. They're cutting news reporters at the New York Times. They're cutting news reports. The New York Times cuts out a bunch of arts critics for the tri-burrow area, you know, and you hear crickets, right? It's like, oh, they're just gone. No protest, no one says, like something valuable has not been lost. Isn't something valuable being lost? So that's why I want people to assert the value of arts criticism. So the first, I think, Deborah? Sure. Okay. That much taller than me. I'm Deborah Cash. Can you hear me? Yeah, okay. So I wanted to ask, looking out in this lovely room, how many of you consider yourselves writers? Okay, so maybe three quarters or something. Writers know what's at stake in a way that the rest of our cultural ecology may or may not. And I think that one of the things that is an early action item that we can take from today's event is a commitment to start talking up what's at stake, what Bill was just saying about things being a less rich ecology because we don't have the voices of various writers. I'm one of the contributing founding writers at the Arts Fuse and I also am on the board. My day job is I run a small cultural nonprofit called Boston Dance Alliance. So I went from a role as a critic, which I did for almost 40 years, to a role building the community about which I wrote. And I continue to write book reviews and some other things for Bill and for other publications. One of the things that I'm very aware of is that when I started here in Boston, also in the 80s, there were five working dance critics in the city of Boston. Five. There is exactly one full-time paid dance critic in the United States in 2018. And it's Alistair Macaulay at the New York Times. He is the only one left. That is a very, very dangerous situation for those of us who care about the seriousness with which we take our art forms. Now dance is always the far edge, right? It's something that is hard to commodify. People don't do a dance and then put it in a closet and sell it for $5 million at Sotheby's 40 years later. But there was always a sense when I was writing that it was kind of like in a newspaper, even though the work is over, you still wanna report on it. And what I used to say was when the house burns down, the reporters still come and talk about the fact that it happened, right? And a lot of the classical music, dance, some other event-specific activities that we have here in Boston and of course across the country are things that happen once or they happen for a very short period of time, a short duration, and then they're over. And one of our questions is if criticism and in this case journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if nobody's ever reported on it? Well, there might be some documentation by the artist and there might be an individual person who is blogging about it. I'm very happy that my friend Greg Cook is doing an arts blog and really covering things because he's deeply passionate about it. But one of the things that was wonderful at the globe was that I could be writing about Boston Ballet Swan Lake or some very obscure event happening in some church in Central Square and people who were actually looking for something else would stumble upon it. That every once in a while, there would be people who would read things, they would find out what was going on and they weren't dance people. They were reading the news, they were looking for the sports stats, they were looking for the comics. And there was a sense that my work was in conversation with not just the other critics and the people in the field that I was writing about, but with all the other things in the culture. And one of the reasons that I care passionately about arts criticism is that it is part of our culture. And there was a quote I actually realized that I had written down in 2003, I am getting older, that Morris Dickstein, who is not my favorite writer, certainly. He's very much a neo-conservative, is somebody who comes from a very different world than I do. But he had a conversation with a writer who some of you may know named Elon Stevens, who teaches at Western Mass, who's a Jewish writer of Central American history, legacy. And one of the things that Dickstein said in the conversation about talking about translation is intellectuals are people who translate the arts into discourse. And I remember writing that down and thinking, well, I'm an intellectual and I'm interested in translating it into discourse. But one of the reasons that that's so important is that once the art isn't happening in front of you, the discourse is part of the residue that can continue on and keep working through the cultural forms. You don't have to go see a bright show to understand some of the ideas that came out of Brett's theatrical practice. Now, if you only know the theory and you never see the work, that would be disappointing. And I would encourage you to go as fast as you can and go see some Brett. But that we do have a sense that the inner life of the artist and the inner life of the community that produces that artist is something that we need to get a handle on. It is not just the entertainment that takes you out of your life. It's something that draws you into it. And if we don't work for that and if we don't spread the information to people who might potentially care about it, then all you get is a kind of surface experience that frankly isn't fair to the artists either. That the amount, I have not yet seen Black Panther, I'm looking forward to it, but the amount of conversation about the implications of the way it was made, the way it was cast, the way it was dressed, who is going, what is important about it, how is it different than any other Black majority film that has been made by Hollywood? What's the difference between a Hollywood film and an indie film in this context? What else will it lead to? What's the relationship of that film to movies? I haven't seen it yet and I know that these are conversations that are happening, right? And I'm not the only one. Now, of course, a Hollywood film is gonna get covered very differently because among other things, there is a multi-million dollar marketing juggernaut behind it, trying to get people into the theater. There is not a single arts organization in the city of Boston, including the BSO and the Boston Ballet and the MFA that have anywhere near those kind of marketing dollars. I promise you, you can have the biggest budget possible to get people into an Andrew Snelson performance or a particular exhibit and it's not gonna touch Hollywood. So we can't rely on that. We need people to say, okay, I'm interested in this because I care about what's happening in the culture and it may be that you're interested in a disciplinary thing. You're interested in theater, not classical music. You're interested in dance, not painting. Or it may be I'm interested in artists of color who are under the age of 40 in all these different disciplines and how are they thinking about the world they're inhabiting. It may be, as some of us had as second-wave feminists, I'm interested in what kind of work women are making. I'm interested in what kind of things people are doing in interdisciplinary forms. I don't like to sit in a theater, but I love that there are dancers who are dancing on rooftops with bungee cords and bandaloop. So we really have a job to do here is to start talking not only to the artists about helping us as writers be partners in the argument for arts criticism, but also explaining to the consumers that they are not doing themselves any favor by having their experience be the minute they walk into the theater and have it end the minute they walk out. That they are participants in a broader cultural conversation and we wanna be there with them, helping them define it, helping them frame it, helping them build literacy in the art form that they're interested in and really committed to bringing new critics in. Bill and I are of a certain age and some of us are older, that we're really interested in having younger people with their multimedia familiarity, with their interest in different kinds of majority art forms. When I was coming up in dance, hip hop was a very fringe activity. It is now the vernacular of world dance. Okay, that's just what happened. But I'm somebody who had a very different framework for thinking and 30 years from now it would not be appropriate for it only to be older people talking about this work but because there isn't any pipeline that's exactly what's happening and that's exactly what's gonna continue to happen and even though it was never something you could make a living at, I did corporate jobs for 35 years because I could not make a living in my art form which was to do criticism and to do other sorts of work. I thought I was being practical by going into journalism, right? Wrong. But there was a circumstance that we really need to think about is, yes, if we can do it for free, the critics can do it for free, the artists do it for free, the people who come to performances wanna have it free, then what are we saying about what we value? It may be that we need to build new structures for access so that money is no impediment. I'm completely for that. But the notion that it's all fungible, that somebody who is writing a paper as a brand new writer for Bill's BU class and Bill with his many decades of expertise are essentially the same thing. It's just not right, it's just incorrect and it doesn't mean that that young writer may not become a fine critic. But we need to really invest in this pipeline in order to develop the institutions like the Arts Fuse, like the new forms that will come that we need to be part of that cultural conversation. So that's what I'll say. The name is there. Yeah. I don't know if you want to play totally stick to that. I'm sticking. All right, stick it. So, this is okay? Can everybody hear me? So, okay. My name's Matt Hansen. I'm the staff writer with the Arts Fuse. I've been writing for the Arts Fuse for about three years, four years. And so I wanted to speak a little bit about sort of the role that arts criticism played in my life and in terms of my own interest in culture and my own consumption of culture. When I was in high school, I made a kind of a conscious, sort of semi-conscious decision to decide to stop listening to the radio. I grew up in the suburbs of Massachusetts. I heard classic rock all day every day in the car with my dad on the way to school. It was something that was kind of always in the air. And I love it. I mean, I love the Beatles, Rolling Stones. Who doesn't? But after a while, I got kind of tired of hearing the same genre of music, the same era of music, and the same five bands over and over again. And so I sort of got interested in other genres that I hadn't really known anything about before. I started listening to jazz. I made a conscious effort to start exposing myself to jazz which was a bit of a culture shock in the sense that if you grow up listening to classic rock radio and pop tunes, like jazz is a totally different world, right? Most of the songs, not most maybe, but a lot of the songs don't have any words. It's acoustic instruments. There's no reference that you can kind of draw from that you're used to. You don't necessarily know old standards or anything like that. And I knew that this music was really popular for a really long time and that people were really well known, New York Hall trains or Miles Davis. And eventually I sort of started to get more of a grasp on it. And where criticism comes into it is that I had an album of Chet Baker songs. It was an instrumental Chet Baker record. Didn't know much about Chet Baker. Didn't know much about the songs he was playing. And I was reading the liner notes by some critic. I don't remember his name. And he was talking about one of the songs and he referred to Chet Baker's solo, his trumpet solo as Milifulus. And I didn't know the word. It's not a very commonplace word to hear. And so I went and looked it up and I went back to the song and listened to it again. And if you don't know, Milifulus means basically sweet as if coated with honey. And so that phrase, when you listen to a solo after that, listen to a piece of music that's been described kind of poetically like that, made when I was listening to so much more vivid to me. It gave me a handle on what I was hearing. You can listen to a song and say, oh, it's really pretty, but to think of it as a specific adjective or a specific term kind of illuminates it. Work of art can be illuminated for you if it's sort of tilted a little bit. If the critic uses particular language to kind of show an angle that it has or an aspect that it has. And that meant a lot to me. And I applied that to a lot of ways that you can take in music. Foreign films became something I was really interested in. So if you're raised on big budget Hollywood classics and you're kind of taken for granted that that's your cultural consumption, sort of like what Bill was saying with homogene, and you start watching like Bunwell or Kurosawa or Fellini, you're kind of going what the hell am I looking at? And so I'd read the booklets for Criterion Collection movies and I'd have this kind of plot twists explained to me and then, okay, well then, Bunwell was a surrealist and Fellini was interested in the circus and all these different critics that were able to sort of give me a handle on what I was seeing. And you see something, you see something else that's interesting that kind of keeps perpetuating. And now 90% of what I watch is foreign movies from yesterday. And that's not something that is as popular as it once was. Pauline Kale, I think, or no, actually was Susan Sontek said that in the 60s there was a new masterpiece, somewhat movies, there was a new masterpiece that was playing every two weeks. It was just, that was when everybody wanted to go see the new Bertman and the new Godard. And it's something that criticism really did for me in the sense of being able to kind of put these things into context for me. I remember the first time I saw Blue Velvet, I was like, what the hell did I just see, right? And I had nightmares about it and I read a Roger Ebert review of it and he broke it down, he broke down the symbolism and the significance of what he's trying to get to about the unconscious and suddenly it made it a little less insane, right? And I could see it for an actual work of art. And I'm very grateful that I had the opportunity to do that and I wish more people were exposed to that because I think, as a couple of people have mentioned, a lot of the culture that we have is thumbs up, thumbs down and there's a real resistance, I think, that people feel towards art that is somewhat challenging or shocking or just something off the beaten path. People feel very defensive about that and they're not comfortable with it. And I mean, I'm in it for beauty, I'm in it for stimulation, I'm in it for something that's going to be entertaining and you can find that in something that's not something that's already being offered to you as your officially standard piece of art. And so this leads you to read criticism. I started reading David Thompson, I started becoming really interested in Lester Bangs who turned me on to a million bands and albums that I never would have heard of before. Astral Weeks, if anybody knows Lester Bangs' writing is a key album for him. That's what got me to listen to it. It's been an album that's probably arguably my favorite over a long enough period of time. I have great friendships that developed because, oh, you like that record, too. I probably threw away my entire chance at an academic career by writing a master's thesis about it. So it's kind of a choice of what you want to let ruin your life, right? So that was, and that Lester Bangs was a critic. Lester Bangs was someone who was very passionate about letting you know what he felt about what he saw and what he read. And so to me, I think that's what I think of when I think about arts criticism, that it's a new way of perceiving the world, it's a new way of understanding the world in front of you. It's about seeing things with new eyes. And by extension, it's a new way of living life. It's a new way of understanding the world that you're seeing. So in terms of the homogeneity, I think it's interesting, especially now. I'm in my mid-30s, so I definitely remember a time before the internet, which not a lot of people necessarily do if they're in college right now. And it's an interesting kind of cultural divide for me because I remember when it wasn't as easy as it is now to communicate globally or to have globalization, the such a buzzword. And I do notice that we have so much more access to art and to culture from around the world than maybe we did before, you know? And so there's kind of a staggering amount of art available and different cultural productions available. And so you don't really know where to start. And I think that's something that arts criticism can do. There's a lot of people that I was brought to, either from music or for literature, that some ecstatic review written by somebody I'd never heard of before for some magazine in England somewhere that I'd never heard of, even the magazine before, opened me up to. And that is priceless. I think just as an example, Jeff Buckley, I'm pretty sure everybody here knows Jeff Buckley, and his great cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. That's what the most downloaded song of the past 20 years or whatever it is. And there's been so many covers of the song. And his is kind of the definitive one. I mean, there's a generation of people who are gonna grow up thinking that's the song from Shrek. And there's nothing wrong with that. But there's something intrinsically wrong with hearing it from Shrek. It's just that if you hear the song and you like it, I have literally had people ask me, oh yeah, isn't that a song somebody else wrote? Well, yes, that's by Leonard Cohen. Oh, who's Leonard Cohen? And then there's a whole tradition of music and of culture that becomes relevant to people all of a sudden. And then people start being interested in Jeff Buckley. Oh, well, what other songs did he do? Okay, well, he's interested in this. And one of the things I really treasure as a critic and as someone who loves art is the idea of someone loving a piece of art that's outside their immediate vicinity, okay? So for Jeff Buckley, I mean, he's definitely a songwriter. Kind of comes from the folk tradition. His father was a songwriter. But if he were here right now, he'd be talking about Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan till he was blue in the face. You know, Pakistani devotional music. Sufi music. And he would cover these songs in his concerts. So to me, it's an incredible thing to have somebody with that kind of popularity and pedigree be that open-minded and to be that sophisticated. And if criticism can open people's minds to be more open to that kind of experience aesthetically and culturally, then if there's any way to fight off the looming presence of the monoculture, it's gotta be that. So I just wanna finish with one thing. This is from a new book that I love. It's a series of essays called Culture Fever by this guy, Steven Ake. I haven't reviewed it for the Arts Fuse yet, but hopefully Bill will let me. So I'm gonna fill a buster for it right now. What's that? I'll give you the quote. Yeah, yeah, right. There's a lot hanging the balance on this. So this is the last paragraph. It's a bunch of essays about literature and art that this guy's writing. And this is the last paragraph of this introduction. He's talking about his experience as a reader and as a writer. So this is Steven Ake speaking. He says, personally, I was a bit miffed when I discovered in late adolescence that the world was more interesting than I was. All right. But that discovery has sustained me ever since. Although I know enough about boredom in a theoretical sense to appreciate its importance in, say, the work of Samuel Beckett, it's something I've rarely experienced. Partly that's because I find life too damn hard to be boring, but it's also because of my high-brow dispositions. Samuel Johnson said, he who is tired of London is tired of life. Whereas I say he who is tired of seeing Sajid Ray's Appu trilogy for the third time, or who won't wait in the rain outside the Frick Collection for the Rare Chance to See a Pierrot de la Francesca from Lisbon, that person may or may not be tired of life, but that person is definitely not me. Plenty of people think I'm pretentious. I don't mind. I know how to think. I know how to talk. And I'm not bored. So if there's any way to sum it up, it's that arts criticism should keep life a little less boring. You know, I'm Paul Dervis and I'm gonna do this kind of stream of consciousness, which critics warn I first was in Boston when I understood just what I meant. And I'd like to start off by saying that Bill Moritz is a little humble when he says he started in the 80s because he had me at his radio show in the 70s on a day in the death of Joe Weg. And he taught me something about Peter Criss in that first interview, the first time I met him. I had just done Joe Wharton's Roughing on the Stair and I had just opened up a day in the death of Joe Weg and Bill asked me on. And he said, it's gonna be a lot of fun. It's like the first time I'd been on radio we're both still having pimples on our faces and stuff. And he said, so just relax, have a good time. And I said, great. And we went on the air and Bill turned to me and said, so Paul Dervis, what is your obsession with the death of the American family? And it was an eye-opening experience, but it taught me a lot. It taught me a lot about how to open an idea which critics do. In the early 80s, I'm gonna talk a little bit about myself in this simply because I've both run theater companies for 40 years and been off and on a theater and film critics in 75. So I've been on both sides of the fence. In the early 80s, for example, when I opened up my theater to the Alley Theater in 1979, we had $400 in our pocket. We had another rent. And on opening night, we had Elliott Norton and Arthur Friedman coming to a show for a bunch of 23-year-olds who had never done this before. That would never happen today. That would never happen today. In 1979, you had a series of theaters that were opened up by kids that had just come out of college who, if they succeeded, great. And if they failed, so what? You know, they were 23 and they declared bankruptcy. No big deal. You had the real paper, the Phoenix, the Globe, the Herald, the Boston Ledger, the Cambridge Chronicle, all coming to your show. And you know what? That's what allowed a theater to succeed or fail. That's gone. When Bill talks about theaters or the papers doing features, he's being very kind when he says features because it was always considered puff pieces, right? You know, a puff piece would be written before a show opened so that the world knew that we were here, but the show was reviewed and succeeded based on the critics. And I swear that's the truth because all these small theaters, I'm sure still to some extent, have really no money for advertisements. So if you don't have the critics, you don't have publicity. And in the world of New England theater, specifically greater Boston theater in the late 70s, early 80s, I think, and I agree with Bill on this, it was a bit of a golden age, at least for like small experimental spaces. You know, when people were doing shows that you had never heard of before, working with player rights who had never really been exposed, and they were succeeding or failing in a lot of ways based on the fact that like Arthur Friedman may come in and say, and I love Arthur, I just love Arthur because I think that he was incredibly a servant but a remarkably funny man. And not only did he get audiences in, if he hated your show, it was just as good as if he loved your show because people wanted to see what that was about. And when you finish the first paragraph of his review, and Bill's too, for that matter, I've known Bill for what, 40-some-one years, and I love the man, and he has pained me many a time. But I love that because he's always brought me an audience. And I know that when I write, and I've been writing really since even before I was directing for magazines and newspapers, I know now, and Bill and Arthur taught me this, you come in, and even as a playwright, you come in and you grab an audience. And if you can do that in the first paragraph, you're halfway home. It doesn't really matter. Joe Loutman called the Transfiguration of Ben O'Bloomby the worst place you'd ever seen. And when Albert O'Rourke wants to write this, that's his choice, but when Paul Durbin's decides to direct it, it's time to call for censorship. And we went from like 10 people a night to a packed house, you know? I used to pick up Arthur and drive him to the show to make sure he would make it. But that's lost today. And I look at it as an example. The last show that I did, which is in Maine, the critic from the Bangor paper, got paid less to do review of my show than the Boston Ledger paid me to do Diary of a Madman in 1977. It's appalling, appalling. And don't kid yourself, papers and write reviews for theaters and even films that take out ads. That's what they're doing. And if you don't take an ad out, you're not going to get a review. People like, in my mind, and I work with Bill, I work for Bill, there's nothing I appreciate more than what Art Scuse is doing, because it's like a salmon swimming upstream. Bill tells me, don't go see this film. It's getting reviewed by everybody. Go see this film. Nobody's seen it. And something that's hugely important. He's absolutely right. Sometimes it frustrates me. But he's absolutely right. It's what needs to be covered. We've lost that. Now you look at a show going up, a play going up. And what you see is bloggers writing about it. And what they're really writing is what Bill was talking about, they're really writing features. They talk about themselves in the theater. They talk about their friends in the show. And it's like, I read a blog. It doesn't make me want to see a show one way or the other. I have no idea what that show is about. I read Bill's review. I read Arthur's review. Even Elliott Norton. I read his review. And I said, oh, I want to see the show, because they've told me right off the top, this is happening. This is something that's happening here. I don't feel that in a blog. Bloggers, I don't know how many of you blog. So I don't want to, I don't. No, I'm not. I don't want to. What? All I'm saying is, it's basically hanging a shingle and writing a review. But I look at it, and I think it's important for theaters to have bloggers, because if they don't, they don't have any publicity. On the other hand, if you're getting your audiences from Facebook, which so many theaters right now are doing, social media has become the way to grow your audience, the problem with that is when you do theater, I believe what you want is people who are walking in and not knowing you. It's not a vanity production. They may come, they may not to the next show. It's not the same 300 people that are coming, because then basically you're doing your living room. And if you're doing that, I don't see that you're an artist because you want to have a voice. You want people to hear your voice. And newspapers used to create that. And that's a lot of people. I'm not reading newspapers anymore. I know. Well, newspapers are dying. That's correct. You're right. Nobody's reading newspapers. How can I place a judgment on how people come in? I'm in the lobby. I know why people are coming to shows. I don't understand what do you mean? I'm not judging who's coming in. I'm saying I'm a playwright as well as a director. And I know this for a fact. I'd like people who don't know me to hear my work, to hear my voice. Now, I don't know if other writers feel that way. Well, I do because I work with almost nothing but original works. I work with playwrights out of New York and Toronto, Montreal. But I do know that the key to most writers' hearts is that they have something to say. And they want the world to hear it. And I do believe that 30 years ago, that was a possibility. I believe it's really hard to do that now. That's my feelings about that. I want bloggers to come to my shows. I do. I want to get depressed. But I so miss the critic coming in and having a critical eye on the piece. I learn something from a critic who knows who has a breath of knowledge of their field that they're talking about. I listen to a bill or an author or an alien Norton. And I feel like I learned something as a director. I learned something as a writer. I don't necessarily feel that if I'm reading something on Facebook. And I think that one of the comments that Bill made that I agree with is seven out of 10 pieces that you read about a show are positive. I don't believe that was the case in 1985. I believe that you are just as likely to see something that a critic said, this does not work. And this is why it doesn't work. And I'll tell you this, as in any other field, I think you learned so much more from hearing that. You don't learn a whole lot from man Sadie saying, you're wonderful. That's my feelings. And I'm expressing my feelings. Anyway, I would just like to finish off by saying that in my mind, Art Schemes is creating something that if it's not going to be the way of the future, then there will be in my mind the death of real criticism. So I really applaud what Bill's doing. And I love being part of it. Thanks. My name is Kitty Drexel. And I run the blog, The New England Theater Geek, where I am the queen geek. The American Theater Critics Association has been attempting to understand its disappearing workplace for several years now. In fact, the Columbia Journalism Review published an article by Jed Gottlieb in 2017 called Curtains Fall on Arts Critics at Newspapers. In it, Gottlieb says criticism is dying and points to two globe critics leaving the paper. We know this. He ends with a sweet sentiment about a critic's dedication to insightful storytelling. Newspapers, he says, should be telling these stories. He forgets that middle-aged and young arts readers don't read newspapers. They largely read alternative internet news sources where people of color, women, and the LGBTQ plus have an authentic voice. Choice is plentiful. Articles are cherry-picked and shared online. Readership isn't dying. It's going elsewhere. Arts criticism is dominated by old, white men. It's a stark contrast to the next generation of female people of color, the LGBTQ and other arts consumers. And they are definitely not taking the opinions of old, white men at face value anymore. The minority demand to hear the voices of people who look, live, and think like we do. If arts criticism wants to survive, it must evolve to include all of us. Evolution means hiring young people, hiring women, hiring people of color, hiring the LGBTQ plus identified, hiring non-binary or gender non-conforming individuals, hiring the disabled, hiring them purposefully, permanently, and as more than special interest writers. Then trusting their voices while legitimizing their work, doing all of this while showing minimal, minimal understanding of the labor necessary to create theater. And lastly, respectfully engaging with the theater-making community as a colleague and not an authoritative outsider. I am a relatively young, disabled, gay, female, activist, theater critic, and a bit of an anomaly. At the New England Theater Geek, I employ six geeks, two are geeks of color, four are female-identified, and one of us identifies as non-binary. For those keeping count, only one is a man. I am proud to say that we offer perspectives that other outlets do not, by virtue of our being different. I encourage my geeks to participate in the arts outside of criticism. Their work outside of criticism positively benefits their writing. I believe that as critics, they must engage on an equal level with our theater community. We are just as much apart as the theater, as our hard-working performers. To us, behaving as outsiders implies a bourgeoisie classism that has no place in the theater. I get emails every day requesting critiques. There is so much theater in New England that my geeks and I can't even get to a sliver of what's available. The opportunities are abundant, which begs the question, what's the real problem here? If the real problem is the lack of paying criticism jobs, then the criticism field either has to get comfortable earning as little as performing artists do, or it needs to become more fiscally inventive, just like it's ever fundraising theater colleagues. There is no money in the arts. And the arts are their own reward. If arts criticism does not catch up with the rest of the black, brown, Asian, gay, trans, female, non-binary, progressive, woke-as-fuck world, then we will be left behind. Jobs in our field are disappearing because our readership refuses to be told what to feel and think. If we won't keep up with our audience, then we deserve to become obsolete. It is time to evolve. Thank you. You would you want to speak or? I'm Tatiana Zaharova. I am retired from active earning money. So my love for the theater came back with the vengeance. So I directed it. And now I am trying to make it in Boston. So I did direct few things, and I want to produce. And I am here. I will admit that it is not for the love for criticism. It is for the love of theater. I love it. I think it is critical for theater to survive. And I think that the criticism is dying because the audiences are vanishing. I see it again. I'm sorry. I'm not as eloquent. I'm dumb foreigner. So please forgive me. But I go to the theater again and again. And I see the average age of audience is 70 years old, where our younger generation does not find theater thing to do. And I'm with you, Paul. As an artist, as a director, I would love a critic coming in. Just bash everything that will tell me. Tell me what I'm doing. Yes, I crave it. However, as much as you dismiss this, what is this, features, features, I want to point one absolutely fundamental, critical difference between other forms of art in theater. There is no other like theater. Please don't compare it with movies. To be passionate about any form of art, we have to experience it. We have to see it. We have to hear it. Then we will get passionate. If we never saw it, how do Bertolt Brecht become? And you can hear because thousands of people saw it. Saw it. They saw the place. That's what is given. Theater is unique. It is maybe you can compare it only with that Japanese superb art of exquisite drawing on a beach. The tide comes in and their heart is gone. Theater is not, it's perishable. It happens only once. And if those guides do not come in to see it, they will be interested in criticism if they didn't see it. They can see Black Panther before or after. And Matt, you're right. There is so much art. But you can't preserve theater. Because on the page, it feels like shit. I'm sorry. That's what it is. And a few shows that I made, I know there is a very, very good value. And I understand real critic would come in and they will certainly find Tickazoo in reasons why it's not good because if it was done on a budget of $27. And yet, I get a few teenagers in a show. And their jaws are dumb. It was so great. But if they wouldn't come, they would never go and read how the Buskerville, which they, again, there is a predicament. How do we get the audience in to experience the theater? And perhaps my solution would be to do the feature and ended up for a deeper discussion. Please follow this link. And those who went and saw it, maybe they will be interested to come in. Does it ever bother you that nobody would give a paying for parking $25? And they want to pay $12 for the theater? See, it's the whole culture. We haven't changed it. So thank you. So now, go ahead. How may I? I'm shy, though. I know you're shy. My name's Tim Jackson. I write for the Arts Fuse film for the Arts Fuse. I wasn't going to speak today because I'm exhausted. I went to a screening yesterday. And then I shot film yesterday afternoon. And then the Boston Film Critics Society Awards last night, Agnes Varda this afternoon and fundraising this morning. So I didn't want to do this, but listening to all these wonderful comments. So all I know is the arts. I started as an actor. And then I had a music career for 20 years. And then I started making films. And when I started writing, Bill has sort of changed my life and allowed me to write for the Arts Fuse. And been a mentor along with Jared Perry, I would say. But I've also taught for 20 years. And I think, for me, in a lot of ways, where it starts to develop a culture is going to be with schools. And I just haven't talked about that. But I don't know why schools are eliminating the arts. That's appalling. So when I talk to my students, I just tell. I went to see Zoo Story and Home Life. Edward Albee in New York a week before last. And I came back to my class. And I just told them the plot. I told them what it was about. And they go, a guy kills another guy on a bench. That was sort of the plot. But then I told them what was going on. This is about the creation of art. And their jaws just dropped. They couldn't believe this. Where can we see stuff like that? This week I saw Orlando. So I'll probably describe to them the gender shifting in Orlando. They're really fascinated. And the same if I tell the plot of a really good film, like a foreign film which they don't go see. I'm amazed at the reaction. There's a hunger out there in schools for this. And I'm really, really surprised that they're cutting that back. And when I tell my classes overall, or young people in general, even my kids, I used to, I'd come out of a movie with my kids. And they'd say, what'd you think, Dad? And I'd go, well, and they go, never mind. So that was practice to sort of get started. Describing something, getting something to enter into the work of art. But I tell them if they don't participate in the arts, if all they do is examine the exterior commercial culture, things that are sold to them, they don't know the difference between art and commercial culture. They absolutely don't know. Everything is exterior, video games are exterior. They're already pre-programmed, whether or not you think you're fighting, that's been programmed by somebody. They go to see these blockbusters because they're advertised, because everybody else is seeing them. So somehow you have to get under that commercial culture to make a generation understand what art is. And what it can do for them and how it's about self-examining. And that it's uncertain and it's ambiguous and that that's fun and that's interesting. And that can be done in the schools. It can probably be done with art criticism too. And maybe be done by bringing art critics into schools. And more, boy, these students really want to go to the theater. And when I bring them to the theater, no matter what it is, they're absolutely fascinated. Oh, I didn't know things could be like that. I did a documentary on the American Repertory Theater years ago, it was the first documentary I made. And so I got to bring students to a lot of those performances when Robert Woodruff was doing some really strange work. And they were absolutely fascinated and didn't know things like that were done at all. I tell them that I wish, would you rather go to church? I'm not a religious person, but would you rather go to church or on a roller coaster? Because all you're ever doing is going on the roller coaster. You're never going and examining yourself at all in these works of art. I can't wait until, I'm not really a sports person, but I can't wait until in a bar somebody is fighting over art and not sports or politics. And then they ask, what does that mean? And then I try to explain that to them. So I think that we need to build that culture. And it also starts with prices, including in the schools and families. Because I'm amazed, I live in Somerville, a lot of the families around me, they don't participate in the arts either, so the kids aren't going to do it. And I just think that's a real shame. So, I think that's my, please. So now I'd like to do the call to action. I'd like to see if we can come up with some ideas, these things that, I might have some meetings after this one, which I'd be happy to carry on, but I'd like to talk about things that you think we could do. I mean, I made a couple of suggestions. A while back in a column, for example, I would love out of this to begin some working groups to do a protest. I would like to have artists and critics protesting in front of the Boston Office of the Boston Globe, in front of WBUR and WGBH, in the name of arts criticism. We want arts critics, right? And that we could perhaps try to organize something like that. That was an idea of some sort of, that would be sort of splashy and public and sort of properly activist. We could talk about another, a few ideas out, but then I'd like to hear others and I really wanna hear whatever ideas you have. Other ideas we could perhaps send out collective letters to various editors, to various foundations, talking about how money's being spent and whether perhaps we could see more arts critics being brought in, more theater critics, or critical writing, right? And try to make some sort of a splash that way. I myself am, I'm really interested in trying to link together all the small arts magazines. I think that what we need to do, I mean, one thing that would be great to do would be, I'm sorry, the movie on the Theater Geek is gone, but I would love to work with her, with Big Red and Shiny, with Wonderland. I think that we can let WBUR, WGBH and the Boston Globe fight to the death for the eyeballs of arts readers so that they never link to one another and they never refer to one another and they'll do the same big event. You have the same thing done at the two big stations, let's say, in the Globe. Why not have a network made up of the arts views, made up of Big Red and Shiny, made up of all the small arts organizations we can share resources. I'm more than happy to share readership and emails that we send out at the arts views, in other words, our group, so that we can in a sense become stronger by bonding together and link to one another and link to each other's reviews and not be afraid of referring each other to the other's work because we want to encourage more interest in the arts, more dialogue among critics and artists and hopefully generating a larger audience. So I mean, those are some of my ideas and of course the idea ultimately is that people should speak out that as arts criticism is fading and if it's found online, demand that it be found online, that we see more of it and that rather than just seeing more and more of what I'm calling features. But I've got it here, so there's a mic here so go up to the mic and whatever ideas you've got. I'm ready for the protest so anybody who wants to hold a placard with me, I'm ready. I do love a protest bill, but from my own point of view, I would love to see a very long list of names assigned to a letter that would begin this because I think it's really important to come together as critics and artists and perhaps very strong audience members and board members to write a letter to the globe and to others and I love your ideas about connecting with the smaller publications, but I just would love to see a step one even if the protest happened one week later. I have to go home and take care of my daughter with broker language. But I just wanted to say that I am there ready to sign. Thank you very much for tonight. Okay, you're welcome. And I mean, a letter would be great. I would say that one thing that instituted part of what I did tonight is that David Miller was one of, he did one of the productions that was sort of ignored the weekend that Donald Coyne became ill, right? He's fine now, everything is fine. There's still a theater critic kicking around, but apparently was ill that weekend and he wrote a letter and had his board members write letters to the Boston Globe, ask saying what's going on here. I mean, basically you couldn't assign another critic to come and do that production on that weekend. I mean, we understand that Don is ill, but couldn't you get someone else? And they received no answer, right? They received no response. So I'm more than willing and I would be happy to do a letter. It's just that sometimes, you know, I'm afraid of what we're dealing with are people who are indifferent or not interested or don't, you know, they want to see themselves. They say they're part of a community and they say they're encouraging community, but even the simplest response to simply say yes, we hear you, you know, I'll give them that and they didn't even really do that. I agree. I wrote to Lyndon Bitsuti, Henry. I did not receive a response. I think a letter from many more people might receive a response and if it doesn't, next step. All right. Thank you. Liking it. Yes. Yeah, do you mind or is there a problem? People just identify who they are. Could you identify? I'm sorry, that was just Charlotte Mann of Sleeping Weasel. Thank you, Janet. You're very welcome. Thank you. My name's Janet Bailey. I think that we might be being just a little bit naive about the possible power of a protest. I think at the end of the day, the Boston Globe and GBH and VUR are in the business of providing content that is gonna be appealing and interesting to the largest number of readers until we can go to them and say, there are lots and lots of readers who want this, then it's not their job to publish theater criticism if they perceive that nobody cares. So for us to have a bunch of theater people show up and say, hey, you know, gee, you have to cover our stuff. I think we just looked naive. I don't know how we make that case, but until we get to the point where we can make that case, I can't see it making any difference. They gotta do their job and their job is not. I mean, I always say good protest and we could generate some bad publicity and generate some pressure on the top because there are a lot of the editors who are involved in it, they're in a bad fix off the record. They'll say, we're not necessarily happy with the way things are going. Oh, they're in a mess. I mean, they don't have any choice. So my idea would be perhaps to put a little pressure up on the top to do that. But also, I mean, or even just some pressure to say, why do we not have, unless someone can locate it, I was Matt and I were looking for it. We can't find any podcasts, you know, that are just dedicated to local theater and local arts. And a podcast would not be all that super, you know, to mean, you know, work or resource intensive to do, but they're not doing it. Okay, there's something is coming. Okay, I didn't, finally, that's good. It's taken some years here, but I'm glad they're waking up. All I'm saying is that until we can show them that there's something in it for them, I just don't think we're gonna get anywhere because they're in the business of making money and most of them are in a world of hurt right now in terms of their financial position. So to expect them to do something because we think it would be great, I think we're just gonna be spinning our wheels. Other ideas, yes. I'll pick up. Please, please use the microphone. Identify yourself and use the mic. Well, this is a great idea. Hi, I'm Mark Hanser. I'm one of the writers for the ARX Fuse. I write about music and theater. And I wanted to follow up in a way with something you said because for years I was a teacher and I'm a certified as an arts teacher. Can be in Massachusetts and in visual arts and in performing arts. And one of the things is that as a newspaper, schools, they cut the arts because everything is all about, thank you, thank you. I had a brief mental block. It's all common core. And how does that, how do the arts fit into that? Well, they don't. And so we're dealing with the culture of common core and we're dealing with a culture that doesn't care about the arts. And one of the things that I think we need to do as artists and as critics is to not just write letters, but appeal to the voices of the city. There's claims to be the Athens of America and all this historical shit that the great beacon, the great city on the hill, okay, we'll prove it. This is where so many things began. This is a city that as a rivalry with New York for decades that would have the greatest library, the greatest, the greatest museum and all that. And I think really insisting, if we have to use bullhorns, nothing is seen, but I'm a performance artist too. So it's like, use a bullhorn. Tell people right about it, like where is our arts coverage? Where do you list these things? Where are the reviewers? And it's the same thing you said about kids learning about theater. And I've shown kids things. I've taken kids to museums and their minds are blown as I currently learning about this stuff. Because as you say, you know, video games, things like that, they're prepackaged content. They're consuming, you know. I'm not denying that it's an art form, but it's a consumable art form. It's not something that's really applicable to learning and to thinking and to developing a sense of one's own aesthetic. And so I think, I'm just sort of like building on the previous youth commenters and speaking also as a teacher, that we have to appeal to these institutions for civic responsibility that, you know, this is Boston, you know, we're not Podum, we're not Oklahoma City, sorry, if you're doing better. And we are a great city and we are a receptacle of the arts. And it's the responsibility of WBUR at the Globe and the Herald, the Herald was struggling, but. The Herald's just been sold. They're barely surviving. I think we need to educate ourselves about our media when we're talking about them. Oh, no, no, you're right, you're right. I realize that, because I've worked in these papers and I know what Bella said about the decline of mainstream media and how it's holding on to people via social media. And, but we've got to find our targets. I don't mean that in a threatening way, but our targets to talk to, to explicate our case to. And with that, I'll. I'm interested in what Catherine has to say because you've brought a couple of things up, and are you willing to. Yeah, I think she's done it. The composition is very old, white, and leadest from what I've heard tonight. And it's really scary. And I think we're talking to ourselves. And I think there, I love the idea, Bill, of the different websites coming together and working together. And we'd be happy to help anything with that at Art Spots, and it's a fabulous idea. That's really, really, really smart. I think that taking potshots at other people, whether it's blogs, et cetera, is not the way to go. I think we need to look at the bright spots for what's happening. The fact that a million dollars has been invested in the arts coverage at WBUR, whether you like it or not, is significant. And hiring a dedicated reporter who's doing some really great work with Maria Garcia is fantastic. I think that's really important. And I think she is covering stories that quite frankly I haven't heard mentioned in this room today. So, no, it's not what it was back in the 80s, but we have a different generation that is looking for a different way of communicating and being inspired to participate. So I think that if we can look at the bright spots, if we can look at what we can do together to produce our own content and take responsibility for pushing it out ourselves, that's the way we're going. And I think that the kind of passion that I've heard tonight from anyone who's spoken very eloquently is so needed and is wonderful. So if we can take that passion, but really look ahead at how people are getting their information, I think that's the way to go. I'm the same. Very interesting observation. Local newspapers, and this is probably where you power your reputation can make a difference. They will report whole page about whatever bad new town match, whatever filled, whatever event, and the show, the theater, every school has one, will have nothing. And yet, the audience would be full at that show. So this audience is their readership, whom these newspapers completely... But they're not their readership anymore and people are getting that information in different ways, not through traditional newspapers anymore. So you're saying that people whose kids are playing whatever sports they're doing would read the newspaper and those who come to read to see the shows wouldn't. I don't understand what your question is. Why the people who are reading these newspapers, the local newspapers, about the local school, whatever, Quincy, whatever's local school and their local newspaper, they do cover all the sports, never cover the school event as play. And these plays are never ignored. They collect the full audience. So somebody is interested. Yeah, I don't know. I don't really know if I have anything, but what? Oh, my name's Daniel. And I started out to call Practice Stage. And I don't really know exactly what I wanna say, but I mean, I will say this. I used to do a show and I got like the big whales there. Right, I got Donna Cohen there. I got Joyce Claw-Haywick there. And she did a tweet. And that was great for us. And Donna Cohen was like the nice student in the world. I didn't know him before I met him the other day. You know, I had kind of an aggressive sort of, you know, shtick to my theater company or whatever, but I've been able to get people there with the press. I love Archfuse, but I'm gonna ask this question, like this figure of seven out of 10 being bad, are we better off as an artist? I wanna, being good, being good, sorry. Are we, as an artist, as somebody who's putting his checking account to mount productions, I love reading the Archfuse. I think you're a terribly smart guy and all the other critics are terribly smart, but I don't necessarily think three good ones to every 10 ones is doing me much good. You know, and I think that, you know what I'm saying? So I think that if I love reading criticism, you know, even of the stuff that I disagree with, I similarly grew up sort of through exposure to the arts and reading the papers that you referenced, you know, when I was a kid and all the great movie houses around town and the theater that I could see. I know I'm not really making the point, I'm sort of rambling, but I leave that question to you. Like, sometimes it seems like I read reviews where people are so eager to talk about the show that they wanna see, that they're not talking about the show that they've seen before them or talk about their understanding of the show and the history, and I love dramaturgy. I mean, I'm not the rube, although Archfuse did accuse one production of mine as being anti-intellectual, which is okay. I can swim with that, but I'm just putting a few ideas out there because I value it all. You know, I really honestly do, but I also will tell you that, you know, Donna Cohen put money in, you know, made my show a profit, you know, just this past week, you know, so I knew I wasn't really gonna make it. I mean, I'm embarrassed now, I'm gonna sit back down. My point has always been I wanted a variety of voices. I have no problem. Oh, I'm down for a protest. I'm sorry. Well, that's good. I'm glad to hear about the protests, but now the idea is I wanted a variety of voices and there's no problem, you know what I mean? When we have a number of critics who are all writing and writing well or thoughtfully about shows, whether it's positive or negative, that is sort of what I'm looking for. What I'm seeing is sort of the dearth of that. I mean, I'm all for bright spots and I'll go with bright spots, but the point is it's a bad thing. Is it dearth of it? Yeah, for sure. For instance, we haven't mentioned this kid at the dig. The dig just went from features, preview features to writing reviews. And I think he's got a limited amount of space he can work with or something, but he is trying to do criticism. I would say he's trying to do criticism. I forget his name right now. I can't think his name, but God right. The dig just switched over to doing more reviews and doing just, you know. That is good. Yeah, I think that's great. I'm absolutely in favor of it. Yeah, so I think Katie's point was one that I would say that there is this sort of disconnection between the labor that goes on and putting on a show and then having people come in and say, you're gonna forgive me, my friend. I think you're gonna be tremendously smart, but I had a reviewer talk about how I should have mounted a show through exploring the, I missed the boat because I didn't explore the inner politics of the Italian left during the 1970s and now I went on to refract throughout European politics to this point forward, but I was doing a show that was written in Italy in the 70s and like looking at some of that, but I wanted to do it a certain way. So when we come with so much knowledge, beautiful knowledge, you know, I'm the dumbest guy in this room, but when you come with that kind of knowledge, that's great, but you have to see the show that the artists and people have sweated to put on. I know I'm sorry about the rule. I'm just talking, I'm just trying to figure out how I, I'm just a little nitpicky here, but I'm just saying, my main thing is try to encounter, okay, I'm sorry, but you can't have a show that you're looking at, right? Be at the show you're looking at. You can tell me that you're familiar with the play and you know that the ending of the play is different than the original and I don't know why that theater company changed the ending. You can tell me that I should have dealt with the Italian left of the 70s and now fractured to impact European politics to this day. That's great, but don't say it's anti-intellectual to ignore that. I mean, I'm getting a little personal here, so I don't mean anything to do that. I'm just saying, I don't, I'm just kind of like, that's a good point. I'm kind of like massaging those words. I knew it was perfect. Any other, support, arts, criticism, I agree that platforms are changing. Times are changing. Information is changing. I'm with you. That's why the Art Fuse was always online and will remain online. The question is, are we going, what are we going to take in terms of, let's say, the form of criticism, the craft of criticism, is that going to remain in as we move into this new form or not? I mean, to me, that's the question. Maybe it won't. I mean, maybe we will have things that will not be about what we traditionally talked about as being evaluation and discrimination, which were practiced by just about everybody in the past. Will that craft continue or will it be slowly phased out in what we will have? We will have different kinds of information. We'll be learning about the arts, but it will not have any critical, we'll not have any discriminative, any evaluative element to it. That will be sort of cleansed out of it because that will no longer be what, I guess, what people want or that will no longer be how we want to understand how the arts enrich us. Do I have someone else coming up or not? I would like to go up. I don't know if anybody else wants to. Yeah. No, I've already spoken. You know, go ahead, you haven't spoken, so. Say who you are. And. I'm Sue Staples, and I'm a playwright and I wanted to talk about it from kind of a, I want, if you don't mind if I'd like to talk about it as kind of from a couple of different perspectives, but first as a playwright, when you talk, because I would like to talk about the craft of criticism, because I know I benefit because I really do think that criticism is a craft. There are a lot of people that can write and there are a lot of people and a lot of people think because you are a good writer and because I've worked with a lot of great playwrights as teachers. So you think, well gee, if they're very good at writing, then they're gonna be really great at critiquing your work. For any of you that are playwrights, you know that isn't necessarily true. So critiquing, you can be a good writer, but there are also then people that go that step further and are really good at critiquing your writing. And I know that I personally benefit from the very few people who are also a good playwright but also are good at critiquing. You can get right to the point and can take a look at your work and then you also kind of have to think backwards and can look at your work and very concisely say, this is what's good, this is what's working, and here's why. Here's what's not working and here's why. And I think that also works when you're critiquing art forms. Does that make sense? And that's why when you're talking about is this something moving forward that we're just gonna let leave our culture because that is and let's not kid ourselves when art's criticism is leaving newspapers in whatever and I think the one thing I would love to just get rid of from this debate because I think we're kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. To me, and maybe it's just because I was of my age, I don't care what format it comes in. I don't think we need to argue anymore whether it comes in a newspaper or it comes to us electronically. I read the newspaper electronically. My parents read the newspaper in paper format. Maybe to some people that matters. I think we need that debate to just be kind of done. Is there anybody here who cares anymore? I maybe know one person. Okay, there's one person in this room who still cares. I'm sorry. So I think we need to move beyond format. I think everybody here in this room can agree on format. But I think those are the kinds of things that we need to be fighting for when we talk about criticism. That it truly to me is an art form. And that's what I think is worth fighting for. So and I will just share one other comment because I know we're getting a little bit late in time. Another part of my life is that I have a master's degree in early childhood education. I was very fortunate to teach a group of college students about creativity and early childhood education. And one of the things that we talked about is what does art mean? And it's very basic because we're talking about art with infants, arts with kids that brand new know conception about what art is. And the best definition we came up with was a unique creation that has value for others in society. How do you find out what has value for others in society? And for me, that really is where art's criticism still has a place. So that when we're talking about bloggers, yes, that matters. It's matters that other people share opinions, that we all go out and we see a movie or we see a great work of art. We all talk about it. Great. But how I think we as a culture move forward is that we have people who can clearly and concisely, people who have studied it can give us back clear, concise understanding. Can hold a mirror up to us and say yes. This really matters and hears why in ways that we as lay people may not be able to understand. And for me, that's the value of art's criticism. That's what it is. Thank you very much. Thank you for the value of art through evaluation and discrimination. Yes, Matt, you wanna? Yeah, did anybody else wanna go? Does somebody else wanna go though? We have, yeah. Let him go. Economically, and okay. It's a response of my rather than actually respond. I will let everyone may read the review I wrote of Praxis Theater's production of Dario Foe's practice stage of Dario Foe's accidental death of an anarchist. You can read it. So, I do not disrespect your company. I know, I'm trying to. We just have a disagreement over, oh, I'm drawing a turgid. But first of all, I, Bill recruited me many years back as a contributor to the arts views really as a practicing artist. I've been a mime and comedi d'arte performer and puppeteer and playwright and poet. So, I always thought it was very important that criticism is part of the job of being an artist. Not necessarily in writing a critique, but just that thoughtfulness about the craft that you were engaged in. I've always thought that. And it was always strange to me when I started getting more and more involved in the theater blogosphere 10, 12 years ago that there were so many playwrights out there who say, oh no, it's a taboo. We're not supposed to write criticism, okay? And it was very strange for me because novelists write criticism of prose novels. Historians write criticism of history books. So I never understood that. I think almost any music critic I can think of has at least somewhat of, you know, if they're not a collector, they might be musicians. And Eleister Banks, by the way, has a couple of really good rock albums, his name, since he's a name who came up. But I always thought it was part of the job. This, by the way, is going to be, I still have a review that I own, but this is, it's going to be my last review as a theater reviewer in Boston because I am about to, in 48 hours, I'm going to be on a train ride to Washington, D.C., where I'm moving to. It's returning to my hometown. So, bye-bye to some of my friends in the audience. I will hope to see you guys again at some point in the indefinite future. But, you know, we do have a problem here in Boston and that is our culture, our culture about culture. We'd like to call ourselves the Athens of America and I'm going to have to say it's bullshit, honestly. Yes, we had these fine universities, but they horned all of their cultural facilities. I'd like to acknowledge Everson College, which is kindly recording this on behalf of you. But they don't, I'm going to tell you, there's a hoarding, there is a hoarding. I grew up in Washington, D.C., okay? I had the best complex of museums available thanks to U.S. tax dollars, obviously, so it wasn't free, per se, but the point is anyone could go. Anyone, so I was being taken to art museums at a very young age, and I got to see all these things before I even could cognate what I was looking at, okay? That is not yet, there's so many barriers to access to just culture in this city that amazed me when I moved here. Museums, free public events, how few of those are there. The difficulty that any sort of community-based arts organization, I have been involved with so many over the last 20 years or more in the Boston area, and how much difficulty they have staying open, staying, maintaining a stable location event, because the city and the institutions that have sway over whether it's Boston city government or Cambridge city government, or wherever, have pushed artists and communities out. Fort Point used to have so many more artists than it has now, and they've been forced out through development, there were so many little black box theaters in that neighborhood, and in weird places, you would never expect to see a black box theater, and you had no idea, but they were there, and I know some of you actually worked in some of them, because I may have met you in the context of some of them, and that is the situation, and there has been a hoarding. Okay, we have to sort of move along here because I only have the space for so long, and I'm sorry about that, but okay. So some of you've seen, I've been taking notes, right? I didn't work as an adjunct for nothing, right? And it really sounds like, besides the general statements that were being made about the arts ecology in Boston, which is a huge discussion, but was not the discussion here, I think that there were really two main things that were coming out, and one was this notion that Bill proposed, which was the aggregation of some of the small publications, the arts fuse being kind of perhaps the cornerstone of that, but also the Big Red and Shiny, and other things that exist only in digital media, that one of the problems that we've all been describing is a lack of the variety of voices, and that you don't necessarily have to merge everything into some mega publication, or a million dollar budget to aggregate the information from different streams, and I heard our Boston say it might be willing to help do that, there are probably other organizations and platforms that might be willing to help do that, that doesn't make the problem of the fact that all of us are contributing things to this content stream for free, or almost free, go away, we still got a really big problem with that, but that's kind of one piece, and then the other thing as a kind of general category is what does it mean to enroll both readers and professionals in this bigger discussion about how arts criticism contributes to the health of the local arts ecology, and I think we're at the very beginning of that, and that there certainly is a sense in which the people in this room, because you're committed to it, are the professional side of that, whether you work as a professional critic or you represent some other part of the arts ecology, you're already in this, you're not people who are merely, and I absolutely do air quotes on that, merely readers and audiences, and we need to start sharing the information about that, and one of the things that I came up with just kind of soon here, is that if you have, let's say five friends on Facebook or in real life, where you have a review of something, either one that you've written or one that you liked, one that you thought was really interesting, whether it's about something you saw together or something you know your friend is interested in, it really would be helpful to all of us who toil in this vineyard to send it to your friend and say, you know, criticism matters. This is a really interesting article. This brought up this issue for me or this reflects something that you said as we left the theater or this turned me on to a new album or something, but that to start making the arts criticism that we know is so endangered, stop having it be in the background and start shining a bit of a light on the fact that it does what it does and that there may be some other things that Bill and the Arts Fuse Organization may wanna do about campaigns and we'll take a picture of that and start thinking about it, but every single person in this room can start pointing out when criticism matters and is done well and I think that that will help all of us make the case to a bigger group of constituents over the next period of time. I think that's really good. I just wanna add one thing in that besides sharing a good review, sharing something that open, that illuminated something for you and telling other people about it, comment on reviews. I mean one of the ongoing frustrations of the arts use and I assume of a lot of the other smaller magazines is that you will post a review and you get no comments. Do people agree? Do people disagree? Engage with the critic. If you went to see the show and you disagreed with it or you liked something, engage because my feeling about reviews online is that essentially it's no longer going to be simply the review is the review. The review will hopefully spark a conversation, a dialogue so that when you have a list of comments down below, my feeling was always that was the review. The review would be not only what the critics said but all the ideas, feelings, passions that were engendered by the people who respond to the review and then the critic can become part of that conversation. You might have other critics coming in or an expert coming in. All that together I think will create perhaps the review of the future. It will be a collective review. It will be a series of voices sparked by a critical judgment which may or may not be agreed with and then that would then spark other people to become part of it and then that would grow and grow and grow. But it seems to me that people who care about the arts or who are reading arts magazines and that includes I sometimes see the comments in the Times and Globe and whatever seem incredibly passive. Become part of the conversation. Everyone, you see a million comments over news stories. News commentary, Trump yes, Trump no. But then you'll see a review and there'll be a handful of comments. Why shouldn't there be more? Why should the audience want to become part of that and engage with the critic and respond? And I think that also would help generate a sense that criticism matters. It would also I think help generate an audience because it would help generate why we think the arts are valued. So I think that is it. Thank you so much for such a lively conversation. So many good ideas. I'm still maybe going through the protests. So those of you who want to hold a placard.