Commentary: Critics are needed now more than ever as our country grapples with small ideas, diminished vision, polar thinking and insularism.
Members of New York City Ballet in a performance of George Balanchine's"Concerto Barocco" on Sept. 21, 2018, at the David H. Koch Theater in New York.The theater, music, movie, fashion, book, dance and architectural critics who once populated the nation’s media have been systematically eliminated at our beleaguered newspapers. As print circulation and advertising have declined, journalism’s new business model has prized clicks over culture.
It was from a dance critic’s essays that I found my calling as an arts editor. I started reading The New Yorker as a pretentious college student desperate to be an intellectual. Arlene Croce taught me more about dance than I learned even at the Edythe B. Rayspis Professional School of the Dance in Berwyn. With her dazzling descriptive and acerbic essays, Croce introduced an art world of beauty, inspiration and insider intelligentsia.
Of Balanchine, who choreographed more than 400 works, Kaufman wrote in 2009: “In his wake, ballet’s range of expression has narrowed, not expanded. Gone, in new work, is theater, spectacle, satire, flesh-and-blood characters, the ache of real life, the escape offered by a sharp, piercing little story. Now more than ever, American ballet, artistically speaking, is a homogeneous entity. We are a thoroughly Balanchine nation.
A sanguine Kaufman is moving forward teaching arts criticism at Harvard Extension School, as well as working on a book about writing. She, like many critics before her, is discovering there is great satisfaction to be found outside the rigid confines of a newsroom.
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