Critical corruption in two keys (Part I)

The temptations of Anton Ego . . .

A few eyebrows around town rose (slightly) in reaction to a recent whine from Bill Marx on his website The Arts Fuse.  In an April 22 post titled "Why is Boston's Arts Coverage So Bland?" the self-professed persona non grata opined that:

Too much local arts coverage is dedicated to reporting—pleasantly and unquestioningly—that the exhibits in the [cultural] window have been rotated and that the latest products on display are (always) the finest.

Marx went on:

You will rummage long and hard on WGBH and WBUR (broadcast or online) to find a critical word amid the depressing line-up of puffy interviews, rewritten publicity releases, and earnest proclamations of “stunning seasons.”

In contrast, Marx announced, his Arts Fuse 'scribes' were "passionately encouraged to be wrong-headed, hysterical, opinionated, stubborn, ecstatic, and pretentious, but never, ever uncompromisingly insipid."

But of course this is Bill Marx talking, so the call to arms inevitably modulated into panhandling:

For those who believe that arts and culture deserves trustworthy and thoughtful criticism and reporting, there is an alternative—The Arts Fuse. Please contribute to our first-ever advertising campaign, via the tops of Boston cabs, to support our mission by getting the word out about our reviews and coverage.

Okay, now maybe that's a fair sales pitch.  You give me your money, I'll give you "trustworthy and thoughtful criticism."  Or, in a nutshell - "I'm Bill, trust me."

But (surprise, surprise), if you actually check out the theatre reviews in the Arts Fuse, you find they're stuffed to the gills with pull quotes like: "Searing . . . rich and layered . . . shocking relevance . . . small missteps but delightful . . . absolutely worthwhile seeing."  In short, the usual middlebrow marketing lubricants; indeed, if you charted the most recent Arts Fuse reviews on a graph (I won't bore you with another Excel spreadsheet), you'd find mostly raves or near-raves, with even the most critical review doing a 180 at the last minute to announce that the play in question is "absolutely worthwhile seeing" - despite, apparently, an earlier laundry list of caveats.  (The music pieces are even more monotonous; of the five most recent reviews, all were raves.)

So I'm not sure what kind of snake oil Marx thinks he's selling. I don't disagree with his critique of the likes of the Globe or WGBH and WBUR - they are indeed too full of puffery and PR (WGBH in particular). The part I don't get is how he imagines he's any better than they are.  It's true that he personally has always been a bit brighter than the average bear at the Globe or Phoenix. And as my friend and fellow blogger Art Hennessey sometimes reminds me, we both do check out a review on the Arts Fuse if it's by Marx himself; he always provides an emotionally pinched but intellectually informed take on the piece in question.

Well, I should say literarily informed. Marx has always been an insightful book reviewer, and he's obviously very well-read; the idea that this qualifies him to opine on the performing arts is a kind of quaint prejudice that he has never really outgrown simply because it would be inconvenient to do so. Beyond that, there's the problem that he's hardly original (in six years I've sketched out more fresh ideas than he has in thirty), and reliably throws softballs to Harvard, and has little to offer beyond boilerplate about "critical standards" and "thoughtfulness." But he does have something of a voice, and he obviously is desperate to be confused with Edmund Wilson - and this ambition gets him somewhere on the page.  

The problem is that Marx rarely writes for his own site. Instead, he publishes people who happily write for the likes of the Globe, WGBH and WBUR (those dens of PR and puffery!) whenever they get a chance, and whose Fuse work is only marginally subtler than their output elsewhere. Marx does pick up the occasional worthy piece by blogger (and, full disclosure, friend of the Hub Review) Ian Thal, but generally when he showcases an untried talent, it's soon embarrassingly apparent that the writer is a critical naïf, and groping for credibility, much less a plausible perspective.

And whatever you want to say about the Globe these days, it has reached a high plateau in terms of pure style - it's probably better written now than it has ever been (or at least better than it has been for the past thirty years - when Marx himself appeared in its pages). People like Sebastian Smee write so superbly, in fact, that it hardly seems to matter that they have nothing to say - they say so very little so very, very well, you hardly care!  Meanwhile Marx has yet to discover even a single new stylist, and seems unable to develop one.

So editing is hard, and grooming a critical voice even harder.  Which may be why Marx seems to be trying to fool potential donors with a variant of the old bait-and-switch; he's basically branding his site with his own reputation, when it's actually stuffed with weaker writers, and their weaker writing. In effect, he promises that if you donate to the Arts Fuse, you'll get Bill Marx - but instead you get Terry Byrne.

Perhaps even more damaging to his case, however, are rumors on the theatrical Rialto that murmur Marx is in effect "selling" reviews to arts organizations. Marx even obliquely nods to these whispers when he claims that he is "not beholden to the advertising dollars that come in from arts organizations."

Okay.  I'm not sure what that means (or even could mean).  But I've heard now from three separate sources that Marx has made explicit quid-pro-quo offers to local presenters along the lines of "If you give me a donation, I'll give you a review." So in effect, it's pay-to-play over at the Arts Fuse (although I doubt Marx has ever stated the rules of the game quite that baldly). I won't argue that Marx has explicitly promised a positive notice for cash; but does he have to?  These sorts of arrangements, like the one that Scott Heller at the Times effected to promote Frank Rich Jr. (which Marx himself poked fun at recently) are always accomplished as unspoken understandings.  Trust me, journalists are expert at hanging questionable dealings on slender ethical threads; and as long as no one says anything, the whole crap game stays confidently afloat.

Thus even sans explicit instructions, Marx's writers are pumping out the puffery, as noted above; so any of the presenters whom Marx approached could look over his site and realize,"If I give the Arts Fuse a  donation, there's a four-out-of-five chance I'll get a rave."

And those are pretty good odds. So by the standards of this fallen world, there's no reason for Marx's money machine not to hum along quite comfortably. Given his endless (and I mean endless) jibes at the mercenary instincts of producers, these moves make him the height of hypocrisy. But like most operational hypocrisies, his system has a built-in deniability that makes it workable.

The more salient question is - why should you contribute to his scheme? I understand why arts organizations would, of course.  But why should readers pony up their hard-earned cash for an uneven, second-rate imitation of what they can get elsewhere (often still for free)? It's obvious why Marx is making a big push right now - with the Phoenix having just folded, there may be a window online for something like its older incarnation to rise from the ashes on the web.  But clearly, even with a claimed stable of some 60 writers, Marx hasn't nearly reached the standards of the vanished world of alternative publishing. His reach seriously exceeds his grasp.

Plus there are other contenders in the race to co-opt our critical discourse.  Here in Boston, in fact, Marx is facing stiff competition from Polly Carl, resident den mother at Howl Round and the Center for Theatre Corrup - sorry, Theatre Commons!

But we'll consider Ms. Carl, and her plans to kill criticism with kindness, in the next installment of this series.

Easy Marxmanship

I know, I know. Criticizing Bill Marx is like shooting fish in a barrel. But sometimes I just can't resist.

Bill has always been under the delusion that he writes trenchant, incisive criticism. If only. I grant you he's pretty good at literary criticism, but less good at theatre criticism, and basically an ignoramus at everything else. I guess in his brain he imagines that his ongoing resuscitation of various crippled critiques of capitalist culture from the mid-twentieth century counts as "incisive." Again, if only.

And as for using "the point of his pen, not the feather" (a favorite quote of his from Swift) - well, somehow when the going gets rough, Mr. Marx always goes missing; he has managed to tiptoe almost entirely around the ongoing intellectual debacle at the A.R.T., for instance.  He was also bamboozled by the devious guilty-white-chick dramaturg Ilana Brownstein (late of the Huntington, now at Company One), who lured him for a time into lame attempts to puff up the intellectual profile of Shawn Whats-his-Face of the same theatre (I still get a chuckle out of Shawn's attempt at a "Judicial Review" essay). And we won't even go into the Arts Fuse's anonymously-sourced paeans to the (now debunked) Matter Pollocks.  Fortunately these days, we don't really hear that much from Bill at all (he recently wrote something incisive about Cirque du Soleil, I think.)

In short, Bill is all hat, and no cattle, as they say down in Texas. And he's sporting quite the chapeau today, as he once again intones that “Criticism should not read as if it had been written by a publicist.”

Uh-huh.  Sure, fine.  I couldn't agree more; I've often said much the same thing myself.  But let's just see how closely the Arts Fuse, which Bill edits, follows this dictum.

Oh, who am I kidding.  You don't have to look far to find P.R. in its purest form on the Arts Fuse.  One recent review described SpeakEasy's Xanadu as "a totally rad entertainment experience . . . an effervescent jukebox musical spoof that brings smiles to every face and glow sticks to every hand." Okay - now you publicists, stay away from that quote, you hear me?  Because that's NOT publicity! No sir, no way, no how!

But wait, theres more non-PR where that came from: Little Shop of Horrors was "vibrantly entertaining . . . Shakespeare might have written this story with an eye to pleasing the groundlings . . . my twelve-year-old daughter has seen and loved the show."

Oddly, there are a few moments when the PR on the Arts Fuse does, indeed, feel like clueless non-PR, as when one critic said of Woody Sez: "expansively competent . . . [its] music appeals to the average person."  (The 30's got a truly bizarre plug, too: "The thirties were famous for the Depression . . . and the Dust Bowl."  Really?)

Wait - the Arts Fuse critics do take out the long knives on occasion, as when they cut up Cupcake, a teensy little gay revue at Club Cafe: "I missed the two ingredients that transform a work of convincing craft into a work of convincing art: surprise and surprise’s twin brother, leaps of the imagination," the Fuse suddenly fumed. "Is the cupcake-baker straight or is he gay? Does he have a legal permit to sell his cakes? These are the basic questions Cupcake raises. Now I grant it’s all done charmingly. But does celebrating “all that is summer and fun” excuse all that is omitted here? If you are the type of theatergoer who yearns for a more engaging, more honest take on Provincetown in summer and on the high drama of ANY relationship—straight or gay—this musical will leave you full but not filled."

Seriously. Xanadu - good.  Cupcake - bad.  Because it didn't "transform a work of convincing craft into a work of convincing art."

Seriously. 

What is there to say?  How can Marx keep imagining he's putting out Partisan Review, when more often than not he's thrashing around well below the level of the Globe? And as for PR - well, honestly, it seems PR calls the Arts Fuse home, until suddenly - usually when the artists in question have no connections - it doesn't.  I'm not sure what Jonathan Swift would have to say about that.

Sebastian Smee and the giant penis of money

Koons encounters a potential critic.

I've been thinking of late (again!) about our mainstream press criticism. This was probably brought on by Bill Marx's recent rant regarding Don Aucoin's clueless putdown of Albee's A Delicate Balance. I poked some fun at Marx over this at Art Hennessey's site - after all, Marx's Arts Fuse is hardly The New York Review of Books; it's basically an extension of the educated-middlebrow ethos one finds at WBUR and NPR (and no doubt other 'Rs), the kind of tiny pond Marx can comfortably dominate as BU's best-read poobah.  (Although to fair, when I saw Aucoin's rave today over Patrick Stewart's Macbeth, I thought, "You know, maybe Bill Marx has a point!")

The trouble is that Marx's point doesn't really go far enough - his case against Aucoin is that the Globe's lead drama critic doesn't have much in the way of critical chops - indeed, he points to the paper's film and music critics as examples of the kind of talent it will pay for when advertising dollars are at stake.  I've made that point myself, of course, but I have to say - even if Aucoin did have some intellectual mojo, would that help the situation? In a way Marx doesn't seem to appreciate the real problem at the Globe - and frankly, at the Times, the New Yorker, and most publications that still feature criticism.

Consider, for a moment, the case of Sebastian Smee.  No, he's not a character out of Dr. Seuss or Roald Dahl - he's the Globe's leading visual arts critic.  And unlike Aucoin, he's undeniably knowledgeable, and a very witty writer.  Trouble is, he rarely writes actual criticism - he sniffs at a lot of local art as beneath him (he leaves it to the less-able Cate McQuaid), and is happy to dodge with literate fluff the salient points of an exhibition if they're controversial, and he doesn't see how engaging with them will help his professional ascent.  Smee's best, in fact, at brilliant recapitulations of conventional wisdom, as in his various analyses of Matisse (hedonist or hero?). You've heard it all before, but Smee puts it so much better than you could that it's fun to revisit what you think already.

"What you think already."  That really should be the tagline of the Globe's arts section.  For the paper's writers are hardly engaged with the art they supposedly cover - instead they're engaged with their audience, and what they think that audience can understand and will pay to hear.  In a word, they're mirrors, not windows.  It's true that some of the mirrors are smarter than others - but they turn that intelligence into a sharper picture of their readers, not the art they're supposedly writing about.  Because, in a word, that's where the money is.

Take for example, a recent snippet from Smee about the artist Jeff Koons:

I can't think about Jeff Koons without laughing. He's a living, breathing, ongoing wisecrack. He's revolting of course, but undeniably mesmerizing, and so funny - in ways that make me giggly and nervous, ways I can't ever quite incorporate into a stable critical framework - that he leaves me speechless.  . . . Luxumburg and Dayan, a commercial gallery in uptown Manhattan, has just opened a revival of Koons's "Made in Heaven" paintings [one at top left] kitsch, explicit, hyper-real depictions of Koons enjoying sexual congress with his then wife, the Italian porn star Ilona Staller, otherwise known as Cicciolina. Those paintings were made 20 years ago. (The marriage went sour, and Koons and Staller were subsequently embroiled in a bitter fight for custody of their son.) 

Yeah, that Jeff Koons - what a comedian! He's still trying to profit off of hardcore photos of his son's mother. Who absconded with said son, Ludwig Maximilian (no, I'm not making that up) to Italy, where a court ruled the kid was better off without Koons - who despite being worth millions, then cut off child support. Yup, a laff riot from beginning to end.

And something about that "it's revolting, but it makes me giggly and nervous" line suddenly made me think of Ty Burr - who often strikes precisely the same tone about this or that movie he thinks is "unholy" or whatever.  Oh my God, my Mom would kill me if she caught me with this!  is essentially the message here.  Only both these men are middle-aged, which makes their shared stance a little weird - until you remember that it's their editors' stance; they're being paid to re-iterate (and massage) a key boomer cultural meme: that "real" art should shock Mom and Dad.  And it's only a small step from that to "If it shocks Mom and Dad - then it's art!"  After all, who's to say otherwise, you know what I mean?  (Certainly not the critic!)

This kind of thinking has turned the Globe critics into living, breathing personifications of cultural co-option; they subjugate high culture to pop on their laptops every day, in fact.  And the smart ones do it just like the dumb ones do; they may do it better, more seamlessly and entertainingly - they insinuate between the lines that they know better - but they still do it.

Kind of the way Koons keeps doing it - you'd be hard pressed to see much development in this particular artiste over his thirty-year-career.  Maybe that's what makes Sebastian so giggly!  Although I think I can help him out with "creating a stable critical framework" for Jeff Koons.  And why not start with his chief patron, Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou?  Joannou is behind a lot of bad art (Kiki Smith, Matthew Barney), and is a board member of New York's Guggenheim and New Museum (which he basically financed, and now uses as a springboard for enhancing the value of his own collection, in shows curated by - wait for it - Jeff Koons). One of the few interesting things about Koons's "Made in Heaven" series was that it revealed that, even if his financial assets were enormous, his personal ones were merely average in size; but you have to remember that behind the beaming, physically unimpressive former commodities broker stands Joannou, a gigantic virtual penis of money spewing enormous gobs of capitalist ejaculate over the landscape (a lot of it on Koons).

Want to know more about Dakis Joannou (at left, with Koons and Duchamp, who may in the end be to blame for all this)?  Well, it's kind of hard to find out more - the Internet seems almost scrubbed of data about anything but Joannou's art collection.  But I do know that his country is basically in default - there has even been talk of Greece selling some of its islands to Germany to make good on its debt, which makes said islands an interesting setting for recent art junkets featuring Joannou, Barney and Koons (who also, btw, designed Joannou's $115-million yacht, "Guilty"). I did eventually discover that Joannou is the chairman of J&P Overseas and J&P-AVAX (and that even though these are publicly-traded companies in Greece, his son Christos runs both). J&P's stock is in the gutter, of course - because the firm essentially builds major construction projects and luxury real-estate in spots like the Middle East and North Africa, and thus is wildly over-leveraged.

So Koons is a bit like the happy face pasted on the secretive networks of the global economy (and its resulting meltdowns) - and basically, trying to discuss him without discussing Dakis Joannou is a bit like trying to analyze Michelangelo without mentioning classical Athens or the Catholic Church. Of course, to be fair, it's easier to analyze the Catholic Church than it is to analyze Dakis Joannou!  But without going into some deep economic exegesis, Smee could at least grapple with the fact that, just as Titian and Raphael painted Madonnas for their patrons, so Koons produces imagery that reflects his patrons - thus his outpouring of porn and plastic, and his mania for childish, commercialized satisfactions that repel as much as they attract. Yes, there's a yin-yang between pleasure and horror that haunts his work - but horror of what, exactly? And why should Dakis Joannou recognize in it his own reflection?

But Smee can't answer those questions - because he's inside the post-capitalist bubble too.  None of this can be discussed; that's not his role.  So instead Koons is a "comic genius." Well, I'm not laughing.

Bowles doesn't bowl you over

If you haven't guessed by now, this is the week the Hub Review beats up on the competition.  This post features my old bête noire, Bill Marx, who let it be known that those of us who were taken with Nicky Martin's Bus Stop had it all wrong - the far better revival in town was In the Summer House, the single play by Jane Bowles (wife of the more-famous Paul), which the BU Fringe Festival is mounting with a student cast through October 23.  To Bill, In the Summer House was "a marvelous script" that is "far greater than anything Inge wrote for the theatre" because it "purposely uses estrangement to examine the ambiguities of social and psychological constriction as well as the smothering attachments of parent and child." He also raved over its "attempt to dramatize a ferocious will-to-control born of spiritual emptiness" which proved "magically unsettling."

Yowza! I'm always up for ferocious, you know, whatever he said; I had to check it out.

So is In the Summer House really better than anything William Inge ever wrote?  Of course not. It's an intriguing piece of juvenilia, but not much more, by a woman (at left) who might have developed into an interesting playwright if ill health hadn't cut her career tragically short.  It's hardly at the level of Inge, and it's pretentious babble to pretend it is. Mind you, it's perfectly suitable for revival by an academic festival, because it's of some academic interest - it clumsily prefigures certain surreal effects of the Theatre of the Absurd.  And of course those with an interest in Bowles are urged to go.

Certainly the script exhibits unusual formal quirks - there's an indeterminacy to its style and action that's original.  But this doesn't really add up to an intellectual armature or anything; we're not talking Beckett here.  Someday, of course, Bowles's drifting, unstable mise-en-scène might have amounted to more; artists often don't truly understand their own material when they begin writing, and watching Summer House, I felt a bit like I was watching something like one of Tennessee Williams's early drafts of Orpheus Descending.  There's a streak of listless unhappiness to Bowles, too, that feels somehow individual.  But there's much here that's awkward and superficial - as well as self-indulgently weird - and at any rate, the conflicts between mother and daughter that Bowles investigates are hardly news.

Still, the production, like the play, had its moments; the cast of BU students was confident and polished, and there was a buzz of talented energy in the air.  But you could tell the kids thought the show was kind of weird, too; there was a suppressed giggle behind everything that didn't allow the alienated twistedness you felt Bowles might be getting at to really take hold.   And director Ellie Heyman's work was inventive but uneven; she likes to "deploy" her "space," which meant actors were often clambering over obstacles or writhing on the floor - but she made up for everything with a truly marvelous final image, in which Bowles's beleaguered heroine leapt into a beautifully abstract sea.  For some, this alone might tip the balance in favor of the show - but if not, don't say I didn't warn you.

A quick note on the meaning of "ad hominem"

I wound up in an e-mail exchange with Bill Marx last night in which he called me "the master of ad hominem." I was struck by this because it's a slur that's been bouncing around the web about me; Isaac Butler said much the same thing here [correction - the term actually appears in the comments to, rather than the main body of, that post] and J. Holtham has tossed the claim around, as have other bloggers.

But one can only assume from this that Bill Marx, et. al., don't understand the meaning of "ad hominem." So in the spirit of education, I thought I'd run a post about the term.

An ad hominem argument (meaning "argument against the man") is defined as something like this:

Person 1 has made claim X.
There is something objectionable about Person 1.
Therefore claim X is false.

A good example would be:

Bill Marx claims that the Huntington Theatre should have done a play other than All My Sons.
Bill Marx is pudgy and unpleasant.
Therefore, his claim is false.

I never make arguments like this - even when, as above, all the separate statements may be true. I think to lazy writers like Isaac and Bill, "ad hominem" has become a synonym for "insulting." And of course I've insulted them plenty of times - but always because of what they've said, not because of who they are. I'm constantly saying things like "Isaac Butler is a dishonest careerist because he said X, which is untrue but opens up a possible job opportunity," and "Bill Marx is a pompous ass because he said X, which doesn't help local theatre but only buffs his own ego." You see that "because he said X" part? That means the statement was an attack, but not an ad hominem attack.

Likewise, if I say "Lydia Diamond R. has distorted the historical record in two different plays to match a consistent psychological profile, and therefore is neurotic," that is not an ad hominem argument. It could be false, but you have to prove that with a statement that has a "because" in it (but does NOT have the name "Thomas Garvey" in it). You have to say something like "Lydia R. Diamond may tailor history to her own psychological profile but this is not neurotic BECAUSE . . ." I'm not sure what would come after that "because," but that's what you have to do - the argument stands separately from me, personally, and it has an inner logic that you have to address.

What's funniest about those who claim I resort to ad hominem attack is, of course, that they themselves are far more prone to the practice. The retort to my assessment of Diamond, for instance, has often been (and I'm not making this up) "Thomas Garvey is a troll!!" In the past, other bloggers have replied to my arguments with "Thomas Garvey is a coward!" "Thomas Garvey is an old queen!" And, of course, "Thomas Garvey is a racist, no wait, he is a BIGOT instead!"

This, of course, brings up something very tricky for the identity politics crowd: many of their claims are hard to distinguish from ad hominem attacks, as they tend to work backward from broad social characterizations. The whole circumstance of a white man criticizing a black woman, which is what has happened here, is fraught for these folks, and many of them immediately jump to the essentially ad hominem argument of "You're racist (and sexist)!" And if that claim doesn't match your profile, it morphs to "You're unconsciously racist!" or "You're structurally racist!" The target floats, but remains essentially the same, and it is, potentially, an ad hominem attack. Of course you might argue from this that therefore those who "dialogue" about identity politics should be especially careful about indulging in this kind of thing. That would seem to be a reasonable admonition, but it's likely to fall on deaf ears.

Because of course I agree heartily that there are some arguments that are racist, and some that are unconsciously racist. Maybe even some that are structurally racist. But the thing is, even if you're going to make that argument, you still have to begin it with a sentence that runs "Lydia R. Diamond tailors history to her psychological profile, but that is not neurotic BECAUSE . . ." (Or, in the case of RVC Bard, "Feeling unworthy of white people's presence is not neurotic BECAUSE . . .") You have to source your attack in the topic at hand. You can't begin with a general argument about the existence of racism, and then work backward to Lydia R. Diamond and RVCBard; this is a form of deductive fallacy, because while racism certainly exists, these two people could still be neurotic about it.

And yet so far no one in this blogosphere imbroglio has written any analysis at all about Lydia R. Diamond or her plays (and of course RVCBard hasn't stopped crying since I ran my post, so no one's going to go near her with anything but kleenex). But until they do, those who attack me are guilty of - yes, wait for it - ad hominem attack.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the generation gap . . .

Who needs David Hare or Edward Albee when we've got these guys?

Yes, Bill Marx is hurtin'. The fifty-something, status-craving bane of local theatre, stung by my recent ridicule, tries to get hip with Company One (a group he's completely ignored heretofore), fire another salvo in his seemingly eternal feud with Israel Horowitz, and reply to me without ever mentioning my name, all in an amusingly transparent new post. Please don't take this as a slap at Company One - even though I've sometimes found their racial politics tiresome, I'm interested in After the Quake (and mean to see it this weekend), and have bemoaned the lack of Asian actors on local stages before (something which, again, I can't recall Marx discussing till now). Still, it's worth noting this particular theatre piece allows Marx to indulge in his favorite subliminal pastime: finding performance art secondary to literary art (most of his praise goes to novelist Haruki Murakami).

But what's funniest about Marx this time around is his sudden ageism. I think he's about fifty-five, yet suddenly he yearns for a far younger posse. Not for him the geriatric tropes of David Hare, Edward Albee and Joan Didion, who are "veterans of the lefty counterculture, 'names' to attract boomers and the older crowd." Fuck 'em - they're old (although no older than Haruki Murakami, who's a youthful 60)! Of course our local theatrical éminence grease isn't merely groping for an excuse for his recent behavior (which some have interpreted as just more bitter jabs at Horovitz), but is instead concerned about drawing in younger audiences, keeping the theatre alive, blah blah blah (via a 60-year-old Japanese guy?). Funny, then, that he's been trying to kill off this particular art form for what seems like years. But hey, I'll give Bill the benefit of the doubt - after all, like Auntie Mame, you're as young as you feel, right? So I breathlessly await his appreciation of the Jonas Brothers!

The Bill Marx Theatrical Benevolent Fund

Well, after a little awkward communication, Gloucester Stage has indicated they'll accept my donation in honor of Bill Marx. How and when it ends up being listed in the program is still in negotiation.

And all I can think is:

Why didn't I think of this sooner?

It's just such a beautiful means of blunting the nasty edge of Mr. Marx's brand of criticism - every time he lays into a company with an eye to fluffing his own ego, I'll make that company a donation. (As this is bound to happen often, the donations may become quite small, so battered theatrical entrepreneurs, don't get your hopes up!) And in the future, can a Bill Marx Theatrical Benevolent Fund be far off? The mind boggles!

Persona non grata - cura te ipsum!

In case you haven't noticed - and only a theatre nerd would - Bill Marx (logo-ized at left) is finally back blogging (as "Persona non grata" on www.theartsfuse.com) following his mysterious fall from grace at WBUR (where he was replaced by the less-abrasive Ed Siegel, who had just retired from the Globe). And as usual, Marx is once again exhorting the critical community "to use the point of your pen, not the feather" (a favorite quote from Swift), and taking many of his former print colleagues (in particular Louise Kennedy and Terry Byrne) to task for recent puff-pieces.

Now far be it from me to attack anyone who's criticizing Louise Kennedy or Terry Byrne - they're skilled suburban-feature writers (to varying degrees) but neither is by inclination or talent a theatre critic (the Globe, for some reason, obviously thinks of its reviews as suburban features). Still, one does wonder why Marx imagines he's in a position to hurl critical brickbats - sure, he's smarter than Kennedy or Byrne, but is his own record really so exemplary? Let's take a look!

But first - yes, I admit there's all but an ocean of bad blood between me and Marx. Years ago, when I was trying to shape productions of my favorite classics from the local, non-professional theatre scene, he was something of a nemesis - but then he was everybody's nemesis, openly hated in the theatre community (as in people spat when they spoke of him). He was widely quoted as describing his job as "shutting down as many small theatres as possible," and he certainly seemed to take that duty seriously; I personally lost thousands of dollars in productions that he panned, and despite raves from other critics (including Anthony Tomassini, now a music critic at the Times), my little company never managed to gain much momentum. I was broke, the scene was moribund, and I gave up on that particular dream.

Of course said scene is different now - but is it stronger because of Marx's brand of criticism? I'd argue not - in fact, he seems never to consider (although I once ruined a fatuous symposium he hosted by pointing it out to him repeatedly) that as his influence - and the influence of critics in general - has waned, the Boston theatre scene, rather than withering, has blossomed instead. This is an irony I think he has to face: local theatre has done better without him (and perhaps without the rest of us, frankly!).

This dichotomy is all the more glaring when one ponders Marx's own history. In the bad old days that he gazes upon so fondly, nastiness was de rigeur (reviewers took their cue from the Globe's bitchy Kevin Kelly), with Marx, ensconced at the Phoenix, as its acknowledged junior avatar - and the theatre scene was basically a flatliner; Marx was like a surgeon scraping away for cancer in a patient that was already dead. Looking back, in fact, it's almost funny to imagine him styling himself as Kenneth Tynan or John Simon - but having to expend his acid on my productions, and others like them, in basements and church halls, starring recent college grads and community theatre types.

Still, if you imagine him as some incorruptible Robespierre, riding above the fray, think again; Marx eagerly fluffed major-league players like the ART, and was hardly above penning fawning puff pieces, such as one he wrote for the late Skip Ascheim's amateurish production of The Winter's Tale (Ascheim's company, ironically enough, fell before the point of Kevin Kelly's pen). Even now, there's a fluffy interview on his site with Suzan Lori-Parks, arguably our most over-rated living playwright.

Marx was, it's true, better at book reviews (he's really a bookworm masquerading as a theatre critic) and gained a positive reputation (and I think an award or two) in that field - but even this, I'd argue, is something of a debit. It's apparent that his literary nature, combined with his lefty politics (he's a Marxist in more ways than one) led him to unconsciously envious positions on several cultural fronts. Like many an armchair critic, for instance, Marx seems to resent the prerogatives of actual theatrical production; he just never thrills to live theatre - it's like a sad also-ran to some production he's got playing in his head. And so while there's still a certain urgency, at times, to his prose, it's always tied to critical issues, not in-the-moment aesthetic experience - in short, he loves criticism, not theatre. (He's not alone in that regard - does Carolyn Clay, for instance, love theatre? If so, you'd never tell it from her bloodless, pun-clotted output.)

There's an argument, I suppose, for valuing criticism for its own sake (even if it amounts to little more than an intellectual echo-chamber), but Marx's Marxism makes his position even more extreme: he seems disgusted in general by filthy lucre, and nothing sends him into a tizzy faster than the prospect of someone actually making money on a show. Indeed, in a widely noted dust-up with me over my rave for the Huntington's Love's Labour's Lost, he admitted:

I steer away from heavy-breathing statements of comparison such as "towers above" or "greater than" because they sound like ad copy.

Well the good Lord save us from ad copy! Now in that brouhaha, in which the Huntington quoted my rave in WBUR's online blog (where I posted at Marx's invitation) but credited it to simply "WBUR," Marx had something of a point - the Huntington, no doubt, was trying to insinuate that the famously pissy Bill Marx had been wowed by their show. Still, ponder, just a moment, how weird his outrage was, and consider what it means that he consciously avoids promoting even the shows he likes (and he admitted liking Love's Labour's Lost). If I had been Marx, I'd have certainly complained to the Huntington, and demanded that they specify the source of those quotes - but I also would have winked at their little gambit; they are, after all, trying to sell tickets, and I'm trying to get people to see the right shows. But Marx spurns both goals; for him, instead, it's all about the integrity of his armchair.

So okay, Bill disdains criticism's real-world purposes - but that still leaves the question of just how good his intentionally rarefied writing actually is; how gorgeous is that critical castle he's been building in the air? How much does he challenge orthodoxy - how often does he open new avenues of inquiry? How often is he a principled contrarian, how much do his insights surprise and enlighten? The answers, I'm afraid, are not often and not much. At WBUR, to be fair, Marx built an interesting and forward-looking web presence - his own contributions, however, were reliably intelligent, but little more (Debra Cash, who wrote on dance, was actually the far more interesting critic). He was also no great stylist, and it's surprising how often he marched in lockstep with the Globe and Phoenix. He learned to see through some of the ART's fatuousness, but was still bamboozled by productions that played to Marxist delusions (Olly's Prison) or 70's-era avant-garde posturing (Three Sisters). In short, he was sometimes slightly ahead of the herd, but just as often behind it.

And more and more, Marx's writing was directed at other critics - perhaps, some argued, as a kind of revenge-by-proxy for his career disappointments. Indeed, of his last ten posts, six have dealt with the decline in book reviewing in the mainstream press; three have dealt with the money scandals at the Wang (that filthy lucre!); only one has dealt with any actual artwork (a takedown of "modern classics," Ayn Rand, and H.P. Lovecraft). Surely the proportions here should be close to the reverse - who cares about some guy whose idea of incisive criticism is demanding that other people write it?

So I suppose my message to "persona non grata" is "cura te ipsum" - i.e, physician, heal thyself! Marx might more effectively stimulate thoughtful criticism if he took a crack at it. He could start by considering a question he raises, but never answers, in that hatchet job on Kennedy and Byrne:

How about looking at the ways the yeasayers do a disservice to theater and the craft of criticism?

Well, how about it, Bill? This would seem to be the question of the hour! Theatre seemed to get better as your influence waned - was that just an illusion? If so, why - and if not, then what exactly is your value-add, and that of criticism in general? And let's be blunt - simply being untainted by commercial concerns is not in and of itself a justification for criticism. There has to be something more - so what is it?