COVER STORY : Criticism, New Aesthetics and the ‘Q’ (for Quality) Word

Critics who get paid to write reviews of art, music, theater, dance, movies and literature are long accustomed to having their qualifications questioned by those whose work they evaluate. Criticism is inherently controversial, and for many artists it comes as naturally as breathing to see ignorance, insensitivity and malice in critics who fail to appreciate what they do. But lately this historic argument has spread to a new battlefront.

As the United States undergoes a transformation from a largely white society to one increasingly colored by immigrants from Latin America and Asia, as well as by the rising influence of women, gays and other groups that sometimes see themselves as “victims” of a hierarchical culture handed down by European white males (the designation has become almost an epithet), artists from these subcultures have found occasion to cry prejudice. Can critics from the dominant culture, they ask, fully understand the plays of Luis Valdez or the paintings of an Osage Indian? If not, should reviews of ethnically defined art and artists be restricted to reviewers properly initiated or bearing a newly forged “multicultural” point of view?

Thus have critics joined college professors, arts administrators and artists themselves on the firing line in a larger culture war that some fear is blowing out the windows of Western Civilization and others cheer as a long-overdue liberation of those the West has enslaved, ignored or exploited.

It has not been popular for a long time to regard the arts in America as political and, likewise, commentary about the arts. The current debate is changing all this, and it will be a good thing if the change brings to criticism a broader discussion of the values transmitted by movies, plays and television, for example, to go along with the more common preoccupations with stars, industry gossip and nuances of real or imagined technique.

But the search for political motive and prejudice in criticism has brought a new kind of separatist cant to the arts as well, denying the possibility that art ever transcends cultural and ethnic divisions in society and diminishing the importance of standards and craft.

In her new book, “Mixed Blessings, New Art in a Multicultural America,” revisionist art critic Lucy Lippard proposes replacing the notion of “quality” in art criticism with a measurement she calls “artistic integrity” that refers to a given work’s resonance within its particular social and historical context. In Lippard’s “politically correct” new world, personal opinions in criticism will be banished in favor of adopted sensitivities to that which has been heretofore slighted. “The conventional notion of good taste with which many of us were raised and educated,” she writes, “was based on an illusion of social order that is no longer possible (or desirable) to believe in.”

It’s not hard to see the implications for criticism in such a credo. Theater managers, museum directors and even the Hollywood studios are under political pressure now to endorse ethnic and sexual diversity per se as a greater good, and critics are feeling a similar pressure to put away personal biases and redress cultural grievances. But if you believe, as some still do, that the best criticism is nothing if not personal, this is not all so simple. Is it really time to add critics to the bland bands of cultural bureaucrats now in charge of so much of the nonprofit world of museums, theaters and universities?

When Times art critic William Wilson last fall found wanting a politically charged exhibition at UCLA called “Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation”--writing that “combining art and sociology is still a dicey business requiring more skill than was shown here”--his review drew a heated response (published in The Times) from Maria Acosta-Colon, director of the Mexican Museum in San Francisco. She accused Wilson of lacking the necessary “frame of reference” to properly evaluate the exhibition, writing: “It is a phenomenon of Euro-American art criticism that dictates that art must be divorced from its social context and must be ‘universal.’ ”

In a city as culturally diverse as Los Angeles, it comes as no surprise that local artists and writers have been thinking a lot about criticism and its place in the new world order.

Director Jose Luis Valenzuela, who runs the Latino Theater Lab at the Los Angeles Theater Center, doesn’t believe his work gets a sympathetic hearing from the mainstream press, including The Times. “A lot of our work is born not to appeal to those in power,” he says, “and if you don’t understand the context we’re coming from, how intelligent can the review be?”

As an example of white critical myopia, Valenzuela cites a review that took him to task for doing only Latino work. “ Latino means a lot of things,” he says. “I’ve done Cuban plays, Puerto Rican plays, Chicano plays. They’re very different. How can I take a person seriously who doesn’t see the difference? There are some smart critics around. But I do believe they have to do better homework.”

“I would like critics to know a little more ahead of time about what they’re going to review,” says Nobu McCarthy, artistic director of Los Angeles’ East West Players, an Asian-American theater company that plays to a 50% Asian, 50% Caucasian audience. “If they would extend understanding toward overall cultural differences, it would be fairer. Many times they really don’t understand.”

Uninformed critics, according to McCarthy, sometimes make the mistake of presuming knowledge of Asian-American culture. “One time a reviewer said that eating a hot dog with chopsticks was not authentic! I was dumbfounded when I read that.”

Hanay Geigomah, a Kiowa Indian who is artistic director of the American Indian Dance Theater, regularly encounters what he considers uncomprehending critics throughout the country. “I think it’s hard for anyone to understand the American Indian cultures--critics or anyone else,” he says about this. “It’s not an aesthetic that is immediately accessible to the general public in this country. American Indian culture has been so debased and so stereotyped and so abused and cast in such a totally negative light over the centuries.”

Yet Geigomah doesn’t think it’s impossible to get an informed review. “No, I wouldn’t say that because there are some very intelligent people. There always are. They can certainly describe the emotional experience, which is an important part of dance; they can give an honest accounting of what they see in the physical sense, the steps, gestures and uses of the body. But in these areas they could be a little more discerning. It takes some knowledge of these dances to evaluate them from a dance aesthetic point of view. But you can’t expect all the dance critics to be cultural polymorphs.”

Sergio Munoz, the executive editor of Los Angeles’ Spanish-language daily La Opinion and a former film critic for the Mexico City daily Ovaciones, draws a distinction between the aesthetics of criticism and the problems of access for minority artists. “I think art is either universal or not,” Munoz says. “We cannot demand that anyone look at it in some sort of handicapped fashion. Art that is universal demands criticism that is universal. You find that inside the work of a Colombian writer like Gabriel Garcia Marquez or a Mexican painter like Rufino Tamayo is a universal experience whether you are here or in Colombia or wherever. But is there access for Chicano artists to get exposure in the art scene at large? I would say no. It is extremely difficult to find Chicano art in the art museums of Los Angeles, and that’s wrong.”

“The multiethnicity of our society and our ability to create discourses between cultures is ultimately the salvation of our society and the world,” states Mark Taper Forum director Robert Egan, an Irish-American who also believes “every play is political” and that critics should address themselves to political choices made by theaters and directors. “You choose a play, you cast a play, you direct a play in a certain way, and it reflects a certain set of beliefs that you hold. . . . There is a kind of apartheid that is practiced in the arts, and in this region if you are going to do art that purports to speak to the world we live in, it has to take into account multiculturalism. I think critics have a responsibility to be aware of this--without forgetting about quality. If you neglect the idea of quality, then you’re in danger of practicing a kind of paternalism.”

Two years ago, when Egan directed “Sansei,” a collaborative musical based on the lives of the Japanese-American jazz-rock band Hiroshima, the play received what he calls “an imperialistic set of reviews--a lot of white people not understanding the subtleties of what these guys are up to.”

Some of those white people might respond that, on the contrary, they understood what they saw, but wished there had been more to understand. Is that necessarily a racist point of view?

When Teatro Campesino’s 1979 local stage hit “Zoot Suit,” about bigotry toward Latinos in Los Angeles in the 1940s, traveled from the Mark Taper Forum to New York and was dismissed by the Broadway critics, playwright-director Luis Valdez complained of prejudice. He may have been right, but as a Chicano artist he was hardly alone in being patronized or misunderstood by the New York theater critics, who have long dispensed condescension equally to plays arriving from the provinces in all colors and dialects.

Indeed, artists from the provinces, minority groups, unorthodox movements and the ranks of the dispossessed have always had reason to doubt whether the Establishment and its critics can accept them. It is the nature of the Establishment not to accept them--until it does. This is the history of art, which is governed by fashion as much as by cultural prejudice. Sam Shepard was an unruly off-off-Broadway playwright, and then one day he won the Pulitzer Prize. William Faulkner was honored primarily by his fellow Southerners until the Yankee critics finally accepted him. Pre-Columbian art was considered declasse until it became quite the rage.

“The largest point that has to be understood,” says former New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer, now editor of the New Criterion, a journal that has resisted multiculturalist theory, “is that this is predicated on the notion that we don’t have an American culture in which everyone can participate, that we are an atomized society consisting of separate cultural pockets.”

Kramer has argued otherwise. “This movement is really anti-critical,” he says. “What these people are really talking about is getting a piece of the pie. They want two things: patronage and praise. They want to substitute political criteria for artistic criteria.”

Multiculturalism, in one sense, is simply another way of recognizing the inevitable shrinking of the globe, and the shrinkage is ever apparent in Los Angeles, where so much more is expected of critics now: not only that they relax their grip on the Western canons of art, music and literature they grew up with, but that they immerse themselves in the cultures of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Since many practicing critics probably consider their knowledge even of the West inadequate, this is a tall order.

Some in the universities, like Kent Devereaux, a teaching fellow in the Critical Studies program at CalArts in Valencia, believe the advent of multiculturalism demands “a multicultural critical theory,” still in development. “When somebody goes out to review a show now, there are no models,” he says. “A whole new type of writer is needed.”

“Like Stalin’s ‘New Man’!” Kramer responds.

Devereaux also denies that the notion of quality is being smothered in the name of progress--an idea, he says, “the right wingers” have put forth. “This doesn’t mean that you throw out standards, only that you realize that qualitative judgments are socially constructed. It’s just exposing the falsehood that standards are God-given and not historically based.”

“Standards come out of our intercourse with the great masterpieces of the past,” Kramer believes. “You can’t say that there are no standards. Posterity creates them.”

It might be added here that the most aggressive cultural revisionists have overlooked the currently quaint notion that criticism is more than simply a political and educational tool. Criticism at its best is a literary form. The people who practice it are writers, not only advocates and theorists. While there are critics who abuse their power and others who are merely entertainers, certainly there are a significant number of others who qualify as essayists, expressing themselves and their view of the world just as artists do. And just as it smacks of authoritarianism to proscribe what kind of music and painting a society will allow, so does it sound ominous to lay out a political correctness for criticism.

Japanese-American playwright Philip Gotanda, author of the Los Angeles-produced plays “The Wash” and “Yankee Dawg You Die!,” is one who has faulted critics for lack of empathy. To the tall order multiculturalism presents to critics, Gotanda says: “I think it’s part of the responsibility of living in America right now. We all have to make an effort to understand the other person’s world. As an Asian-American, I feel the need to understand African-American literature and Latin-American literature. If we all stay in our own camps, it’s not going to work. With that new responsibility will come a new reward: participating in the new vision of America.”

Who can argue with this? But it may be easier to agree with Gotanda’s sentiments than to see clearly how they will produce better criticism any more than they will produce better plays. Critics and artists strive to achieve strong individual voices or visions, which may or may not measure up to enlightenment depending on who’s reading the meter. In the end, critics will always be disliked, always found unsympathetic, capricious, mean and adversarial, unless they see themselves primarily as publicists. In this respect, multiculturalism provides another rack on which they can be flailed.