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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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The Toronto Alliance of Art Critics panel organized by Nadja Sayej a couple of weeks ago is now available on Youtube. Leah Sandals and John Bentley Mays have both written interesting blog posts about it. Having watched the video documentation, I find myself most impressed with David Balzer. Here are two things he said that I like:
The reason why people don't care about criticism isn't because there's a general apathy towards it but because it doesn't do service to the community, to the art scene, for critics to have a voice...because [artists are the] audience for us. And that needs to change. What I'm interested in as a critic is actually not the artists reading me but rather the people that aren't artists, and I don't think that there are very many. Film is different. Film is an industry, it's part of the culture, its part of the zeitgeist, people put money into it and want to know if something's good or bad. (video 6 of 8 at 4:21)Balzer is right on. But interestingly both of his statements speak more to editing and publishing than they do to writing. It's the responsibility of a publication to encourage confliciting opinions, to set up a context in which a diversity of readers are welcomed, and create an environment that readers come to because they can expect to have their assumptions challenged. There are umpteen reasons why writers self-censor, but I think the biggest is fear of offending artists. But if it is clear in the context of the publication that the audience for criticism is not the artist, but a broad and unpredictable scope of readers, then the pressure on the writers shifts less on the negative need to establish defensible positions and more towards the positive need to communicate their points of view. Editors may be frustrated that writers hold back, but that just means editors have to work harder to encourage dialogue and set a precedent. This means actively seeking out challenging critiques and then assuming responsibility when artists get their noses out of joint, rather than putting everything on the shoulders of the writer. And keeping the conversation going from issue to issue. It doesn't really matter if the context is academic or populist, the importance of editorial risk and responsibility is pretty much the same.
[...]
Being an editor has really taught me a lot of things and one of the most dangerous things you can do as a writer is to assume there is editorial opposition to what you really want to say. There is a lot of self-censure in the freelance writer community, and actually the reality of it is that there's a lot of freedom, especially in Canada, and you can say what you actually want to say ...so say it. (video 7 of 8 at 4:23)