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| Two whom the critical establishment know to be masters... |
Everyone’s a critic, they do say, and they’re right. But
obviously some people criticise better than others and as cultural consumers we’re
better off when they do – it makes a valuable guide as to how we should spend
our leisure time. Reviewing a piece of art, though, is also a little art of its
own, and ought to be a mutual literary pleasure into the bargain. For those
reasons I’m going to be teaching a 10-week course on Writing Reviews at Covent Garden’s
City Literary Institute starting next week, Thursday January 14, and finishing
Thursday March 17.
Each week we’ll be exploring specific issues about the
skills and styles and principles that make for good (and bad) reviewing,
looking at some masterly practitioners of the reviewer’s art (plus a few who do
it much less well), and class members will share their own freshly written
reviews for group discussion.
We’ll study work across the spectrum of art forms – high and
low and somewhere in-between; and examine all sorts of diverse and recognised ways
of covering the arts, from the 1000-word appreciation to the capsule column review,
the top-ten highlights list to the ‘hatchet job’.
Content will be shaped in part to the interests of the
group, but I have a notion that over 10 weeks we will peruse for interest the
celebrated movie writings of Pauline Kael, the TV columns of Clive James, the
theatre reviews of Ken Tynan, the art criticism of Robert Hughes, the thoughts
on music of Alex Ross and Greil Marcus, the book reviews of Christopher
Hitchens and the expansive thoughts on culture of Susan Sontag and of Stanley
Crouch.
Whether you’re a novice in the reviewing field or someone
who’s tried it out and wishes to hone their craft further, I do believe you’ll
find something useful here. Some fun, too.
