Yeah, so what?

I was delighted when Michael Cox from Across the Arts read one of my reviews of Vanishing Point's Wonderland and exclaimed that I appeared to love it. Not because he had understood my feelings about a show that still has me pondering the morality of internet pornography, but rather because, at the time, I felt deeply ambivalent about Wonderland. Of course, that images remain with me months later, and the final lines of responsibility and guilt have not been completely unravelled in my mind, suggests that Wonderland is an important piece of theatre - at the time, I was more concerned to try and discover whether the format did justice to the seriousness of the content.

Aside from the intrinsic worth of attending and writing about performance and art - which is probably up for debate, anyway - the role of the critic can sometimes be mistaken for the arbitration of aesthetic absolutes. That is, the review is read as being an objective statement of an art work's value. The ambiguity of my review of Wonderland, which led to Michael Cox interpreting it in a way I had not expected, undermines any claim I might make to objectivity, and transfer the review into a far more interesting and fertile realm. It becomes, like the artwork itself, an object for discussion. Like a three minute pop song, or a sonnet, the review can condense complex ideas into an accessible format, and hopefully provoke a reaction.

I'd be shy to insist that my reviews have the same aesthetic worth as the art itself - it all depends on the quality of the production, and its relationship to the audience's interest - I'm not uncomfortable recognising the critic as an artist. Whether any particular critic is a good or bad artist is another matter, but my rather lazy working definition of the artist - anyone who is primarily motivated by their desire to express - allows documentary makers, scientists and musicians to share the label.

Critical writing is in a different relationship to art than, say, electronic music, although it shares certain commonalities, such as its status as an expression of the creator's perspective on certain experiences. Since I would argue that the purpose of criticism is to provoke and prolong an argument or discussion, it is as close to political theatre or conceptual art as it is to more frequently considered companions like reportage.

The problem that criticism has is not so much intrinsic to the critics or their process, but the way it is experienced. Most critics have a particular platform that comes with an audience - The Telegraph shares few readers with The Guardian, for example, meaning the readers read both news and arts writing from a particular expectation. While Across the Arts offers a compendium of often competing reviews about the same works, most readers don't trawl the arts page to find out what the overall consensus might be on a particular piece.

The traditional "use" of a review makes a blog like this useless: the double review of Greig's Dusinane reflects not a definitive statement on the script but the opposing possibilities the play offers about Scottish and British identity. Had Cox not already seen Wonderland, and was kind enough to trust my opinion, he might have thought my support for it implied he ought to catch it. On the contrary, I'd be reluctant to recommend a play about violent pornography to anyone unless I was really sure they were going to be okay with the content.

Instead, I'd like to think the best that I can offer is a few ideas, expressed in such a way that the reader can respond to them freely, winkle out my prejudices, suss out my dishonesty and bounce concepts a little further along the discussion. I think that is probably what art does anyway...