500 Pieces of Arts Criticism

Nothing Ever Happens in Brisbane has just passed a milestone, and I wanted to mark the occasion. This month, we passed our 500th piece of published arts writing. It’s no longer just a fun blog, something we do in our spare time. It’s a portal to arts criticism in Brisbane spanning the years from 2016 to today. It’s bigger than the sum of its parts. It’s a legacy.

Like many artists and other foolish excitable people, I never thought we’d get this far. We being myself and my co-conspirator in all arts things, Adam Wood, who helps me keep the whole thing floating above the high tide mark. To be frank, we make it up as we go along. We build the pyre higher on the broken back of the year before, with whatever energies we can spare from our day jobs. We do it for love, we do it so it feels real. Sometimes we make a hot mess of it, but more often than not, we do good. We add a little piece of flotsam to the whirligig of arts culture, and it gets swept up and in and makes the whole web a little stronger.  

From our first writers workshop in 2020. L-R Aaron Dora, Jaydem Martin, Charmaine Idris, Kristy Stanfield, Harmonie Downes.

Inadvertently, we have become not just critics, but teachers of critics. I say teacher, but really, I think perhaps the role is more of a catalyst, the good fortune of passion and circumstance. When you take a thoughtful kind of person, the kind that wants to look closely at art and dig deep to try and define what it is they really think, and you give them some academic inspiration, some musing and philosophy, some guidelines around style and speed and focus, and then you just… let them write. You get this bunch of lovely thinkers and dreamers, some twenty-odd crew who make up the current writers pool. What a bunch of beautiful reflections they make. The kind of thoughts they bring to surface are monumental.

Debrief session after our Critiquing the Arts - POC Edition workshop collaboration with Polytoxic and Brisbane Festival.

The diversity of this crew is so fantastic. It’s helped me to deeply understand how diversity strengthens teams, strengthens communities, beyond the tokenism, and into the guts of it. I learn all the time. I am educated and elevated; teacher become student. I never know what I’m going to get from moment to moment.  I just know it’s going to be thoughtful and heartfelt. I’ve read some fantastic things from our team. Some glorious accolades, some complex criticisms, some beautiful love poems to art. Surprise deconstructions, joyous serenades, odes to epics. Go through the archive, it’s a library of wild ideas.

Initially, as I read more and more, my own writing slowed, conflicted about my own why. The old challenge for all artists… who am I to write, who am I to decide, who am I to dare to put my opinion into the public eye. (How do you know you are a writer? When you experience crippling self-doubt about the thing you do well…. )

We recently had a workshop, a professional development opportunity for our team (supported by Brisbane Festival), in which different speakers gave us their considered approaches. MJ O’Neill, a powerful advocate for unfettered honesty in arts criticism. Kim Kaos, multipotentialite and elder amongst critics. An advocate for kindness, and for thinking deeper about why things are created, and for whom. Natano Fa’anana gave us the working artists perspective, including how the wrong kind of criticism can make or break a season, and how we might make a review really truly useful to artists and audiences alike.

Writer and provocoteur MJ O’Neill with Nadia at Brisfest Writers Salon.

We must move away from the idea that there is a good review or a bad review. There can be neither, as no critic can ever be the true barometer of an audience. There is an honest review, or there is no review at all. And an honest review, done with good humour and generosity, or with poignant respect for community, for progress, for Art… well, that’s the kind of writing worth reading, regardless of how much we agree or disagree with the perspective.

Another idea we need to discard is the idea that a ‘bad review’ should stop you from going to see a show. On the contrary, you should never let a critic define your experience. Rather think about it as the beginning of a conversation and your engagement with the work. Go and see it anyway, in spite of, and think to yourself, do I agree? What do I think? What did I feel? Which parts do I align myself with, which do I discard? (Of both play and criticism.) Clap back! Write an erudite reply. Post it on Facebook and give right of response. Email us! Phone a friend! Make a tiktok! Do what you will, but keep the conversation alive! Arts criticism is a jumping off point, a deep cut that lets you consider the work from more than your own perspective.

And finally I find myself come full circle.

Brisfest22 training session, with regular contributor Charmaine Idris and new writers Ranjini Ganapathy, Nadia Jade (facilitator), BB le Buff, Sarah McNally, Claire Alcock.

Arts criticism is cultural criticism. Our artists reflect the world around them, they choose a toothy issue or a personal one, one that affects millions or one that breaks a single heart, and they climb right in amongst it and thresh it out. It’s a vital service, it’s how a culture breathes, how it rebirths, how it discards the rotten and the dead weight, how it dances.

And writing about art, dissecting it, holding it up to the light, through the lens of deeper criticism we can see what happens and why and how. We can respond, we can identify when a trope has run out of useful life, or we can demand more intelligence, more integrity, from our arts makers, from our culture shapers. We work in tandem with them.

Reviews are provocations and conversations starters about one of the most important things that we can do as people - ponder our humanity by creating art that helps us to consider and challenge it.

And that’s what I think. Ah boom! Renewed, I approach my personal hundredth piece of arts criticism. Some of my opinions I value immensely. Some of them I have no doubt got wrong, or I have regretted my thoughts in reflection, changed my mind. But I am proud to have written them, I am proud to have unleashed this portal of Brisbane arts writing and can’t wait to see where we grow next.

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