Welcome antidotes to the end-of-year/beginning-of-year top-ten lists and eyes-raised-to-the-future optimism came from two recognized critics over the past few weeks. First, in his own personal year-end round-up, Randy Gener is less than cheerful about the future of his own profession:

Not only have I paid my dues, I have also paid dearly for my convictions — in personal ways even I have not begun to fathom.  For as long as I can remember, I have never had the backing of any institution, for-profit or non-, that supported my idea of arts criticism as a public service.  Today’s mainstream publications, print or digital, more or less mimic the dinosaur 20th-century media’s dependency on celebrity and fame.  Media execs claim their practice is called vetting. The more my ideas get turned down, I am beginning to wonder if they should really call it news suppression.

Such fault lines reveal why change has not happened. Even the supposed last bastions of arts journalism don’t truly serve the journalistic profession either.  At a majority of non-profit arts magazines I am aware of, the reporters simply write down what the arts administrators and exec directors say to them at press conferences or media interviews.  What these reporters are doing isn’t journalism — it’s stenography.  Worse, your own colleagues are frequently the first ones who will work to bring you down in the profession — who will resist or oppose your transparent attempts to rethink how best to achieve a better global dialogue about arts and culture.

If Randy finds things this grim behind the scenes, Michael Feingold is even grimmer about the state of American drama on the stage, in a recent review of Close Up Space:

I can’t blame Metzler for repeating the pattern. Like all playwrights, she wants to get produced. Naturally, she has turned out the sort of play our would-be serious theaters increasingly tend to produce. They, too, strive to imitate previous successes; everybody’s following the Ruhls. The result, in Close Up Space, is a viscous mixture of sitcom and after-school special. It opens with patent absurdity, in an ostensibly naturalistic context, and ends in a glop of would-be tragic ironies. Reality, heightened or everyday, is the one thing it virtually never touches.

Thanks to Garrett Eisler for calling my attention to this latter review.