Going too far ... The Go! Team at the 2005 Mercury Awards. Photograph: Dave Hogan/Getty
There's a popular idea that music critics are a hopelessly embittered group of people who ease the pain of their own failed pop careers by attempting to stamp brutally on the creativity of others. Happily this time of year, when every music magazine and website fills its pages with lists of 1000 Albums That Made Our Hearts Explode With Joy, gives the lie to that perception, revealing hacks in their true light as warmhearted Santa Clauses, whose only fault is a tendency to be, perhaps, a little too generous.
This isn't really a problem in today's music scene. It will only take the properly sceptical Grinches who read these lists a few minutes online to establish that, say, the much acclaimed Go! Team album actually sounds like somebody repeatedly throwing a box of knives on the floor. But in other areas of creative arts the problem of critics who love too much is more serious.
Take the theatre. If you read theatre reviews you would think that roughly a third of all plays produced are, broadly, "very good", maybe another third are "good" and the remainder are "mediocre" or downright awful. This is surely a reversal of the truth. I've been to the theatre about eight times in the last 10 years, after naively believing the rave reviews, and maybe three of the plays I saw were "good" the rest mediocre or worse.
But the critics are, inevitably, people who really, really like their art form so they're going to be more generous than a normal person who'll grudgingly admit that it can, on rare occasions, be alright.
It's significant that the most dependable, and often most entertaining, critics are on the TV pages. No one would complain if a TV critic produced 52 columns a year pointing out that everything they saw was unimaginably horrendous brain-rot. Even the more generous writers will generally have a 50 / 50 split of good to bad. This seems like a much more accurate audit than theatre gets. Is theatre that much better than TV? At least TV doesn't usually go on for so long and you don't have to sit next to people who'll laugh at, literally, anything.
Admittedly there are flaws in my plan of having an army of cynics spread out across the arts pages. You'd end up with the contemporary dance column headlined "More Twatting About On Stage" every week. It would be difficult to find critics who don't really like much of what they're watching but who, nevertheless, know a huge amount about it and are able to offer informed opinions.
Also, OK, it might be a bit mean to the poor artists churning the stuff out, 90% of whom would be thrown to the wolves. Still, as a consumer guide it would be more helpful than the current consensus that several genius albums, plays and films come out every week. What do you think? Are critics too generous to what they review? Or far too willing to stick in the knife?
