As this debate has unfolded over the last few days my feelings have swung from side to side. Initially part of me sympathised with Jonathan Jones's utopian call for total detachment, for critics to stand back and report with unsullied objectivity upon what they see and hear. But experience suggests that Michael Billington's pragmatic attitude is more realistic, as long as it is underpinned, as Michael says, with a fundamental determination to tell the truth - as the critic perceives it, of course - in a review. That truth may hurt or cause offence sometimes, but arts criticism isn't warfare, and though some in the business would fervently believe otherwise, the critics and those on whom they pass judgement are fundamentally on the same side - that of promoting the art form they believe in and, without dumbing down, of opening up its wonders and rewards to the greatest possible audience. All critics were fans before they started doing what they do now - unless they were academics, of course.
In any case the community of classical music is very different from that of the rather incestuous-sounding world of visual arts. It's much more like what Michael Billington describes as the "baggy, amorphous" situation in the theatre, with many different factions pulling in different directions. There's the fundamental division between the opera world and that of concerts, a much deeper one than you might think, each with its own set of sensitivities and priorities. It's not so long ago that most newspapers, including this one, had separate opera and concert critics; now only one national daily keeps them distinct, and the rest of us go to Covent Garden or ENO one night and the Barbican or the South Bank the next, moving in a much wider world that contains singers and instrumentalists, conductors and directors, as well as composers, one in which it's perhaps easier for critics to avoid getting too enmeshed in personal spats.
Having once been denounced on Radio 4 by Jonathan Miller (one of those artists who claims never to read reviews but who amazingly can quote exactly what has been written about them) I know that it possible for those on the receiving end to feel that critics are pursuing personal vendettas. And to generalise wildly, it does seem that those in the opera world and (perhaps because a voice is such a peculiarly personal instrument) singers in particular, have far thinner skins than their concert-giving colleagues, so that whenever I meet singers for the first time, I always mentally flick through the reviews I might have written about them, in case there's been anything less than favourable, which will undoubtedly be quoted verbatim.
The relationship between critics and composers is different again, and perhaps much closer to that in the art world, because it's a tighter-knit world, and one that is exacerbated because only a fraction of British music critics are really committed to new music, and can write knowledgeably about it. Most composers - the qualification is important, however - appreciate those that do, and there is, I like to think, a sense of community between them, perhaps because the world of new music is perceived so widely as being arcane and impenetrable, and composers, more than any other branch of the musical community appreciate what critics are trying to do for them in dispelling that perception. If I have any friends "in the business" they are composers, ones whose music I got to know and admire long before I encountered them.
