Judgment day

We live in a city that churns out massive amounts of art and entertainment, then proceeds to talk about it endlessly. At times it doesn’t even matter if you haven’t seen, read or heard something, as long as you can gab about it—and our local critics provide the handiest cheat sheets. But the best professional pundits aren’t just supplying party chatter for lazy-asses. They can shed light on the culture around us, champion David against Goliath and unearth obscure goodies. They can be thought-provoking and enlightening. And, of course, they can be complete morons who obviously have no clue about that great such and such. At least they’re pros, unlike the thousands of armchair analyzers equipped with nothing more than opinions and a blog.

But who critiques the critics? What happens when the megaphone is pointed in the other direction? We set out to review the reviewers, our own included. First, we developed a system of grading, on a scale of one to six, using five categories: knowledge, style, taste, accessibility and influence. Next, we enlisted panelists, from publicists to curators and artists—in other words, the people most likely to be directly affected by criticism—to use our system to rate NYC’s arbiters of taste and to provide (anonymous) comments.

To maintain the integrity of the project, we contracted an independent proctor: Samir Husni, chairman of the department of journalism at the University of Mississippi and an expert on the magazine industry. Husni read and collated the submissions—and consequently, nobody at Time Out New York knows how the individual panelists graded or which comments were made by whom.

The results are on the following pages. In each of eight fields of criticism, the reviewers are ranked in order of overall average score, accompanied by a selection of the panelists’ comments. (To avoid the appearance of being self-serving, TONY’s own critics were rated but are listed separately.)

Unsurprisingly, the critics who write for The New York Times were nearly universally deemed to be the most influential in their various areas, though many of them scored low in taste and knowledge. Among the art reviewers, The Village Voice’s Jerry Saltz received enthusiastic praise—and in fact, garnered the highest average score of any critic in any genre. The books category was surprisingly vibrant: Book reviewing is the only field in which authors are evaluated by their peers, making it pathologically incestuous and laden with conflicts of interest. Not by coincidence, this category had one of the highest rates of participation in our survey.

In the food section, the Times’ Peter Meehan outscored the chief critic, Frank Bruni. Film and music reviewers have arguably lost influence since the heady days of Pauline Kael and Lester Bangs, leading to more tepid comments in those categories. But the opera gloves came off when it came to classical music, theater and dance. Ticket prices in these genres can be much higher than in others, resulting in an increase in critics’ power—and a more intense reaction to them by our panelists. It seems that if there’s something everybody can agree on in New York, it’s that an opinion is one thing definitely worth fighting…about.

For a list of the participating panelists and for recommended collections of criticism in every field, go to timeoutnewyork.com/critics.

View the results per field:

• Art
• Books
• Dance
• Film
• Food
• Music
• Music: Classical
• Theater

Plus:

• Grade expectations: For those getting reviewed, a critic can be a savage or a savior.
• The panelists: TONY thanks the artists and industry leaders who participated in the survey of local critics.
• Further review: Hungry for some deep, engaging criticism in a particular field? Seek out this recommended reading.