The panelists

Florence Almozini, Michael Barrett, Ronnie Bauch, Livia Bloom, Jonah Bokaer, Amy Bordy, Anthony Bourdain, Bill Bragin, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Chuck Close, Connor Coffey, Robert Contant, Karen Cooper, John Corigliano, Emmanuele de Montgazon, Harris Dew, Wylie Dufresne, Denis Dutton, Garrett Eisler, Cori Ellison, Josh Fox, Jonathan Franzen, Lia Gangitano, Aleba Gartner, David Gersten, Keith Gessen, Barbara Gladstone, Karen Greco, Molly Gross, Trajall Harrell, Susan Haskins, Ernio Hernandez, Jeff Hill, Laura Hoptman, Andy Horwitz, Ethan Iverson, Dennis Loy Johnson, Stephen Kent Jusick, Tom Kalin, Wayne Koestenbaum, Richard Kornberg, David Lang, Ron Lasko, Ben Leventhal, Anita Lo, Eric Lorberer, Mike Maggiore, Ben Marcus, John Mariani, James Marino, Mike Martinovich, Michael Mayer, Sarah Michelson, Shamim Momin, Rick Moody, Jim Nicola, Jack O’Brien, Michael Orthofer, Jacques Pepin, Matthew Perpetua, Tobias Picker, Fran Richard, Jeffrey Richards, Yancey Richardson, John Schaefer, Julian Schnabel, Regina Schrambling, Arthur Schwartz, Brett Singer, Kristin Sloan, Becky Smith, Valerie Smith, David Staller, Tanya Steel, Amanda Stern, Mike Stuto, Pam Tamowitz, Rob Tannenbaum, Rose Anne Thom, Lenora Todaro, Alexandra Tomalonis, Sue Torres, Alec Treuhaft, Laurie Uprichard, Didier Virot, Jeremy Walker, Chloe Walsh, Dean Wareham, Charles Wuorinen, John Wyszniewski, Guy Yarden, Billy Zavelson

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Further review

Hungry for some deep, engaging criticism in a particular field? Seek out this recommended reading.

ART

Charles Baudelaire, The Painters of Modern Life
The list of poet-critics is long (Guillaume Apollinaire, Frank O’Hara, Peter Schjeldahl), but it begins—as modern art criticism itself does—with the prose of this 19th-century French writer.

Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (1961)
Best known as the critic who championed Jackson Pollock, Greenberg was almost rapaciously opinionated about the primacy of abstraction. He missed the mark on Pop and postmodernism, but remains one of the 20th century’s strongest voices, as this collection attests.

Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977)
Anyone seriously interested in contemporary art in general, and sculpture in particular, should read this lucid collection, which begins with a piece on Rodin and concludes with an essay on minimalism and earthworks.

BOOKS

James Wood, The Broken Estate (1999)
Passionate, engaging and shot through with tough love, the long-form essays collected here take on authors old (Dante, Austen, Gogol) and contemporary (DeLillo, Pynchon, Morrison, Sebald).

Joan Didion, Political Fictions (2000)
Didion’s reviews of books about American politics show the esteemed writer performing some of her most casually brilliant literary dissections. She says of Bob Woodward’s work: “These are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925, 1932)
A touchstone of modern reviewing, Woolf’s book criticism, published in two volumes, considers authors (Donne, Austen, Conrad, Chaucer) with insight (duh). Even better, she approaches her duties with an inviting and infectious enthusiasm for the art of reading.

Elizabeth Hardwick, American Fictions (1999)
An idiosyncratic and deeply knowledgeable literary scholar, Hardwick arranges lurching, thoughtful meditations that consider Melville and Wharton, as well as modern-day titans such as Richard Ford and Joan Didion.

DANCE

Jill Johnston, Marmalade Me (1971)
Johnston’s collection is an exceptional document of one of the most thrilling movements in dance history: Judson Dance Theater. A critic at The Village Voice from 1959 to 1968, Johnston writes prose that is full of insight, as well as vivid description and analysis. A heroine, still.

Arlene Croce, Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker (2000)
As The New Yorker’s brilliant dance critic from 1973 to 1998, Croce crafted observant, textural prose that is still uncontested. This compilation includes reviews from three previous collections (now out of print), and is required reading.

Théophile Gautier, Gautier on Dance (1986)
Want a particularly fine example of the importance of dance critics? This compilation, translated and annotated by Ivor Guest, focuses on Gautier’s reviews of 19th-century French romantic ballet. And this is before political correctness. Meaning if he wasn’t fond of a dancer—or her body or face—he said it.

Edwin Denby, Dance Writings & Poetry (1998)
A poet as well as a dance critic, Denby, a fierce and early champion of the work of George Balanchine, wrote with inimitable clarity and deceptive simplicity. His influence on American dance is unrivaled, but it is the passionate writing that lives on: Like the art form itself, it is instilled with invincible beauty and grace.

FILM

Stuart Klawans, Left in the Dark: Film Reviews and Essays, 1988–2001 (2002)
Klawans, film critic at The Nation since 1988, gracefully balances politics and prose, writing some of the most eloquent and thoughtful movie criticism around.

Jim Hillier, ed., Cahiers du Cinéma, the 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (1985)
The passionate stances on auteurs and mise en scène from the first decade of the landmark film journal were taken by the five cinephiles who would become the architects of the French New Wave: Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol.

Pauline Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968) and Reeling (1976)
The former, Kael’s second book of critical essays (including her savage pan of The Sound of Music, which got her fired), covers the years just before her legendary tenure at The New Yorker. The latter collection shows the tart-tongued critic in highest form, lavishing disses and kisses on Nashville, Last Tango in Paris and Funny Lady.

Danny Peary, Cult Movies (1981)
A book that can make obsessives out of the merely curious (and, in many instances, critics out of writers), Peary’s compendium of ardent argument makes the case for Eraserhead and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls as much as for The Red Shoes and The Wizard of Oz. You’ll actually feel your mind being expanded.

Manny Farber, Negative Space (1972, 1998)
A painter as well as a writer, Farber used his prose to create impressionist, splatter-happy sentences that didn’t skimp on intelligence. This collection of pieces on everything from the merit of B movies to the defense of certain directors is the perfect introduction to his unique sensibility; the seminal “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” essay alone makes this essential for would-be critics and the cinerati.

MUSIC

Da Capo Books’ Best Music Writing series
This annual compendium is, predictably, a little inconsistent—hell, one year it was guest-edited by a nonexistent author! But it always reminds us of the continuing relevance of music criticism, love it or hate it. (And for the record, JT LeRoy’s selections were solid.)

Gene Santoro, Dancing in Your Head: Jazz, Blues, Rock, and Beyond (1994)
This anthology ranges from an appreciation of Robert Johnson to praise for John Zorn’s assaultive innovations, through essays drawn from Santoro’s work in The Nation, The Village Voice and Down Beat. Mavericks such as Ornette Coleman, Neil Young and Public Enemy bring out Santoro’s most effusive prose, but he’s also a sharp-eared analyst of popular idioms and their place within a cultural framework.

Francis Davis, Outcats: Jazz Composers, Instrumentalists, and Singers (1990)
It’s not hard to view iconoclasts such as Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor as being out of step with the cultural norm. In this influential anthology, Francis Davis explores how that the iconoclast label also applies to the work of a number of more mainstream historical figures, from legends like Lester Young and Billie Holiday to the young lion, Wynton Marsalis—not to mention figures including Frank Sinatra and Mort Sahl.

Gary Giddins, Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century (2004)
Many still consider jazz a forbidding, impenetrable world, but Giddins, a legendary Village Voice columnist, writes about America’s classical music with clearheaded breeziness. From Louis Armstrong to Gold Sparkle Band, this virtuoso of accessibility always foregrounds the human element.

Richard Meltzer, A Whore Just Like the Rest (2000)
For gonzo rock-era journalism, you sure wouldn’t go wrong with Lester Bangs’s classic Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Still, we favor his spiritual sibling Meltzer, whose wide-ranging screeds are even more visceral—and since he’s still alive, Meltzer has been able to keenly attack (and gleefully participate in) rock journalism’s latter-day absurdity.

MUSIC: CLASSICAL AND OPERA

Nicolas Slonimsky, ed., Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time (1953)
Any library of classical-music criticism has to include the late Russian musical polymath Nicolas Slonimsky’s eye-opening anthology of contemporary attacks on such time-honored figures as Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky.

George Bernard Shaw, How to Become a Musical Critic
In addition to his renown as a playwright, Shaw was among the most erudite and stylish classical-music critics to be found in late-19th- and early-20th-century London. Shaw scholar Dan Laurence’s 1961 anthology, out of print but easily tracked down, spans Shaw’s critical career from 1876 to 1950, offering essays filled with insight and contrarian humor.

Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Virgil Thomson: A Reader—Selected Writings 1924–1984 (2002)
More than a few classical composers turned their hand to criticism over the centuries, but few applied as deft a hand or produced copy as vibrant as that of Virgil Thomson, who wrote for the New York Herald Tribune from 1940 to 1954. True, he played favorites and used his position for self-advancement, but his role as a musical citizen has had at least as lasting an impact as his compositions, and likely more.

Andrew Porter, A Musical Season (1974)
During his two decades at The New Yorker, British writer Andrew Porter chronicled classical music in this city and around the world with lucid, elegant prose, in essays packed with technical detail and sometimes fiercely partisan rhetoric. This compilation and the four that followed cover his work through 1986; all are out of print but easy to locate secondhand.

Kyle Gann, Music Downtown: Writings from The Village Voice (2006)
One of the cruelest cuts of the ongoing reorganization at the Voice is the loss of Kyle Gann, the paper’s unparalleled chronicler of contemporary music and the downtown scene in particular. Like Thomson, Gann is a composer; his best pieces are informed by a sense of being in the trenches that no bystander could hope to achieve. As a memento of New York music in the ’80s and ’90s, this anthology is indispensable.

THEATER

Frank Rich, Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980–1993 (1998)
This collection of reviews by the “Butcher of Broadway” reveals that Rich was fiercely opinionated, yes, but also fair and engaged. He cared deeply about theater and how it reflected on the culture.

Kenneth Tynan, Curtains—Selections from the Drama Criticism and Related Writings (1961)
Tynan was the critics’ critic, a dandyish, chain-smoking aesthete who loved to shock the squares and who championed Britain’s “angry young man” writers. Curtains is a juicy, compulsively readable primer on Tynan and a model of wit, concision and passion to which other reviewers can aspire.

Robert Brustein, The Siege of the Arts (2001)
In the 1990s, Brustein made waves by challenging playwright August Wilson’s call for self-segregated African-American theater. The contrarian academic and reviewer defends theater and the culture in general against moral, political, and aesthetic correctness: “the three horsemen of the anti-culture.” This book comprises essays and reviews published in The New Republic from 1994 to 2001.

John Simon, John Simon on Theatre: Criticism 1974–2003 (2005)
Nearly 30 years of erudite, eloquent and peerlessly nasty criticism is crammed into this fat volume of gorgeously turned prose. Simon ogles pretty actors, vituperates the homely, praises British comedy and never meets a sacred cow he doesn’t tip over.