Extended family in the arts

Of the three major players in a vital artistic community -- creator, evaluator, audience -- the evaluator may have the toughest role. The evaluator must do several things at once: evaluate the work of the creator in a personal and fair way, which means owning up to personal standards and taste; communicating to his own audience what the work is, how it fits into the artistic family in which it belongs, and who in the evaluator's audience may likely appreciate the work, or not.

The evaluator also must work within parameters set by the venue in which s/he works, i.e. writing for a daily newspaper is different from writing for an arts weekly is different from writing for a literary journal. The evaluator has the hardest job and faces the most temptations to turn away from responsibility: the temptation to be superior, cute, a secret and better creator.

For creators and audiences, the roles are straightforward: do the best work you can, on the one hand, and respond according to your tastes, on the other. Yet each can learn from an evaluator doing a good job. Creators can learn to better understand how works change in presentation. Audiences can learn to expand their horizon of interests.

Historically changes in cultural tastes in the arts are usually led by one or more evaluators who champion a new form. Susan Sontag helped us understand Happenings in the sixties, for example. Max Perkins, the evaluator as editor (a lost art), gave us several important American authors, most dramatically Thomas Wolfe.

Too often, creators and evaluators are seen as enemy camps but in the most healthy environment, they play different roles in the same extended family. An evaluator with high standards can raise the level of appreciation of the audience but only by being a kind of teacher.

Creator-evaluator-audience, the extended family of the arts.