THE CHATTER

According to this critic, artists have every right to fire back at criticism — fair or foul

How exactly is an artist supposed to react to criticism

of their work?

In the winter of 2012, Pete Wells, esteemed chief restaurant critic at The New York Times, paid a much-anticipated visit to Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square, the expensive, expansive 500-seat novelty diner founded by celebrity chef Guy Fieri, of Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.

He ate Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty with supermelty-cheese and Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche. He imbibed the Almond Joy cocktail with bourbon butter crunch chips. He sampled Guy’s Famous Big Bite Caesar, replete with half a dozen miniature croutons. Then he sat down at his desk and, in lieu of an ordinary review, he wrote a long, acerbic letter to Guy Fieri.

“Have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square?” opens the piece that was eventually published in the Times, under the title As Not Seen On TV. “Have you pulled up one of the 500 seats at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar and ordered a meal? Did you eat the food? Did it live up to your expectations?” Wells continues, relentlessly: “Were you struck by how very far from awesome the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are? If you hadn’t come up with the recipe yourself, would you ever guess that the shiny tissue of breading that exudes grease onto the plate contains either pretzels or smoked almonds? Did you discern any buttermilk or brine in the white meat, or did you think it tasted like chewy air?” It goes on like this. “Is the entire restaurant a very expensive piece of conceptual art?” he concludes. “Is the shapeless, structureless baked alaska that droops and slumps and collapses while you eat it, or don’t eat it, supposed to be a representation in sugar and eggs of the experience of going insane?”

He finishes with a simple question: “What is going on at this new restaurant of yours, really?”

Fieri was stung, understandably. Days after the review appeared, having attracted the attention of seemingly the entire internet and aroused vehement debate over its fairness as criticism, the chef and restaurateur appeared on the Today show to defend the honour of his establishment. “I’ve read reviews. There’s good and there’s bad in the restaurant business. But that, to me, went overboard, and it really seemed to me like there was another agenda,” he said. “It’s a great way to make a name for yourself, going after a celebrity chef who is not a New Yorker.” Fieri objected in particular to the implication that he hadn’t been involved much in the creation of the restaurant. Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, he insisted, was all “heart and soul.”

Fieri, hearteningly, did not seem opposed to the idea of a bad review on principle; he was receptive to criticism, and indeed admitted that Wells made good points. His defense was rooted in an authentic belief in the quality of his restaurant. “We are trying as hard as we can to make it right, to do it right,” he told the interviewer passionately. “Is it perfect right now? No. Are we striving for it? Yeah.” The restaurant, he pointed out, had only been open for two months at the time of the review. It needed room to grow, to improve. “This is an everchanging, ever-evolving process,” he said. “Let’s see where we are in six months.”

I’ve been thinking about Wells and Fieri a lot recently, in the wake of several high-profile cases of artists responding angrily to negative reviews. After a mixed notice in Pitchfork described rapper Lizzo’s album Cuz I Love You as sometimes “ham-handed” and reminiscent of “soulless stadium-pop,” she promptly tweeted that “PEOPLE WHO ‘REVIEW’ ALBUMS AND DON’T MAKE MUSIC THEMSELVES SHOULD BE UNEMPLOYED,” an irate generalization that generated an enormous amount of discussion and backlash. Likewise, Chance the Rapper had a meltdown online in the days after his album The Big Day was released to lukewarm reviews; he tweeted that he was “getting this crazy feeling that people want me to kill myself,” naturally provoking a wave of confused reassurance and support.

Most prominently, and curiously, Lana Del Rey retaliated against NPR’s Ann Powers, resulting in a minor storm of controversy. The singer-songwriter declared that she did not “even relate to one observation you made about the music” in Powers’s mixed-negative review of Del Rey’s album Norman F---ing Rockwell. Rejecting the review’s claim that, in comparison to Joni Mitchell, Del Rey’s lyrics “feel uncooked,” she wrote: “There’s nothing uncooked about me. To write about me is nothing like it is to be with me. Never had a persona. Never needed one. Never will.” She later added: “So don’t call yourself a fan like you did in the article and don’t count your editor as one either. I may never have made bold political or cultural statements before — because my gift is the warmth I live my life with and the self-reflection I share generously.”

As a lot of people quickly pointed out, Del Rey had little reason to respond so indignantly. Norman F--ing Rockwell was shaping up to be the most celebrated album of her career; Pitchfork had given it an extremely effusive (and rare) 9.4 out of 10, and on Metacritic, the review aggregator, the album sits at a dazzling 87 per cent, signifying “universal acclaim.” There was talk of entitlement, oversensitivity, even arrogance; people, and of course, other critics in particular, chided her being being so thin-skinned, and reminded artists that criticism is a necessary consequence of producing art. Some took it as nothing short of a reminder of the importance of criticism — truth to power, checks and balances, etc. The Los Angeles Times thanked Del Rey “for demonstrating, however accidentally, why critics matter.”

But if these examples are to be considered inappropriate, it prompts the question: How exactly should artists respond to criticism? The critic — and I say this as one — has the easier job; not because criticism isn’t hard, which it often is, but because it comes after the fact, and is fundamentally responsive. The artist puts themselves entirely on the line, and though a critic may have insightful, amusing or otherwise significant things to say about the resulting work, the critic rarely makes themselves so vulnerable.

I have written some very, very nasty things about bad albums, bad movies and bad books; that nastiness seemed justified by the quality of the work under review, which (I promise you) was sometimes truly vile. But I don’t expect the people whose work I am attacking to simply accept what I say without complaint. And if my work were so brutally denigrated, I’d bear a grudge too.

When Del Rey’s first album, Born To Die, was released in 2012, the music press had a field day with it. Del Rey had been recently “exposed” as Lizzy Grant, an aspiring pop singer who had seemingly manufactured a new, prefab persona; a lot of the criticism of the music (bizarrely, it seems, in retrospect) was fixated on the phoniness of the woman behind it all. The music blog Tiny Mix Tapes, in one of the most noxious, condescending reviews ever published by a serious outlet, simply compiled an index of the nouns on the record, refusing to take the album seriously and dismissing it with zero stars as “shtick.” If you are Lana Del Rey, and you’ve been scoffed at and ridiculed like this for almost a decade, what relationship do you think you’re going to have to music criticism? Why shouldn’t she fight back?

Critics, by the nature of the profession, have a responsibility to be serious, thoughtful, even-handed, and reasonable. Artists have no such responsibility.

They are not obligated to accept an unfair review on its own terms; they are not even obligated to accept a fair one. Of course, Lizzo is wrong that music critics who don’t make music should be unemployed. But she was not wrong to read Pitchfork’s barbs and erupt with rage and resentment: That is a healthy, sensible reaction to something that probably hurt like hell to read, even if it was (to my mind, at least) accurate. It is human nature to feel wounded by criticism.

Pete Wells, as the restaurant critic for The New York Times, is entitled to eat at Guy Fieri’s restaurant and trash it in print. And Fieri is entitled to go on the Today show and defend his heart and soul. That’s art; that’s criticism. We all have to strive to accept it.

HOW EXACTLY SHOULD ARTISTS RESPOND TO CRITICISM?