“No statue has ever been put up to a critic,” Sibelius is supposed
to have said, offering up an aperçu in which the world’s legions of
slighted artists have been only too happy to take refuge. The
aphorism, it seems to me, has one basic defect: it rather overlooks
how few statues there are to composers, authors, and painters, at
least when compared to kings, generals, and prime ministers: you
wouldn’t, in other circumstances, find the artsy crowd so eager to
endorse the values of public statuary. Besides, by no means all
critics want for honors. Brooks Atkinson and Walter Kerr, both of
The New York Times, have Broadway theaters named after them; their
predecessor, Alexander Woollcott, is memorialized in a cocktail, the
Brandy Alexander. It’s a passably diverting game to divide their
successors into those whose immortality would be more aptly
conferred by the theater’s marquee or by its bar. It’s hard to imagine
a Brandy Frank. On the other hand, it’s even harder to imagine a
Frank Rich Theatre, unless it was permanently closed. As for the
present occupant of the Times chair, Ben Brantley seems to be
piling up his own premature memorial in the startling number of
press columns, from In Theater to the Toronto Globe and Mail,
bemoaning the loss of the paper’s critical authority. For the first
time in decades, a Times notice is no longer seen as making or
breaking: Brantley disliked Titanic and Jekyll and Hyde and The