Gridlines: Everybody's a Critic

Gridlines is our recurring feature about the world of visual arts, performing arts, media arts, and beyond. We’re talking about the latest and greatest (and less-than-greatest) happenings—what’s grabbing our attention, bringing us joy, piquing our curiosity, and otherwise making us stop and take note. Today’s Gridlines come from Jennifer Wray, Wex marketing & media assistant.

The Critic, voiced by Jon Lovitz, with a couple of noteworthy guests circa 1995. Still: ABC/FOX

I’m a big fan of puns and wordplay in general. A tip of the hat (and a sip of Heirloom Café’s Wexpresso) to the A.V. Club, whose “Great Job, Internet!” feature lead me to Atlas Obscura’s new project: an interactive map guide to punny businesses, including nods to Central Ohio’s own Damsels in this Dress (a women’s clothing store), Marcy’s Clayground (a DIY pottery space), and 6-1-Pho (an eatery specializing in the Vietnamese soup).

• Five stars for shamelessness. What to do when you get a bad review from a great publication? The marketers behind the movie Legend decided to hide a Guardian (UK) pan in plain sight.
• Meanwhile, on occasion of the New York Film Festival, which just wrapped up over the weekend, the New York Times’s A.O. Scott asks, “Film Snob? Is That So Wrong?”
• (Side note: the Muppets have returned. Full House has a new life on Netflix. Can we bring back The Critic—notably, the only TV show Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert ever reviewed—now?)
• For her part, Michelle Grabner is having a ball puncturing Ken Johnson’s 2014 New York Times critique of her exhibition at the James Cohan Gallery, which negatively compared her work to that of a soccer mom.
• San Francisco is losing its artists, reports Hyperallergic, which says high rent prices are pushing them out. The city’s arts commission found that of nearly 600 local artists, 70% had been or were being displaced from their home, their studio space, or both. Perhaps they might consider relocating to our fair city, which Time recently ranked the No. 3 best place for millennials.
• Think sweeping vistas, pristine forests, majestic mountains and glass-flat lakes would wow any and all who see them? Not quite. Mother Jones has a five-star piece on one-star Yelp reviews of national parks.
• Reviewing the reviewers’ manuals: Praise from Hyperallergic for Gilda Williams’s How to Write About Contemporary Art and Eric Hayot’s The Elements of Academic Style.
• No one’s immune to criticism: first “Yelp for people” came for us. Then the people came for Peeple.  
• Feeling overwhelmed? Perhaps the time is right to take some life lessons from Sol LeWitt.