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Oh, look -- this week's Time Out NY hosts a round of every New Yorker's favorite sport: inside baseball. They asked these guys ("artists and industry leaders") to rate and comment the local criterati (including TONY's own) on a six-point scale, over five categories: knowledge, style, taste, accessibility, influence.

The comments and numerical ratings are anonymous, but the obvious party game is to try to pair the panelist with the invective. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to who said, of (otherwise top-rated) New Yorker critic Alex Ross, “Writes well, can’t hear, knows little”? Or of NYT pop critic Kelefa Sanneh, “His agenda is to raise crap to the level of art—he tends to write glowingly about some of the worst American music”? My favorite comment is whoever called Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni “the George Bush of restaurant reviewers: He’s a little man in a big job who got lucky but has never acknowledged the need to learn on this big job.” (If you don't get the reference, click here.)

One annoyance -- in an otherwise fun piece, the unnamed TONY editor(s) responsible for the intro can't resist taking the obvious cheap shot at bloggers:

At least they’re pros, unlike the thousands of armchair analyzers equipped with nothing more than opinions and a blog.

I can't resist noting that the top-rated pop critic and the top-rated classical critic, plus one of the two runners-up, all appear to have something in common...

Comments

[Matthew]

1.

Actually (and it's not readily apparent unless you get close enough to the screen to read the fine print) Nathan Huang is only responsible for the illustrations. Which means (drumroll) it's an anonymous cheap shot. Classy.

[DJA]

2.

Actually (and it's not readily apparent unless you get close enough to the screen to read the fine print) Nathan Huang is only responsible for the illustrations.

D'oh. You are, of course correct. I've revised the post.

[mwanji]

3.

Excellent.

Note that the only two illustrations where the critic is a woman are for Music and Music: Classical, which, ironically, only Theater equals for male dominance...