Common Mistakes in Arts Reviews—and How to Fix Them
A review is an argument with a deadline. Most weak arts coverage is not weak because the critic got it wrong — reasonable people disagree about a show all the time — but because the argument isn't there. Assertions stand in for evidence, context arrives either missing or in a lecture, and the verdict lands before the reader has been given a single reason to trust it. What follows is the working checklist editors end up giving most often, organised by the mistakes that cause the most damage.
The review that is really a synopsis
The most common failure in arts coverage is a piece that describes the thing instead of judging it. You can spot it in the first paragraph: two hundred words on the premise of the novel, the running order of the album, the layout of the gallery, and no indication of whether any of it works. By the time a verdict appears, it is a single sentence bolted onto the end like a fire door.
The fix is a ratio, not a ban. Description is essential — a reader who hasn't seen the work needs enough to follow you — but every descriptive sentence should be earning its place by supporting a claim. Ask of each paragraph: if I cut this, does my argument lose anything? If the answer is no, it is a synopsis, and the programme already has one.
A useful test: cover the descriptive passages and read only the judgments. They should still make sense as a sequence. Then do the reverse, and check that the description actually matches the judgments you made. Reviews that fail this second test are the ones where the critic saw a different show from the one they wrote about.
Adjectives doing work that evidence should do
Words like stunning, masterful, uneven, and brave are promissory notes. They tell the reader that something happened without saying what. A review built out of them reads as confident and conveys almost nothing.
Pay the note with a detail the reader could verify if they bought a ticket. Instead of "her performance is luminous", write what she did: "She plays the final monologue almost entirely still, hands flat on the table, and the room goes quiet in a way it hadn't all evening." Instead of "the translation is clumsy", quote the line where a character says something no one would ever say out loud, and let it sit there without commentary.
One concrete detail per strong claim is a good working rule. Not every sentence needs evidence — that would be exhausting to read — but the load-bearing adjectives do. If you can't produce the detail, the claim is probably a mood rather than an observation, and the honest move is to soften it or cut it.
Context: too little, then too much
Context failures come in two flavours. The first is none at all: a debut exhibition reviewed as though the artist were a known quantity, a genre novel marked down for not being literary realism, a revival judged with no reference to when the play was written. The second is a lecture — four paragraphs of biography and art history before the reader learns whether the thing is any good.
The question that sorts this out is simple: what does the reader need in order to trust my judgment? A line on where the artist is in their career. A sentence on the tradition the work is working in or against. A note on the constraints — a two-week rehearsal period, a first feature, a commission with a fixed brief. Then get on with the review.
Practical details belong here too, and they are the ones most often missing: the venue, the dates, the running time, who directed, designed, translated, adapted. Translators and dramaturgs vanish from reviews with depressing regularity. If a name is on the poster, it should be in the piece.
Taste dressed up as law
"I found it boring" and "it is boring" are different sentences, and the gap between them is where a great deal of unfairness in criticism lives. The first reports your experience, which you can defend. The second makes a claim about the object, which needs an argument behind it.
Try naming your standard. If you are judging a comedy by whether it made you laugh, say so, and then say which jokes landed and which didn't. If you are judging a slow film by how it handles duration, explain what it does with the time rather than simply resenting it. Readers don't need you to be neutral; they need to know what yardstick you are holding.
Two traps are worth watching. One is mistaking difficulty for depth — a work that is hard to sit through is not automatically serious. The other is mistaking your own impatience for the work's failure. Sometimes you were the wrong viewer, or you were tired, or the heating was off. Where that is true, saying so is more honest than dressing it up as a verdict on the artist.
Fair criticism, and the cheap shot
Criticism lands on people. The gap in power between a critic and a first-time playwright is far wider than the gap between a critic and a publicly funded institution, and the tone should reflect that. This does not mean going soft. It means being accurate about what you are attacking.
Attack the work, not the person. "The script keeps circling the same argument" is a criticism a writer can use. "The writer clearly has nothing to say" is a verdict on a human being, and it is also unprovable. Separate ambition from execution: a company can attempt something difficult and fall short, and the review should make clear which of those you are describing.
If the sound desk failed in act one, say so, and let the reader weigh it. If you saw a preview, say that too. And resist the clever line that misrepresents the thing you sat through — a memorable sentence that is slightly untrue will outlive the correction.
What the edit should catch
Most of the damage is done in the edit rather than the draft. A few checks cover the majority of it:
- Headline and verdict agree. A mostly negative review under a triumphant headline is an editorial error, and readers remember it.
- Names, titles, dates, and credits are verified. Check the spelling of every collaborator against the programme or press materials, not against your notes.
- The verdict appears early enough. A reader should know the direction of travel within the first hundred words, even if the reasoning takes longer.
- Every "however" paragraph is doing real work. If the qualification contradicts the main judgment, one of them is wrong.
- The strongest claim has a detail under it. And the weakest claim is either supported or gone.
- The second-best paragraph is cut. It usually repeats the best one in softer language.
- You can answer the artist's fairest objection. If you can imagine a reasonable rebuttal and have no reply, the argument needs another pass.
Before you file
Read the piece aloud. Check that your strongest claim has evidence beneath it and that your weakest claim is either supported or deleted. Make sure a reader who has no intention of going still learns something — about the work, the form, or the argument the artist was having with it.
The test is not whether the artist would like the review. It is whether a reader who disagrees with you can see exactly what you saw and understand why you drew the conclusion you did. Get that right, and the review stays useful long after the run has closed and the tickets are off sale.
Photo: Jakub Zerdzicki / Pexels