By Himie Koshevoy

Critics of creativity are never popular with the artists they criticize be it theater, movies or art. To be liked by everyone they would have to praise everything but then their judgment could not be trusted. Tate Cone was an acerbic judge of the stage in eastern Canada. His tool was a barbed wire pen dipped in acid that wrote only on sandpaper. He upbraided every artist and he became satisfactorily hated.

One day the odds caught up with Tate. He wrote a particularly bitter review of the efforts of an actor who happened to be a friend of the publisher. Cone was fired and thereafter he couldn’t find another job. Poverty clutched him and as the years went by he suffered to the extent that even the artists he had criticized became very sorry for him. A round the club you could hear often their comments about the plight of the critic who … had no spot to hiss in.