could show you the houses of drug dealers. I could show you the houses of murderers,” the innocuous-looking guy with a broad Cardiff accent keeps saying, again and again. The police ignore him, rough-housing the other morning drinkers off the bench and trying to haul one of his more boisterous companions into the van. Eleven o’clock on a Friday morning, fresh off the train from London, on my way to an exhibition: could I work this little vignette into my review, of an exhibition I hadn’t yet seen? You never know what might prove useful. It is good to have a ready supply of piquant details that prove that I am both alert to the moment and have my feet in the real world. Should I ask him to show me these places? It might make a sidebar or a featurette. How often I have wanted to wander off-course into the shadowlands and margins, not so much sidetracked as led astray, to come at things more circuitously and at a tangent – but then I might arrive too late, or not at all. We critics need to stay alert to circumstance and the unexpected. I was in need of diversion before I even arrived. The previous day I had been interviewed by a young academic from another country that had left me quite out of sorts. “What is your methodology?” he had asked. “And what are your critical criteria?” Search me. I think he believed that I carry a list about with me, a paper covered with numbered categories and tick boxes, or a spreadsheet where the pluses and minuses of an artist’s oeuvre are laid bare and calculated according to unshakable principles, perhaps even by the use of logarithms. Or, even worse, that I had in my head a set of precepts, positions and even a theory, if not several, that I could trot out to order. Even not having a theory is a theoretical position, as everybody knows. Pacing to and fro in the gallery, panther-quiet as I pad across the oak flooring (or my shoes ominous on the polished concrete), other critics veer out of my path, turn from their close encounters and step aside. We knew all about social distancing even before it started. Observe me now, an indoor flâneur wandering in circles, taking off my glasses and putting them on again, ferociously staring and squinting, brow-furrowing and lip-pursing, pausing now and again to jot something in my notebook or to take a photo, backtracking and tacking across the gallery as though in a gale, or suddenly becalmed in the spotlit doldrums, the wind taken from my sails. So much for the flâneur. Now I am drifting through a long afternoon, or beached like an oarsman who has run out of water. This whole process is accompanied by sighs, sniffs and snorts of half-strangulated derision, quiet murmurings to myself and muttered curses. Next I am a stalker, appraising the work before me as if it were a mortal enemy. Never mind murderers. Never mind methodology. A ne’er-do-well on the hoof, a critic at large. We are the men in black, and the tweedy ones, the flamboyant and the mousy, the well-dressed women and worse-dressed men, clutching our catalogues and going about our nefarious business and avoiding eye contact with one another. Get up too close and some other critic might tell you what to think, or a gallery person might take the opportunity to regale you with the official line. Do not read the wall panel if you want to retain your composure, and whatever you do try not to meet the artist. They might charm you. They might infatuate you. You might hate them. They might hit you. What use is a theory then? Other beady eyes peer over a high counter set in the corner, following me as I go, noting down the seconds and minutes I spend with each exhibit, trying to work out what I’m thinking from my body language, my feints and turns. You might have seen me at it. Occasionally I hurl myself to the floor, to get a weirder view, and I have been known to go about on all fours, to get up close to some floor-bound scatter piece, like a child with their toys, or to slump with my back to a wall, taking in the longer perspectives, or fling myself on to a bench, where I drape myself, deep in thought. Disappearing through the curtain into a video booth, hours might pass until I re-emerge, wild-haired and gawping, or refreshed after a nice lie-down. Some artworks encourage a narcoleptic view. After all that hard looking, and a period of reflection and a quick parsing of the gallery press release, there comes a point when we are at last obliged to deliver what is often touted as “the verdict”. The weight of history heavy on my shoulders and reluctantly donning the critic’s black cap, I finally take up my pen and deliver my judgment. Although I have done it in Costa and Starbucks, at pub tables and in gallery cafes and hotel bedrooms, this last bit is best conducted in camera, from the safety and seclusion of my own office. You never know when anger might assert itself, or umbrage be taken. There might be words, or worse. Even going about my business in the gallery has occasionally led to threats to my person, so when the time comes and the thing is still fresh in everyone’s mind, I like to keep a low profile when my review comes out. We have almost forgotten – how could we – perhaps the most onerous task of all: the conferring of the stars. Sometimes I wonder if we need to go through that rigmarole of writing at all, with all its quibbling ambivalences, and just leave it to the stars. One star for don’t-even-go-there. Two is pretty terrible and three might signify run-of-the-mill mediocrity or an implicit, schoolmasterly “could do better”. This is where friends and enemies, as well as careers, are made and lost, where the partisan acolytes of the artist, as well as their dealers, collectors and curators are either vindicated or infuriated. This is where knives are sharpened, stealthy assignations organised, where bones are arranged to be broken. There’s a bloke in Cardiff who might introduce you to the right people for the job. Fallible mortals that we all are, most artists cannot expect to get more than four stars. Five stars means unmissable, or that I have somehow gone giddy under the influence of it all, where I am ravished, moved even to tears of joy, and where method and criteria fly out of the window. My reaction invents itself as I go. In other words, I make shit up, winging it, and cobble something together in whatever time I have left.