{"id":842,"date":"2022-04-07T06:27:21","date_gmt":"2022-04-07T06:27:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highclasswriters.com\/blog\/?p=842"},"modified":"2022-04-07T06:27:22","modified_gmt":"2022-04-07T06:27:22","slug":"responsibilities-of-a-critic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highclasswriters.com\/blog\/responsibilities-of-a-critic\/","title":{"rendered":"responsibilities of a critic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Everybody\u2019s a Critic. And That\u2019s How It Should Be.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By <\/strong>A.O. Scott<\/strong><\/a> \/ <\/strong>Jan. 30, 2016<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

NEXT month, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will complete its annual ritual of designating the best in two dozen cinematic categories. The Oscars have come under fire this year for the predictable, shameful racial homogeneity of their nominations, but that is not the only reason to complain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am a critic. A scold, a snob, a paid hack intent on punishing artists and spoiling the fun of the public. That, at least, is the role I\u2019m sometimes called upon to play. And in that capacity I\u2019d like to say: Forget about the Oscars. It\u2019s pretty much a foregone conclusion that you will, if history is any guide. The best-picture winners that live up to the name \u2014 \u201cThe Godfather,\u201d \u201cThe Apartment,\u201d \u201cThe Hurt Locker\u201d \u2014 are outliers in a field of bloated, flash-in-the-pan mediocrities. <\/em>\u201cAround the World in 80 Days\u201d? \u201cOut of Africa\u201d? \u201cCrash\u201d? Please.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, the pantheon of all-time great films is largely a roster of the snubbed, from \u201cCitizen Kane\u201d to \u201cDo the Right Thing\u201d to \u201cBoyhood.\u201d The best film in any given year is almost guaranteed to be one that didn\u2019t win, or one that wasn\u2019t nominated at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That much is obvious. The Oscars are silly. Why should we suppose that 6,000 members of an insular and entitled professional association would be reliable judges of quality? A show-business oligarchy can\u2019t seriously be in the business of legislating taste.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But neither can the public. Box-office data is hardly an answer to industry-insider cluelessness. \u201cAvatar\u201d has made more money than any other movie ever, but does anyone think that makes it the best movie of all time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then again: Who am I to talk? I make my living sorting, ranking and judging movies, part of a professional guild devoted, precisely, to the legislation of taste and the denomination of excellence. If the academy is out of touch, what does that make me? A dinosaur. A stagecoach driver in the age of Uber. An old man yelling at a cloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the Internet, everyone is a critic \u2014 a Yelp-fueled takedown artist, an Amazon scholar, a cheerleader empowered by social media to Like and to Share. The inflated, always suspect authority of ink-stained wretches like me has been leveled by digital anarchy. Who needs a cranky nag when you have a friendly algorithm telling you, based on your previous purchases, that there is something You May Also Like, and legions of Facebook friends affirming the wisdom of your choice?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The days of the all-powerful critic are over. But that figure \u2014 high priest or petty dictator, destroying and consecrating reputations with the stroke of a pen \u2014 was always a bit of a myth, an allegorical monster conjured up by timid artists and their insecure admirers. Criticism has always been a fundamentally democratic undertaking. It is an endless conversation, rather than a series of pronouncements. It is the debate that begins when you walk out of the theater or the museum, either with your friends or in the private chat room of your own head. It\u2019s not me telling you what to think; it\u2019s you and me talking. That was true before the Internet, but the rise of social media has had the thrilling, confusing effect of making the conversation literal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like every other form of democracy, criticism is a messy, contentious business, in which the rules are as much in dispute as the outcomes and the philosophical foundations are fragile if not vaporous. We all like different things. Each of us is blessed with a snowflake-special consciousness, an apparatus of pleasure and perception that is ours alone. But we also cluster together in communities of taste that can be as prickly and polarized as the other tribes with which we identify. We are protective of our pleasures, and resent it when anyone tries to mock or mess with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Obsessives and dilettantes, omnivores and geeks, highbrow and low, we are more likely to seek affirmation than challenge. Some people love opera. Others love hip-hop. Quite a few are interested in both. \u201cIt\u2019s all good!\u201d you might say. But you don\u2019t believe that, any more than I do. Some of it is terrible. There is, axiomatically, no disputing taste, and also no accounting for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet our ways of thinking about this fundamental human attribute amount to a heap of contradictions. There is no argument, but then again there is only<\/em> argument. We grant that our preferences are subjective, but we\u2019re rarely content to leave them in the private realm. It\u2019s not enough to say \u201cI like that\u201d or \u201cIt wasn\u2019t really my cup of tea.\u201d We insist on stronger assertions, on objective statements. \u201cThat was great! That was terrible!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or maybe that\u2019s just me. This newspaper, after all, pays me to turn my personal impressions of movies into persuasive arguments \u2014 not only to share my feelings about movies but also to assess them and provide some useful counsel to readers. So it might seem as if I\u2019m setting out here to make a self-serving point. Don\u2019t trust the Hollywood insiders who control the Oscars! Ignore the quantified peer pressure of Rotten Tomatoes or Box Office Mojo! Listen to me!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And sure: I do have a stake in defending the relevance of my own job, even as I grant that it\u2019s kind of a ridiculous way to pay the rent. Critics are sometimes appreciated \u2014 or even, in rare cases, admired, like Roger Ebert \u2014 but we are more often feared, resented or ignored altogether. In the popular mind, critics are haters and killjoys. Maybe we\u2019re sadists, like the viperous, martini-swilling New York Times theater reviewer in \u201cBirdman.\u201d Or maybe we\u2019re masochists: In spite of that cruel caricature, \u201cBirdman,\u201d an Oscar best picture, is \u201cCertified Fresh\u201d by Rotten Tomatoes (I think it\u2019s vastly overrated, by the way, but that\u2019s just my opinion).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ability of critics to make a living may be precarious, but criticism remains an indispensable activity. The making of art \u2014 popular or fine, abstruse or accessible, sacred or profane \u2014 is one of the glories of our species. We are uniquely endowed with the capacity to fashion representations of the world and our experience in it, to tell stories and draw pictures, to organize sound into music and movement into dance. Just as miraculously, we have the ability, even the obligation, to judge what we have made, to argue about why we are moved, mystified, delighted or bored by any of it. At least potentially, we are all artists. And because we have the ability to recognize and respond to the creativity of others, we are all, at least potentially, critics, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This means, above all, that our job is to think. As consumers of culture, we are lulled into passivity or, at best, prodded toward a state of pseudo-semi-self-awareness, encouraged toward either the defensive group identity of fandom or a shallow, half-ironic eclecticism. We graze, we binge, we pick up and discard aesthetic experiences as if they were cheap toys. Which they frequently are \u2014 mass-produced widgets from the corporate assembly line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, in our roles as citizens of the political commonwealth we are conscripted into a polarized climate of ideological belligerence. Bluster substitutes for argument. Important political divisions are at once magnified and trivialized. There is little room for doubt and scant time for reflection as we find ourselves buffeted by sensation and opinion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do we sort through it all? How do we manage the prodigious too-muchness of the demands on our attention? The incentives not to think \u2014 to be one of the many available varieties of stupid \u2014 are powerful. But there is also genius around us, and within us. There is \u201cHamilton\u201d and \u201cTo Pimp a Butterfly,\u201d \u201cTransparent\u201d and the novels of Elena Ferrante. Take your pick! Make your case!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are far too inclined to regard art as a frivolous, ornamental undertaking and to perceive taste as a fixed, narrow track along which we stumble, alone or in like-minded company. At the same time, we too often seek to subordinate the creative, pleasure-giving aspects of our lives to supposedly more consequential areas of experience, stuffing the aesthetic dimensions of existence into the boxes that hold our religious beliefs, our political dogmas or our moral certainties. We belittle art. We aggrandize nonsense. We can\u2019t see beyond the horizon of our own conventional wisdom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enough of that! It\u2019s the mission of art to free our minds, and the task of criticism to figure out what to do with that freedom. That everyone is a critic means that we are each capable of thinking against our own prejudices, of balancing skepticism with open-mindedness, of sharpening our dulled and glutted senses and battling the intellectual inertia that surrounds us. We need to put our remarkable minds to use and to pay our own experience the honor of taking it seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The real culture war (the one that never ends) is between the human intellect and its equally human enemies: sloth, clich\u00e9, pretension, cant. Between creativity and conformity, between the comforts of the familiar and the shock of the new. To be a critic is to be a soldier in this fight, a defender of the life of art and a champion of the art of living.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not just a job, in other words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everybody\u2019s a Critic. And That\u2019s How It Should Be. By A.O. 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