the role of the critic
I had a few conversations last week that touched on criticism. One of them was with
here on substack, but it got the ol wheels turning a bit so I want to briefly touch on the role of the critic.And since I write a fair amount of criticism, I suppose I’m talking a bit about myself and my goals or at least what I think my goals should become. Because my thoughts have shifted a bit on this. Many of my reviews are really more like reflections on my life, and I do this because I think the interaction between art and our lives is inextricable, so to write about art is to write about yourself. And often, at least for me, writing about myself is really writing about art.
who is a critic
First, I suppose I’ll dwell on what it means to be a critic. For while you can find buckets of criticism online in the form of billions of hours of youtube and tiktok videos or newsletters or websites of varying degrees of intelligence and usefulness, I think the difficulty for many right now is parsing the quality of the information they’re getting.
Granted, there is no way to do this now without being familiar with the critic or venue. Once upon a time, you could trust the Atlantic or New Yorker or whatever other major periodical to be an important and even crucial gatekeeper of quality.
Not so anymore.
Worse, now we run into criticism as paid advertisement, though without any disclosure or transparency so the glowing review at whatever website you’re reading or influencer you’re watching was paid for by the thing they’re reviewing.
I believe there are a few important qualities that a critic must have in order to be of any use.
They must not only explore deeply in the artform they’re critiquing but also widely. Perhaps just as important, however, is that they must explore other artforms deeply and widely.
They must have a voice worth reading/watching.
They need a perspective.
While I don’t think a critic necessarily needs to be a historian of, say, literature in order to review books effectively, but I do think not knowing literary history will give you a shallow and often dismissible perspective. I’ve mentioned this before, but I do feel like many book reviewers working right now or that you’ll find on booktube or booktok have simply not read anything written before they were born. Worse, many have never read outside of the genre they’re reviewing.
Too few videogame reviewers have read a book, let alone a great book, and too few have also explored film in a serious way. While these aren’t strictly necessary, especially if you’re reviewing a game like Mario Wonder, but if you want to take an artform seriously, I think you need to take its influences seriously. And much of modern videogames are as indebted to film and literature as they are to Tetris and Pacman.
That’s not to say I expect Woolf or Dostoevsky from my videogames, let alone Tarkovsky or Mallick or even Christopher Nolan (there are even good reasons why you don’t want these kind of things in games), but that makers of games and reviewers of games could use some rounding out, culturally. But it’s also true, I think, that book reviewers are doing themselves a disservice by not taking the Sitcom or Prestige Crime Drama TV seriously.
And so a critic must consume and engage with art. Broadly. Deeply. A book reviewer, for example, would gain a lot from listening to Miles Davis, even if the connection isn’t obvious. It may also be helpful to do drugs, but I won’t exactly recommend that to the children here.
in defense of gatekeepers
There was something lost when we began bypassing the gates. Now, there are myriad issues with gatekeeping and the ways artistic industries have kept certain peoples and perspectives out, but those have been widely discussed for fifty years or longer.
We’ve since largely treated gatekeepers and gatekeeping as nefarious forces in culture and society, but I do think there was great value to the hipster, for example. Even the dilettante! For even the pose of taking art very seriously and exploring the underground and underbelly, discussing art in its most aesthetic form, had great value.
And even as annoying as hipsters are and were, they brought a lot of great beauty into my life. Now, almost all art people consume and engage with was brought to them by algorithm powered by money. Not to mention that much of what was once deemed indie has been bought up by the giant players in their respective industries so even the new indie bands or movies are really just low budget efforts by conglomerates.
And as anyone can now dump their songs or books or films into the great gaping algorithmic maw, and as firms begin implementing AI to churn out garbage to fill your feed, there is now a greater need for gatekeepers than ever before.
For how does one sift through the hundreds of thousands of books on Kindle Unlimited or the hundreds of thousands of albums on Spotify or the hundreds of thousands of comedians on youtube or tiktok or instagram reels?
Well, perhaps there is no longer a way to find such a filter, and because of the deluge, there’s no good way for a critic to be up to speed with everything.
If your niche as a reviewer is selfpublished fantasy, for example, there are likely 100 books published per day that would fit that niche. And while reviewers often read more than the average person, you’d be surprised to discover how many read fewer than fifty books a year.
the gadfly
Socrates called himself society’s gadfly before drinking hemlock after losing his trial and I believe this gadfly is really the role of criticism. For criticism is an artform. You may not recognize it as such, but any criticism worth reading or watching is brought to you with artistry.
Because there is an artistry to criticism. Pulling together the many threads of culture and society and politics and art together to generate a thought worth having, a perspective worth sharing, is the whole of it. It may be why you’re reading this now.
And this art is a generator for more culture, for further experimentation and exploration. The creation of art may be play, but the criticism of art is serious work that goes on to guide future play.
And, sure, this may all sound quite self-serving since I am a self-identified critic both by inclination and by sheer volume of words generated here talking about books, movies, music, and games, but I’m also a writer of fiction. And I see both of these as feeding off one another.
We learn how to write, how to create art, by engaging with the art of others, by looking at it both with a critical eye but also with the hands of a child prepared to play. And I learn a great deal from approaching art in this dual manner, but especially when I choose to engage in the serious work of criticism. By diving into how or why a work of art succeeds or fails teaches you much about what you want and what you expect from art, but also what you think is now possible in the medium of your choice.
Art fills our lives. Possibly now more than any previous time in human history. The nonstop firehose of art fills every moment of our lives and I think this has caused us to value it less. The omnipresence of music and movies and words on screens makes it all seem quite mundane and ordinary, rather than the product of monumental effort and play. This has caused art itself to have few teeth in social change, I think.
But it needn’t be so.
For you can start today to take music more seriously. To stop allowing it to exist purely as background noise. The same is true for movies and TV. It doesn’t have to be just a screen on the wall blaring noise while you stare at the screen in your hand. It can be art that you seriously and actively engage with, that may change you permanently the way it changed me many times in life.
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