Late August Note on Criticism Part 1
This is the first part of a three-part series; one 5000-word piece cut into more digestible pieces.
I think a lot about criticism and whether I’m any good at it. I started writing this once as an outgrowth of a review and another time as a standalone piece. In either case, I am trying to get at what critics do and why. This is not a list of rules from someone seasoned and respected, just my thoughts on something I care about. This feels too much like a disclaimer and it’s quite long, so the big takeaway is that critics have an intellectually challenging job rife with contradictions, but which depends on trying to engage earnestly with art and show other people what there is to it. I don’t know much about criticism of architecture or sculpture or theatre, but I spend a good deal of time thinking about the criticism of story and form in film, games, television, and fiction. This is in part because my earliest remembered dream careers were to be a novelist and a film director. Journalist and critic followed soon after.
There is always a crisis in the arts, always a crisis in criticism. There are Pauline Kael arguments from the 1960s that would not be out of place today, arguments about how cultures of boosterism or celebrating shallow works as deep because of the subjective appeal of their style undercuts the great artists and the good makers. The issues of corporate control in the studio system challenged by New Hollywood is resurgent and evolved; how do you bare your soul or express your viewpoint in a way that is true under the duress of constraints imposed by funders? This question intends to frame art, especially films and videogames, within a critical thought that helps guide audiences, but the contrast existed long before contemporary multimedia. It’s just that there was a time when arts were funded by patrons looking to flex their virtue as tastemakers rather than simply trying to extort the maximum surplus fiduciary value from other people’s creative labor. It seems to have passed. Still, this broad concern could as easily be asked of anyone going through life: how do you express yourself in a world that requires you labor to feed yourself? Where do you find the space to express yourself when, to exist, you have to take on tasks that have nothing to do with that?
I am a relativist about many things. One benefit of this is that I can from time to time put myself in other people’s shoes, or at least humble myself to understand that people see the world differently and aren’t necessarily just having a laugh or being untrue when their perception of what the world is and how it works differs from mine. Therefore, I can engage with art I don’t like or criticism I don’t agree with and gain something from the interaction. These are hardly unique traits, but nonetheless sometimes people feel offended by disagreement about art, because art matters to people.
At a basic level, the critic’s job is to inform a prospective audience about a work, perceive and describe; catch and release. In the case of a movie, what the film is about and how it is about it, to closely-paraphrase Roger Ebert. Sometimes that means zigging where everyone else zags, but such a contrarian result comes about from an earnest appraisal of a work. A funny thing about criticism, even if it's something as far from the definition I’m using as a simple product review, is that people who disagree will sometimes think you are being dishonest or unfair. If you dislike (or like) a work in a way someone else finds objectionable, they may assume you have ulterior motives, a hidden (or not-so-hidden) agenda. This is because sometimes people are tied too closely to works in a way that preclude fair treatment by way of what’s called conflict of interest. And critics of art are often enabled to critique it because of early film screenings, early review copies of books, early review code for games. Not always, not exclusively, but sometime. What constitutes a conflict of interest is contested space, but I suppose if you say you love everything you engage with for shallow reasons that sound like marketing copy you are more likely to be accused of that than if you say you hate everything you engage with, though people might call you a hater (sometimes a badge of honor) or a bore (perhaps less so). Sometimes, much more defensibly but held as equivalent by the most suspiciously over-protective-of-art-product audience member, critics are guided by core beliefs that affect how they see everything. This is what leads to writers being criticized for “making everything about politics” or “being woke” or whatever shorthand comfortable reactionary centrists (or pure reactionaries) use to reflexively oppose thinking critically about work. And sometimes critics can try to warn one another not to veer too much into that realm of critique based on their own tastes and analytical lenses.
These potential landmines can be hard to know if you are looking for a rubric, a template, or a guide for how to shape your art or criticism. All you can really do is engage with art that attracts you, even if it’s the sort of attraction tinged with or cloaked in initially-apparent repulsion, and say what you think about it. We augment our abilities to perceive, analyze, and relate by engaging with lots of the same medium, genre, and/or subgenre to hone precision and learn form. We imbibe critiques by people whose opinions we trust (i.e. find engaging and honest even if we don’t always agree) after (or before, in some cases) we engage a piece. The powers of contrast and context come from living and reading more widely. For a benign and limited example, the film critic that only reads horror, watches horror, and plays horror will have different things to say about the same film than the critic that only reads poetry, practices photography, plays life sims.
That’s something obvious which is very difficult to address for the contradictions it implies and enables. Every artist, including writers, wants to express their way of being in the world and what the world shows them and makes them feel. Many also want to contribute to a canon, a tradition, a political project, or so forth. Some of us crave legacy, some a better world, many of us both. Some of us crave clarity and find that, in attempting to provide it, we obfuscate.
There are ways in which art can change the world, but they are not as precisely simple as the way for which it is sometimes lauded or pilloried. For example, Dungeons & Dragons has certainly impacted the world. It has not led to the destruction of Western Civilization by child-stealing Satan-worshipping heathens. For all the sins of its creator, neither did Harry Potter. Dr. Strangelove did not preclude the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Neither did Star Wars. The Jungle is commonly said to have led to more concern about food safety than labor safety. But if we didn’t think art had any affect, we wouldn’t worry about propaganda, we wouldn’t worry about politics at all, we wouldn’t concern ourselves with “representation” specifically meaning how minorities are showcased or generally meaning what the text and subtext say about the world at all. Art has power, but even when it’s easily seen it isn’t simply measured.
I’ve written things I look back on as ill-conceived or ill-considered, though much less since I started getting paid to write, getting access to editors, getting drawn into the peripheries of communities seriously concerned with art, writing, criticism, and transgression as valuable. Growth is part of criticism. Changing one’s mind. Seeing another take and thinking “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” Some of my favorite reviews to read are when someone I disagree with makes a compelling case. What fun that is to read!