At a time of copious opinions on the Internet, a good critic is someone who can further extend the art they are critiquing into an entirely new piece of art. “The motive of the critic who is really worth reading is the motive of the artist to make an articulate noise in the world,” said journalist H.L. Mencken in A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing. Furthermore, a true critic reviews the arts without hesitation. They do not rely on writing positive blurbs in order to have their name published. A true critic writes the truth and knows why they hold an opinion.
Merely stating whether something is good or bad does not make a high-quality critique. One has to go past thumbs up or thumbs down conclusions and delve into the themes and statements of a piece of art until the work produced is of the same level or higher than the art being discussed. For example, claiming Hal Ashby’s 1971 film “Harold and Maude” is a movie about a May-December romance, grossly diminishes the film’s deeper value. Instead of focusing on the societal aspect of the May-December romance, one should note the film’s juxtaposition of Maude’s strong sense of self with Harold’s feelings of insignificance. While Maude is part of the generation that has survived the Holocaust, Harold belongs to the generation in which Vietnam, argued by some to be a meaningless war, is taking place.
A skilled critic would go further, noting the most poignant scene, in which Maude explains the merits of being unique to Harold and tackles any feelings of insignificance or desires of normality. As the two sit among daisies, Harold shares his wish to be a daisy because “they’re all alike.” In response Maude explains the flower’s differences, “… some are smaller, some are fatter, some grow to the left, some to the right, some even have lost some petals. All kinds of observable differences.” As Cat Steven’s “Where Do The Children Play?” begins to get louder, the most profound statement of the movie is made, “You see, Harold, I feel that much of the world’s sorrow comes from people who are this [Maude points to a daisy], yet allow themselves to be treated as that [Maude gestures to a field of daisies].”
From there, the film cuts to a shot of a military graveyard. The graves sit atop the soldiers killed in the Vietnam War. The scene undoubtedly helped place Harold and Maude in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress for being culturally, historically, and aesthetically pleasing. While the song aptly explains the nation’s loss of childhood due to battle, it also comments on other concerns, like suburban sprawl, brought on by the transition of a decade and the advancement of technology.
In addition to analyzing a creation and generating an art piece of one’s own, a critic must tell their truth and assert with knowledge why they hold such an opinion. As explained by David Denby in the article “The Moviegoers” truth cannot be disregarded in favor of a flood of media promotion, which “overwhelms the voice of a good critic.” For instance, the blurbs found on movies and books do not solely promote the materials they champion. The blurbs also promote the writers behind them. When Rolling Stone’s movie critic Peter Travers writes, “Hits all the laugh bases!” on the 2000 film “High Fidelity” and “Coppola woks her magic again … your eyes will be dazzled …” on the 2007 film “Marie Antoinette,” the critique is irrelevant. The important part, at least to critics like Travers, is what comes after the one or two sentences. The important part is the critic’s name. It’s a selling point for the writer, one that enables a weak critic to forgo merit and succumb to the draws of notoriety.
It is entirely possible that Travers is lying to further his career, or at least keep it intact. Perhaps, he has no interest in the comedy offered by “High Fidelity” or the magic in “Marie Antoinette.” Instead, he is acting as an arm of Hollywood, enabling him to determine the content of movies. Denby comments on the phenomena of such promotional writing. “The dog is being wagged not by the tail, but by the fleas on the tail,” Denby said. If not Travers, certainly there are bloggers who write for attention, as opposed to disseminating their fanatical opinions for the masses. In the same vein as the desperate individuals who create an outrageous balloon hoax in hopes of landing a reality television show, bloggers often spew critiques ranging from undeserving praise to complete garbage in hopes of drawing attention to their writing. They have no idea why they hold such an opinion, they simply know it has the potential to advance them.
That is one of the main problems with the Internet. It allows anyone with access to share their opinions, disproving the infinite monkey theorem by showing that in comparison to one million monkeys hitting keys at random on a keyboard for an infinite amount of time, which would eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare, the one million monkeys will most often produce a critique that is well surpassed by the art being discussed, wreaks of fallacy, and cannot support their opinion. In an age when everyone is seeking fame, David Weinberger offers this witty play on Andy Warhol’s maxim: “On the Web, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.”
The thing is, those made “famous” should be the ones that deserve the distinction. It should be the real reporters who bring their skills online in order to compete with advancing technology. As Nicholas Lemann said in his article “Amateur Hour,” which appeared in the The New Yorker, “ as journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away.”
No comments:
Post a Comment