November 8, 2007
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Think about the enterprise of a critic for a moment. When I think of a critic, I always imagine a grumpy old guy with permanently cringed facial features, so it looks like his face is a perpetual snarl. He’s also probably sitting back in a chair chewing on a cigar with a newspaper folded in one hand.
What are critics? To me, they are people that sit back, look at something, and say, “Ehhh, now I’ll tell you what I think of that…REALLY LOUD!!!” They are like the self-appointed gods of opinions on planet earth whose judgments possess trump status.
Imagine the sequence with me: someone does something, and there’s some guy that rates it according to his internal reaction, and his assessment holds some sort of special weight to it. But why is his opinion more qualified than others’? Does that make sense to anyone? Has this person done anything particularly interesting, besides asserting his opinion really loud? Were these people deemed “critics” beamed here from planet Truth? Did they sell their souls to the devil in exchange for always having true opinions?
Whenever I read a movie review, or a critique of some politician, I never place any value at all in what I am reading. What does this person know? They might be right, they might be wrong—just like the rest of us. For instance, if it’s a movie, I’m sure for every movie I’ve liked there are a bunch of professional critics who hated it. There are also probably critics who appreciated it. So why does it matter that there are any critics at all?
For almost any artistic masterpiece in history—muscial pieces, books, paintings—there’s been some guy who thought he knew what he was talking about that hated it. Almost everyone hated Beethoven’s 5th Symphony when it debuted, and it’s solidified itself as one of the most brilliant pieces of music ever written.
And the problem is not just that these people believe in the oxymoron of a “true opinion,” but that they don’t do anything besides talk. I admit that people can be qualified to say that other people aren’t up to par, if they’re in the right position to do so. But the critics I’m talking about do nothing. All they do is criticize. It sometimes seems like the assumption of criticism is that the critic is a paragon of awesomeness who will now tell these—cretins—where they have failed.
The worst thing is when someone tries to criticize someone personally who they don’t know. What do you know of what goes on in their minds, of what they think about?
From the outside and while doing absolutely nothing, there are only three things you can criticize. And those three things are critics, myspace, and facebook.
Comments (5)
Whew, so glad xanga wasn’t in that final list.
Things are so simple when you know the absolutes. Good thoughts. It’s amazing, too, how someone’s opinion of someone affects how you think of that person before you ever meet them. Why do we care what anyone else thinks about anything else? I guess because we’re human.
Oftentimes we care because the opinions of others can be valid, regardless of where that person stands on much of anything.
It matters that there are “critics” (people who always voice their opinion and are publicized) because without them we could have much less of an idea about what our own reaction may be to an opinional subject. By continually reading someones opinions, we can get a feel for which people have ideas closer to our are own and which are farther, so giving us more insights and perspectives regarding any subject. To put it differently, there’s consistency in criticisms, and learning to feel that at least sometimes can be benificial, varying by how similer the person has appeared to be to yourself in the past by your own evaluation.
But I think I get your point, that opinions don’t matter in and of themselves and their importence is not influenced by who has said opinion.
While I agree that looking at critics’ reviewers is generally useless, since you can always find disagreeing critics, I think they can be of some use. For instance, what if you find a critic that dislikes a movie. You see the movie, and you dislike it too. Then the critic likes another movie. You see the movie, and you like the movie. You might discover that this critic has the same tastes as you, and by listening to their reviews, you can avoid watching movies that you probably won’t like.
But again, listening to the critic population as a whole is useless, since they all cancel eachother out.
“Critique” and “criticism” may be two separate (yet related) enterprises. (Or rather, their denotation may be the same while their connotation is, or should be, different.)
A critique is always valuable. It is not a mere statment of opinion. A critique points out objective features of reality (whether it be features of a movie, book, worldview, argument, etc.). In pointing these things out, they are often then compared with hard and fast rules of logic, in which case opinion never factors into the equation. Or at times these objective factors are subjected to generalized or particular rules or standards of aesthetic evaluation. In that case, the final judgment of the critique will depend on the quality of the (subjective) standards employed. But even in that case, the critique may very well prove to be helpful in guiding others to apply (what they deem to be) better standards of evaluation to those same objective realities.
As to your main problem with “critics,” I have no qualms, since the people you describe to not engage in true critique. (However, it would be beneficial to see if you are guilty of the fallacy of overgeneralization when it comes to what all critics do or say…)