I found myself accidentally diving down the rabbit hole of film reviews by Slant Magazine's Jake Cole this afternoon, drinking them in with a fervor. I read his glowing reviews of films I loved and his brutal reviews of films I hated. I read reviews where he saw films wildly differently than I did, in ways that sometimes seemed revelatory and sometimes missed the mark entirely. I read his reviews of films I've never seen, of films I tell myself I want to see, of films I have no intention of seeing, all just to get more of his voice, his vision, his perspective.
Sometimes I feel embarrassed, or even insecure, about how much I love good critics. We're told that critics are lesser to artists—typically by artists, of course—in the same way that we're told political theorists are less important than politicians, or, taken to an extreme, philosophers matter less than world-changing actors. There is an anti-intellectual current to this, obviously, but it masquerades itself as an attack on pretension, on onanism, on pseudo-intellectualism that reduces genuinely momentous Experiences or Reality into worthless little mind games, which critics play with one another to impose some ludicrously meaningless version of prestige or authority upon themselves. And, of course, many critics really are quite worthless. It's probably also true that the most worthless critics are quite a bit more worthless than other kinds of worthless people.
But all that misses the point, I think, of why criticism is so wonderful. Criticism is great precisely because it's not objective: it is the idiosyncratic documentation of an individual's reaction to something that meant something to them, half-spirited and half-reflective. Criticism is a revelation and a rush of energy all at once: the best critics are both studied and somewhat feral, because they understand that theory helps articulate their enthusiasms and passions, a language rather than an endpoint. And while a part of criticism is all personality and charisma—the difference between Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael is as vast as the difference between Stephen Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick—the bit that remains constant is the belief that reaction is a valid kind of expression, and that there's value in seeing the world through other people's eyes.
The point is not to let critics tell you what to think. (There's not a single critic who I love who I don't also occasionally want to shoot with a water pistol.) The point is that there are, invariably, far more ways to think about things than you, personally, have come up with. And the experience of encountering a great critic is on some level overwhelming, even more so than an encounter with a great artist can be, because a critic brings with them a set of cultural memories that invariably differ from yours, leaving you feeling deeply ignorant and uncultured in the way that they take for granted a set of experiences that you yourself are barely familiar with. But that's not necessarily pretension or gatekeeping: it's an acknowledgment of the simple fact that the world you come from is not the world that others do, and that theirs is, in fact, a valid a world as your own.
It strikes me that, in some ways, the art of criticism is more central to digital culture than most other types of art. Social media employs all sorts of devious tricks to trick you into sharing your opinions: it's not that it values your opinion so much as it ranks it, driving you into a furious need to assert your worldview as More Correct than others while seeking to eradicate the very possibility that other positions exist. What mattes more online: the thing that everybody's reacting to, or the act of reacting to it in the first place? Meaningful experience is just another genre of pop phenomenon—and when you're online, all pop phenomena, whether it's fandom or flamewars or thought pieces or memes, is defined by "movements" of response, with individuals rising to prominence for how memorably they offer their opinions. Right-wing provocateurs, YouTube video essayists, Instagram ADHD accounts and Tumblr reblog chains, centrist Democrats asking you to retweet if you too think that dying of gunshots is bad... all of these, in their ways, owe more to traditions of criticism than they do to any of the art forms that criticism originally orbited.
I suspect that sites like Letterboxd, which is where I discovered Cole, are as popular as they are precisely because they make the central trade of the Internet explicit, and encourage their anonymous masses to take what they're doing a little more seriously. (And one of the least-commented-upon online phenomena is that Rate Your Music, while relatively niche, is maybe the single best way to discover new media online, because the ways that it lets its users rank and review music makes it possible to find anonymous strangers with similar affinities to you, and mine their own passions looking for new discoveries of your own. All without a single goddamn algorithm.)
The most fascinating cultural nexuses, for me, are the ones that are simultaneously broadly popular, capable of profound depth, yet exist in a way where most people don't recognize just what kinds of depth are possible—partly because depth typically requires structure, and the Silicon Valley dipshits that built our world loathe structure more than they loathe anything else in this world. (Well, they loathe structure that we notice. To their worldview, we're the raw materials that they plan to shove into vats, melt into sludge, and bake into their mansion walls.) The realm of criticism, to me, is brimming with potential. And that potential, I suspect, is not just a matter of making a neat tool or a cute little community. I think that one of our genuine political, intellectual, and cultural impoverishments is our inability to recognize how wonderful it is to celebrate someone for the weird ways they see the world, without reducing that celebration down to "this person being right, and everyone this person hates being wrong." We are starving, I think, for a kind of nourishment that few of us could name: everything in us cries out for a type of enrichment, a certain dimension and depth to the world, that we typically only notice as flickers in the corner of our eye. And when we look at the collapse of our society, our communities, our social lives, even our political norms, not even sure what's gone awry, I suspect that what we're looking for is somewhere within this space.
The idea that criticism is an effete intellectual exercise is directly connected to the idea that the point of criticism is to be "right" or "wrong." That, in turn, is linked with the idea that the right way to experience things is to continually rank them and categorize them and treat them like math equations to be solved—and not in the sense of moral or ethical dimensions, but in the sense that, by knowing the "right" things to value and hold dear, you might pass some cosmic test and win accolades from your betters and/or peers. (And there is a further argument to be made that some of our approaches to moral and ethical dilemmas turn sickly and ineffectual when we subject them, too, to this endlessly reductive and combative process. It's worth pointing out, incidentally, that combativeness is a natural byproduct of reductiveness, in ways that combative people often don't quite recognize.)
Step away from that useless mindset, and you start to see criticism for what it ought to be: an ecstatic process, intelligent in the sense of restless curiosity, emotional in the sense of honoring a response, and a joyful, playful, ongoing reconciliation of the two, as you quiet your emotions long enough to be curious and pause your intellect long enough to feel deeply and furiously and without reservation. To be a critic is to believe that to be alive in this world is, itself, a kind of art—or at least it can be, if you take the act of being yourself seriously enough. There is a place for making art, but it will always be found right next to the place where you take things in; the part of you that longs to do things and take action sits right next to the part of you that experienced the world in ways that taught you what you wanted to do, and made you yearn to be seen as the kind of person who took those actions, did those things, as a kind of testament to the ways that those people once shaped and inspired you.
Criticism, in other words, stems from a recognition that the world shaped you. If you look closely at what you've become, you might capture a reflection of the thing you were shaped by, and better understand it for its capacity to mark you so. The relationship between art and audience, between world and us, goes both ways. And it's only when you meet someone who celebrates that, someone who takes it seriously, that you realize you might understand the world better by caring about how other people see it—and that you too might make the world a deeper and richer place, just by trusting that your experience, too, might be a revelation. The art of criticism, the part of it that you work on and insist upon and aspire to, is the art of letting yourself become someone who's passionate, cultured, and deep—not so you'll stop responding to the world with ferocity and feeling and joy, but so you can respond to it like that even more, and become the gleeful adult that the gleeful child in you always hoped it'd grow up to be.
Sometimes I feel embarrassed, or even insecure, about how much I love good critics. We're told that critics are lesser to artists—typically by artists, of course—in the same way that we're told political theorists are less important than politicians, or, taken to an extreme, philosophers matter less than world-changing actors. There is an anti-intellectual current to this, obviously, but it masquerades itself as an attack on pretension, on onanism, on pseudo-intellectualism that reduces genuinely momentous Experiences or Reality into worthless little mind games, which critics play with one another to impose some ludicrously meaningless version of prestige or authority upon themselves. And, of course, many critics really are quite worthless. It's probably also true that the most worthless critics are quite a bit more worthless than other kinds of worthless people.
But all that misses the point, I think, of why criticism is so wonderful. Criticism is great precisely because it's not objective: it is the idiosyncratic documentation of an individual's reaction to something that meant something to them, half-spirited and half-reflective. Criticism is a revelation and a rush of energy all at once: the best critics are both studied and somewhat feral, because they understand that theory helps articulate their enthusiasms and passions, a language rather than an endpoint. And while a part of criticism is all personality and charisma—the difference between Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael is as vast as the difference between Stephen Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick—the bit that remains constant is the belief that reaction is a valid kind of expression, and that there's value in seeing the world through other people's eyes.
The point is not to let critics tell you what to think. (There's not a single critic who I love who I don't also occasionally want to shoot with a water pistol.) The point is that there are, invariably, far more ways to think about things than you, personally, have come up with. And the experience of encountering a great critic is on some level overwhelming, even more so than an encounter with a great artist can be, because a critic brings with them a set of cultural memories that invariably differ from yours, leaving you feeling deeply ignorant and uncultured in the way that they take for granted a set of experiences that you yourself are barely familiar with. But that's not necessarily pretension or gatekeeping: it's an acknowledgment of the simple fact that the world you come from is not the world that others do, and that theirs is, in fact, a valid a world as your own.
It strikes me that, in some ways, the art of criticism is more central to digital culture than most other types of art. Social media employs all sorts of devious tricks to trick you into sharing your opinions: it's not that it values your opinion so much as it ranks it, driving you into a furious need to assert your worldview as More Correct than others while seeking to eradicate the very possibility that other positions exist. What mattes more online: the thing that everybody's reacting to, or the act of reacting to it in the first place? Meaningful experience is just another genre of pop phenomenon—and when you're online, all pop phenomena, whether it's fandom or flamewars or thought pieces or memes, is defined by "movements" of response, with individuals rising to prominence for how memorably they offer their opinions. Right-wing provocateurs, YouTube video essayists, Instagram ADHD accounts and Tumblr reblog chains, centrist Democrats asking you to retweet if you too think that dying of gunshots is bad... all of these, in their ways, owe more to traditions of criticism than they do to any of the art forms that criticism originally orbited.
I suspect that sites like Letterboxd, which is where I discovered Cole, are as popular as they are precisely because they make the central trade of the Internet explicit, and encourage their anonymous masses to take what they're doing a little more seriously. (And one of the least-commented-upon online phenomena is that Rate Your Music, while relatively niche, is maybe the single best way to discover new media online, because the ways that it lets its users rank and review music makes it possible to find anonymous strangers with similar affinities to you, and mine their own passions looking for new discoveries of your own. All without a single goddamn algorithm.)
The most fascinating cultural nexuses, for me, are the ones that are simultaneously broadly popular, capable of profound depth, yet exist in a way where most people don't recognize just what kinds of depth are possible—partly because depth typically requires structure, and the Silicon Valley dipshits that built our world loathe structure more than they loathe anything else in this world. (Well, they loathe structure that we notice. To their worldview, we're the raw materials that they plan to shove into vats, melt into sludge, and bake into their mansion walls.) The realm of criticism, to me, is brimming with potential. And that potential, I suspect, is not just a matter of making a neat tool or a cute little community. I think that one of our genuine political, intellectual, and cultural impoverishments is our inability to recognize how wonderful it is to celebrate someone for the weird ways they see the world, without reducing that celebration down to "this person being right, and everyone this person hates being wrong." We are starving, I think, for a kind of nourishment that few of us could name: everything in us cries out for a type of enrichment, a certain dimension and depth to the world, that we typically only notice as flickers in the corner of our eye. And when we look at the collapse of our society, our communities, our social lives, even our political norms, not even sure what's gone awry, I suspect that what we're looking for is somewhere within this space.
The idea that criticism is an effete intellectual exercise is directly connected to the idea that the point of criticism is to be "right" or "wrong." That, in turn, is linked with the idea that the right way to experience things is to continually rank them and categorize them and treat them like math equations to be solved—and not in the sense of moral or ethical dimensions, but in the sense that, by knowing the "right" things to value and hold dear, you might pass some cosmic test and win accolades from your betters and/or peers. (And there is a further argument to be made that some of our approaches to moral and ethical dilemmas turn sickly and ineffectual when we subject them, too, to this endlessly reductive and combative process. It's worth pointing out, incidentally, that combativeness is a natural byproduct of reductiveness, in ways that combative people often don't quite recognize.)
Step away from that useless mindset, and you start to see criticism for what it ought to be: an ecstatic process, intelligent in the sense of restless curiosity, emotional in the sense of honoring a response, and a joyful, playful, ongoing reconciliation of the two, as you quiet your emotions long enough to be curious and pause your intellect long enough to feel deeply and furiously and without reservation. To be a critic is to believe that to be alive in this world is, itself, a kind of art—or at least it can be, if you take the act of being yourself seriously enough. There is a place for making art, but it will always be found right next to the place where you take things in; the part of you that longs to do things and take action sits right next to the part of you that experienced the world in ways that taught you what you wanted to do, and made you yearn to be seen as the kind of person who took those actions, did those things, as a kind of testament to the ways that those people once shaped and inspired you.
Criticism, in other words, stems from a recognition that the world shaped you. If you look closely at what you've become, you might capture a reflection of the thing you were shaped by, and better understand it for its capacity to mark you so. The relationship between art and audience, between world and us, goes both ways. And it's only when you meet someone who celebrates that, someone who takes it seriously, that you realize you might understand the world better by caring about how other people see it—and that you too might make the world a deeper and richer place, just by trusting that your experience, too, might be a revelation. The art of criticism, the part of it that you work on and insist upon and aspire to, is the art of letting yourself become someone who's passionate, cultured, and deep—not so you'll stop responding to the world with ferocity and feeling and joy, but so you can respond to it like that even more, and become the gleeful adult that the gleeful child in you always hoped it'd grow up to be.