December 08, 2006

Critiquing the critics NYCFilter: "Everyone’s a critic, but some professional reviewers have the power to shape NYC culture—and for the first time, these tastemakers have been rated by the artists and industry insiders who know them best."

Among those on the receiving end of comeuppance: film critics A.O. Scott, J. Hoberman, Michael Denby; book critics John Updike, Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin; theater critics Charles Isherwood, Michael Feingold, Clive Barnes. Dance critic for Newsday Apollinaire Scherr responds. via artsjournal

posted by sly_polyglot 17 years ago
  • Excerpts
    • Rex Reed (Film critic, Observer): "Bitchy reviews and feeble insight."
    • Anthony Lane (Film critic, New Yorker): "More of an entertainer than a critic."
    • Robert Christgau (Music critic, NPR): "Pretentious, unyielding, stuck in the past, but still pretty brilliant."
    • Kelefa Sanneh (Music critic, NYT): "His agenda is to raise crap to the level of art..."
    • Frank Bruni (Food critic, NYT): "...the George Bush of restaurant reviewers: He’s a little man in a big job who got lucky but has never acknowledged the need to learn on this big job.”
  • "Pretentious, unyielding, stuck in the past, but still pretty brilliant." Hey, they're talking about me behind my back!
  • I love Michiko Kakutani. There seems to be a huge backlash against her in the last few years, because most of her reviews are supposedly negative. I think people ragging on her are just upset that she gave hem a bad review. Thing is... I usually agree with her. ;) And I think that's really the only good criteria for a critic: how much are their tastes in line with your own? I trust Ebert (of Chicago, so not in this poll) most of the time because he and I tend to like the same films; I never regret seeing anything he recommends. If a critic's taste differs significantly from your own, their criticism will be worthless to you, but useful to someone else. Basically, I think of them as people who wade through crap so I don't have to. I've heard some noise lately for the idea that book critics should never be writers, that a lot of reviews come out that are written for "backstage" reasons, by authors who were once slighted by someone in some way involved with the book they're reviewing. (It was Matthew Pearl, who wrote The Dante Club, who was complaining about this most recently, insinuating that Amazon reviews are really better than more formal ones.) But who else is educated enough about books and writing, and widely read enough to speak with authority? When non-novelists critique novels, someone complains that they can't be trusted because they don't write. Can't have it both ways. I think the conflict-of-interests issue is up to an individual reviewer to fess up about, and I also think that someone who doesn't write novels but specializes in criticism is capable of intelligent reviewing. But whether or not something entertained Aunt Betty in Skokie is not a good criteria for a positive review; it doesn't say anything about the quality of the prose (see: The DaVinci Code for details).
  • There hasn't been one critic who I've agreed with consistently over the years, though I've enjoyed the writing styles of many of 'em. I think Ebert's a good one to use as an illustration of what you're describing, verbminx. I can't help feeling that he's shifted his stance over the years, over the many years, to see more from Aunt Betty's point of view than from a learned cinephile's. Truth be told, there are actually very few film critics nowadays that I can read without wondering why they get paid to write what they do. The nature of the business has changed, I believe, to favor more the slumming with the Hank Hills (resonates with more readers) than pitching to the arty crowd. This goes back to the whole "prescriptive" vs "descriptive," or the "normative" vs "positive" binaries, doesn't it? In other words, are critics supposed to act as beacons and raise our collective awareness, or simply "do their job" and point us to things they know we'd like because they know exactly what we like. In this sense, I think it's more than just about taste--a critic I don't like may have a different understanding of his/her job than what I believe is/should be his/her job. And, yes, all this gets a bit muddled at some point... This may be because criticism is a fairly gray area to begin with--it's liminal to both the highest level of thought on any given field of art and the people who consume that art. Whoa... sorry for the rambling; you've just raised some interesting points that got me going. Thanks!
  • Anthony Lane may be more entertainment than criticism, but god damn the man is funny.
  • Anthony Lane may be more entertainment than criticism, but god damn the man is funny.
  • Argh.
  • What's he got to do with it?