quote:
I am a critic. A scold, a snob, a paid hack intent on punishing artists and spoiling the fun of the public. That, at least, is the role I’m sometimes called upon to play. And in that capacity I’d like to say: Forget about the Oscars. It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that you will, if history is any guide. The best-picture winners that live up to the name — “The Godfather,” “The Apartment,” “The Hurt Locker” — are outliers in a field of bloated, flash-in-the-pan mediocrities. “Around the World in 80 Days”? “Out of Africa”? “Crash”? Please. Meanwhile, the pantheon of all-time great films is largely a roster of the snubbed, from “Citizen Kane” to “Do the Right Thing” to “Boyhood.” The best film in any given year is almost guaranteed to be one that didn’t win, or one that wasn’t nominated at all.

Fair enough.

quote:
On the Internet, everyone is a critic — a Yelp-fueled takedown artist, an Amazon scholar, a cheerleader empowered by social media to Like and to Share. The inflated, always suspect authority of ink-stained wretches like me has been leveled by digital anarchy. Who needs a cranky nag when you have a friendly algorithm telling you, based on your previous purchases, that there is something You May Also Like, and legions of Facebook friends affirming the wisdom of your choice? The days of the all-powerful critic are over. But that figure — high priest or petty dictator, destroying and consecrating reputations with the stroke of a pen — was always a bit of a myth, an allegorical monster conjured up by timid artists and their insecure admirers. Criticism has always been a fundamentally democratic undertaking. It is an endless conversation, rather than a series of pronouncements. It is the debate that begins when you walk out of the theater or the museum, either with your friends or in the private chat room of your own head. It’s not me telling you what to think; it’s you and me talking. That was true before the Internet, but the rise of social media has had the thrilling, confusing effect of making the conversation literal.

Good point there. I think people make declarations or get frustrated with something that is repetitive (does the same Lost argument happen every time?) However, it's in the argument itself, even if it's mostly the same, that we may find out something new.

quote:

Like every other form of democracy, criticism is a messy, contentious business, in which the rules are as much in dispute as the outcomes and the philosophical foundations are fragile if not vaporous. We all like different things. Each of us is blessed with a snowflake-special consciousness, an apparatus of pleasure and perception that is ours alone. But we also cluster together in communities of taste that can be as prickly and polarized as the other tribes with which we identify. We are protective of our pleasures, and resent it when anyone tries to mock or mess with them.

I like that he points to the major contention. At least for me, the question is between taste and quality. The rules for both are just impossible to determine. It makes no sense sometimes what we like and dislike. Or even how to judge the "goodness" or quality of something. I think that's what every single argument is about in terms of film and this board.....

quote:
And yet our ways of thinking about this fundamental human attribute amount to a heap of contradictions. There is no argument, but then again there is only argument. We grant that our preferences are subjective, but we’re rarely content to leave them in the private realm. It’s not enough to say “I like that” or “It wasn’t really my cup of tea.” We insist on stronger assertions, on objective statements. “That was great! That was terrible!”

Ends strong though:

quote:
This means, above all, that our job is to think. As consumers of culture, we are lulled into passivity or, at best, prodded toward a state of pseudo-semi-self-awareness, encouraged toward either the defensive group identity of fandom or a shallow, half-ironic eclecticism. We graze, we binge, we pick up and discard aesthetic experiences as if they were cheap toys. Which they frequently are — mass-produced widgets from the corporate assembly line.

quote:
Enough of that! It’s the mission of art to free our minds, and the task of criticism to figure out what to do with that freedom. That everyone is a critic means that we are each capable of thinking against our own prejudices, of balancing skepticism with open-mindedness, of sharpening our dulled and glutted senses and battling the intellectual inertia that surrounds us. We need to put our remarkable minds to use and to pay our own experience the honor of taking it seriously. The real culture war (the one that never ends) is between the human intellect and its equally human enemies: sloth, cliché, pretension, cant. Between creativity and conformity, between the comforts of the familiar and the shock of the new. To be a critic is to be a soldier in this fight, a defender of the life of art and a champion of the art of living. It’s not just a job, in other words.

But oh the irony, since he got paid to write that too.