Reading Nick Ripatrazone’s piece in The Metropolitan Review made me feel like a bad critic.
I like reviewing things - for fun, mostly. To get my thoughts down, to reflect. But is that interesting? Am I offering anything unique? Probably not. There’s an art to criticism, and it’s easy to forget that just having opinions isn’t the same as being insightful.
“Criticism without flair is dull, and criticism without sensibility is useless.”
Maybe Henry James, the subject of Ripatrazone’s article, could criticize anything - but was he always insightful, or just confidently opinionated? At what point does strong taste get mistaken for objective judgment? Twain hated Austen. Nabokov hated nearly everyone. That doesn’t mean they were right.
I believe artists need critics. Done well, criticism sharpens the work, challenges assumptions, raises the bar. But the commercialization of criticism (clickbait recaps, YouTube essayists chasing engagement, etc) has tilted the balance. You end up with people writing sharply but not thoughtfully. Being entertaining isn’t the same as being perceptive.
That leaves me wondering where I land. I don’t think I have flair, but I do try to be honest. Maybe that’s its own kind of usefulness: not the voice of an authority, but of an average person trying to say something real without being dumb about it.
There’s a burden to professional critics. They’re expected to form definitive, timeless opinions with no room to reconsider. They have to speak immediately, often for communities they’re not a part of, and often to them. Left-wing Youtuber Patrick Willems’ post-Cannes review of Emilia Perez said that the film rocked, but the progressive audience he often appeals to disagreed strongly when they got to see it after it hit streaming. I guess that’s also what happens when you pander to a crowd you don’t really belong to, you end up missing the nuance.
Willem’s review, for posterity:
Jay-Z once put it plainly:
“First of all, you can’t listen to an album and rate it in a day, it’s just impossible… And when I see that I’m like, ‘Oh, so this is all just bullshit.’”
Yeah. That.