Critics are getting less cruel. Alas

https://www.economist.com/culture/2023/07/21/critics-are-getting-less-cruel-alas

by cocacola1 • 3 years ago

30 39 3 years ago

cocacola1• 3 years ago

permo-w7• 3 years ago

perhaps this is my imagining, but it feels like the grip of the corporate elite upon the media is tighter than ever. maybe this is just a symptom of that

rainonmoon4• 3 years ago

Yes. The power dynamic has shifted considerably, for a lot of reasons, but the result is access is withheld to only the most obsequious press. If you want to run a pub that's independently critical, fun, experimental, or anything other than sycophantic, you either need to have the funding/resources to do it sans access or bank enough goodwill with slobbering endorsements sufficient to excuse one hot take every six months or so.

permo-w7• 3 years ago

in my opinion the solution to this is subsidies and grants for journalism. create more bodies roughly like the BBC, maybe run them through the Universities, and have them hand out grants for journalism. set up competing publicly-owned print media companies

don't nationalise the current industry or outlaw them in any way, just create competition that doesn't have to focus on profit

people may hate the idea of public ownership, but what is the alternative? ownership by Murdoch and a handful of billionaires, corporate funded and staffed by people only in it for the paycheck

WorldMaker2• 3 years ago

In my opinion the only solution is to murder any and all ideas of "review scores". Those seem to be the most harmful homogenizing force. They eliminate nuance. They hide subjectivity behind an illusion of "objectivity" (because numbers are always "objective", right?). They make it too easy to spot "outliers" from the norm (and "punish" them if you are a media giant planning the next ad contract or layoff plan or a rabid fanbase planning a hate raid).

Of course, murdering review scores is an extreme solution and also probably an impossible feat. Too many businesses are built upon the illusion of aggregate review scores as "objectively" good things (Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, Yelp, Amazon, AirBNB, Uber, and on and on and on). But we can still dream the impossible dream that more people wake up to how rotten these statistics are below the surface and it eventually becomes a cultural mandate to stop using bad metrics for cultural homogenization.

cafard• 3 years ago

It seems to me that I have seen some pretty snotty reviews within the last n years, n < 20. Aren't James Wood and Dale Peck known for harsh reviews? But I tend to read only non-fiction reviews, and those can have their own problems.

monkeydreams• 3 years ago

What function do critics serve? A critical analysis of a book or movie is entirely unlinked to whether or not the piece is enjoyed by its audience. Why should the audience care what a critic says if they enjoyed a film? Indeed, should they feel ashamed that they enjoyed something that some snobby wanker told them they should shun?

So what point do critics serve?

The only critics whose work I enjoy are either a) enjoyers of the same genres and pieces I enjoy, and who compile vicious and humorous snipes at pieces I do not, or b) who don't tell me why I should love or hate a piece, but instead explain the critical elements I may not understand or might have missed without judgement. And, out of these two types, the impact of team b) lasts much longer.

rainonmoon4• 3 years ago

You resolved your own mystification at the end and yet chose to publish this anyway, so I can only assume you're looking to be further corrected. What you're missing is that criticism is (capable of being) a work of art itself. As your more perceptive self illustrated, criticism is not about telling you why you should love or hate a piece and someone who feels their perspective on something has no room to move or grow shouldn't care what a critic says. The audience for criticism is not "people who like film" or "people who read books". The audience for criticism is people who want to read criticism. Conflate at your own peril.

ramphastidae• 3 years ago

The value is in finding a critic who aligns with your tastes. Once you’ve found them, you can learn about (or avoid) all kinds of art you wouldn’t have known about before.

reducesuffering• 3 years ago

The very same function that we do on HN, discussing the merits of the article. You can just simply read all the primary sources by themselves if you wish, and then no criticism and discussion of the primary source is useful to you. For most people though, we like to understand peoples different interpretations and analysis, and they often provide new insights we never realized.

Mostly though, I can’t watch every movie or eat at every restaurant so I need recommendation data.

zimpenfish5• 3 years ago

So what point do critics serve?

You've answered your own question.

[critics] who don't tell me why I should love or hate a piece, but instead explain the critical elements I may not understand or might have missed without judgement.

Someone who is just saying "good/bad/yay/nay" on a piece of art isn't a critic, I'd suggest, but just an opinion-haver. Being a "critic" requires some level of thoughtful critique.

richardjam73• 3 years ago

A lot of people don't understand art criticism. They assume it means to judge a piece of art and determine if it is good or bad. This is exemplified by the way most criticism is portrayed in the media, for example rotten tomatoes. Although judgment can form a part of criticism that is not its primary role, it is only a very small part.

"art criticism, the analysis and evaluation of works of art. More subtly, art criticism is often tied to theory; it is interpretive, involving the effort to understand a particular work of art from a theoretical perspective and to establish its significance in the history of art."

https://www.britannica.com/art/art-criticism

I was reminded of this when I watched a video on video games criticism with my son and he didn't understand how that was criticism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDtxueJZufs

magarnicle• 3 years ago

Exactly. During my English & Film Studies major we studied all kinds of texts, some of them very poor quality e.g. the early 90s adaptation of The Scarlet Letter - but the lecturers always found something useful to say about them, and almost never talked about them as 'good' or 'bad'.

rollplaymodus• 3 years ago

(hint: Two people conversation)

REM: 'Literary life rarely offers splendid spectacles' (ducks)

A lot of people don't understand critics. They assume it means to judge and determine...

..and you may think 'yes that may be about censorship'

Won't sound offending but 'idiocracy' is much more subtile, and left criticism tied to theory, interpreting, and ('shure' ^^) without involving any effort or understanding?

And the moral is about: "Some people better insert their gold-coins their throat down, to not hand it out to thieves, burglarzz and criminals."?

[dice-roll] P-:

WorldMaker2• 3 years ago

There's a lot of great (meta-)criticism that tools like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic (the videogames relative of RT) by trying to treat reviews as simply scores and then trying to synthesize those in a frappe of a blended metric have been some of the worst things to happen to criticism and critical thinking. There's so much signal lost in the noise of review scores. There's so much subjectivity and nuance lost just jumping to the thumbs up/thumbs down without hearing the reasoning behind any individual review, that it becomes increasingly harder to fathom why people put any weight behind the metrics that scale that data loss up to such incredible volume.

(ETA: It gets worse too, because then you get companies gaming these meta-metrics and reviewers that feel uncomfortable giving scores below certain thresholds for fear of their jobs or other punishments, so even the truthfulness of individual reviews starts to be questioned how much they are just doing for "the algorithm".)

Barrin92• 3 years ago

it does need to mourn the death of the hatchet job.

I despise hatchet jobs. They may not be as common in literary reviews any more, but they absolutely have taken over most popular internet media. Youtube is full of dunk reviews of absolutely everything, dripping with sarcasm and often targeted at anything even remotely unconventional or provocative.

I can't remember who said it but I took the advice to only listen to critics who lead you to something, not away from it. For one it is more actionable and useful to get advice on what to read rather than what not to read, and also scathing criticism is often more about the reviewer than it is about the subject they're writing on.

Turskarama• 3 years ago

I can't help but agree with this. I'm noticing this more with games than anything else, but it's simply not possible to release something that won't be immediately bombarded with hate.

There are too many people who style themselves reviewers who cannot tell the difference between something not being for them, and something being actually objectively bad.

zimpenfish5• 3 years ago

something being actually objectively bad.

How would you even define "objectively bad" when it comes to art?

acomjean• 3 years ago

I noticed this slamming things (at least in the title) is pretty popular as well. Especially with video games. I have a few go to reviewers that I trust. But watch one review and the others get recommended.

I guess it was like movie reviews from back in the day, you’d find a reviewer that matched your preferences.

serf• 3 years ago

I think it changed when the views began to pay the bills.

hate and outrage generate a lot of clicks, it makes sense (sadly) that people would tend towards it given the profitability.

andersrs• 3 years ago

Perhaps companies within the economy have consolidated and thus become less competitive and more powerful. On the flip side reviewers would be reviewing products from fewer companies and become less independent. They wouldn't want to rock the boat and lose access. I have no real proof but most big YouTubers I see are in it for money (shilling VPNs) and seem to get access to products early.

ralferoo• 3 years ago

The last paragraph took me down an interesting rabbit hole reading about Catullus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16 (warning: NSFW text)

We certainly weren't taught any of that in our Latin classes at school!

happytiger• 3 years ago

Fewer comics and more clowns are the inevitable result of intolerance for unpopular opinions.

Everything becomes the upside down parody when we suffer those who prefer to preserve polite righteousness over hard and unpleasant reality.

Some things just suck, and should be said to suck. Coolidge said it best, “ If we judge ourselves only by our aspirations and everyone else only by their conduct, we shall soon reach a very false conclusion.”

Critics are getting less cruel. Alas

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