The Excesses of Critics

If you're one of those who thinks that any and everything that is ever said of any artistic work is entirely "subjective," and any one remark as good as another, and nothing can ever be overrated or underrated (let alone more rigorously and substantively evaluated); and you are utterly unshakable in that opinion; then you may as well stop reading now because nothing I will have to say will mean anything to you.

If that is not your position, then perhaps it will be worth your while to keep on reading.

Now, to begin properly:

It has long seemed to me that arts criticism tends toward the excessive in both its praise and dispraise. The good is passed off as great, the bad horrid--while the merely mediocre is often presented as great or horrid as well.

Why is that? An obvious answer is that many critics are, like many people in any and every line of work, simply not equipped to do their job well--in this case, lacking the grasp of the craft, the frame of reference, the fair-mindedness, to render a meaningful, worthwhile judgment on a given work. (There are film critics who, for example, do not understand how film works, or perhaps the particular kind of film they are writing about. There are critics who have just not seen very many movies, or at least, movies of the kind about which they are talking. There are critics who simply do not seem to care if the remarks they offer make any sense, or are at all supportable.)

Another is that being the critic for too long (which is not so long a time as one may think) leads to boredom and even burn-out. One runs out of things to say, especially when the work in front of them inspires only a "Meh." Hyperbole is one way of spicing things up; colorful insult another. The reader may find the results amusing, but as actual judgment it leaves something to be desired.

I suspect this sort of thing is exacerbated by the pressure to deliver favorable and unfavorable reviews in cases. No critic seems to want to offend the Disney conglomerate, especially when it critic-proofs its films with corporate pseudo-wokeness. (Who wants the flak that would come with giving Black Panther a less than enthusiastically celebratory review?) At the same time there are other movies they are expected to denigrate, even if they have to strain to do it--because they are less than congenial to the politics prevailing among the strata from which they hail and for which they work. (I had a sense of this looking at, for example, the reviews for the legal drama Roman J. Israel, which the critics bent over backwards to denigrate.)

All this has critics very used to talking things up and talking things down excessively. And as they are much more often called on to overpraise a movie than underpraise it, they seize on any opportunity to beat up excessively on something with impunity.