Jared Luck pointed out a good piece by the New York Times movie critic A.O. Scott last Sunday about the death knell of criticism. It tells the story of the failure of his television show with the Chicago Tribune critic, Michael Phillips, and the larger implications of the increasingly fractionalized audiences that writers try to reach.
“One minute for the cross-talk, guys,” the producer would say, using the show’s term of art for the back-and-forth that follows the scripted reviews. How can you do a movie justice in 60 seconds? You can’t, of course — or in 800 words of print or in a blog post — but you can start a conversation, advance or rebut an argument, and give people who share your interest something to talk about.
And that kind of provocation, that spur to further discourse, is all criticism has ever been. It is not a profession and does not stand or fall with any particular business model. Criticism is a habit of mind, a discipline of writing, a way of life — a commitment to the independent, open-ended exploration of works of art in relation to one another and the world around them. As such, it is always apt to be misunderstood, undervalued and at odds with itself. Artists will complain, fans will tune out, but the arguments will never end.
Scott believes that criticism will persist in one form or another. I think he’s right. The arguments will never end.
