06 Aug 2004 | JF said...

Critical analysis of art/music is bullshit. If you like it, you like it. If not, you don't. Why do we need to confuse the matter?

06 Aug 2004 | RS said...

Despite JF's comment, some of us (ahem) do believe in the humanities :)

06 Aug 2004 | ML said...

If you like it, you like it. If not, you don't. Why do we need to confuse the matter?

Well, I think one of the main purposes of criticism is to help individuals determine whether or not it's worth the time/effort to watch a movie, listen to a record, read a book, etc. It's impossible for any normal person to actually consume every piece of media that's released so critics help guide us in selecting what's worthy of our attention.

06 Aug 2004 | JF said...

It's impossible for any normal person to actually consume every piece of media that's released so critics help guide us in selecting what's worthy of our attention.

Exactly, which is why the thumbs up/down method is so effective and popular. It's a yes or no -- not a long-winded, pretentious, prolix diatribe. The thumbs or stars or whatever cuts through the crap and gets right to the point which is all most people care about anyway. Does Derogatis not get this or is he just so jaded and jealous that he can't deal with reality?

And another thing... Who wants to read a review that gives the whole damn movie away? Thumbs or stars let me know if it's worth seeing without ruining it for me.

06 Aug 2004 | SH said...

Why don't you guys just turn around and *talk* to each other about this. You're all in the same room.

06 Aug 2004 | RS said...

Here comes the philosophy...

It's easy to agree on the meaning of things like chairs, because chairs do the same thing for many people. You can sit on the chair, I can sit on the chair, so the chair's good for sitting. A chair is something you sit on.

Chairs aren't a problem because we agree that they belong to the physical world as objective things. But we don't yet have this sort of agreement on things in the mental world. Like it or not, art objects (paintings, films, books, Duchamp's urinal...) exist largely in the mental world. When you use the chair, you sit your ass down. When you use some art, you have a private experience.

Whether or not criticism is valuable, or the connected question -- if art has any objective meaning -- depends on whether you believe that the mental world is in some sense shared like the physical world.

How could that be? Some folks argue that since our brains mostly work the same, and our mental world comes from our brain, then our mental worlds should be somewhat the same. Throw some shared culture in the mix, and you have some physical stuff in common and some mental stuff in common. Do these add up to some degree of shared meaning?

Lots of good work continues to be done on questions like this, and for those of us who believe in shared meaning, they point toward an escape from the runaway relativism that seems so popular these days.

06 Aug 2004 | Josh said...

Critical analysis of art/music is bullshit.

Great -- there goes my career then!

The truth is that art and criticism are two sides of the same coin: together they allow for an exchange of ideas and for the creation of a culture of the arts. Maybe you've read bad criticism, or maybe you don't have the patience to read seriously anything that's not a thumbs up or a thumbs down. But that has to do with you and your preferences, not with art and not with criticism of art.

Helen Vendler, who gave the National Endowment for the Humanities' annual lecture, says it better than I ever could; ignore the cheesy design and read her excellent lecture. And there is great criticism alive today: Pitchfork, Stylus, The New York Review of Books.

06 Aug 2004 | Elaine N. said...

which is why the thumbs up/down method is so effective and popular.

except that...

too many thumbs-up means that the whole system is meaningless, unless you figure that all movies are pretty good.

and

what you think is awesome I may find atrocious, which means that you need some context to decide whether the book/movie/etc. is worthwhile for you. (in a less artsy context, I have two friends with radically different tastes: if they both like a movie I know I have to see it, but if one likes it and the other doesn't, I need to know the body of their opinions in order to decide whether to see it myself. of course, the more familiar one is with any particular reviewer, the more one can get out of a bare like/don't like review, but still.)

and that's assuming that criticism is essentially a buyer's guide, rather than an artform in itself.

06 Aug 2004 | Hilarie said...

"Coooommin' uuupp neeeext..."

--Byron Allen

06 Aug 2004 | ek said...

and that's assuming that criticism is essentially a buyer's guide, rather than an artform in itself.

Ack. Critics thinking of themselves as artists or their work as art is bad, very bad.

Why does everyone have to be an artist now? Does something have to be labeled as "art" in order to be appreciated?

Or is it that snooty people label anything they happen to like art, so they can be snooty about it without feeling like they're slumming?

06 Aug 2004 | RS said...

Ack. Critics thinking of themselves as artists or their work as art is bad, very bad.

Not necessarily disagreeing, but care to back that up with something?

Why does everyone have to be an artist now? Does something have to be labeled as "art" in order to be appreciated? ... Or is it that snooty people label anything they happen to like art, so they can be snooty about it without feeling like they're slumming?

*runs and hides from rhetorical questions and unchecked assumptions*

06 Aug 2004 | Brad Hurley said...

This is obvious, but the problem with a simple "thumbs up, thumbs down" is that you have to trust that the critic shares your sensibilities.

Thumbs up/thumbs down works if you know the critic, but otherwise it's not enough information. Human judgement is so subjective that you need to understand why a particular critic liked/didn't like an art exhibit, film, concert, recording, etc.

I remember when I lived near Boston in the 1980s, I used to make a point of going to most of the movies that the film critic for the Boston Phoenix panned, because his tastes and mine were so predictably at odds with each other. And in fact I really enjoyed most of the films that he disliked.

21 Aug 2004 | Paperhead said...

Go JF!

While we're at it we could just stop having any meaningful intelligent conversations with each other about anything and reduce the whole of our existence down to a series of thumb up/ thumb down gestures.

30 Jan 2005 | compatelius said...

bocigalingus must be something funny.