Better Living Through Criticism (2016)

A.O. Scott presently labors at the New York Times as a film critic, where he has worked since 2000. I liked his attempt here to define and defend the role of critics, a vocation (or avocation) that has existed for centuries—millennia—but always under a vague cloud of illegitimacy and forever on the verge of ending abruptly. Nazi types are one problem ("When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver," "Journalism is the enemy of the people"). Capitalism more generally doesn't like the critical enterprise much either. Newspapers and magazines carried the burden for a century or two but they were always folding and now the whole industry looks sketchy. Lately it's been the internet and digital and social media as a more likely source, but the amateurism there also makes it a threat to professionalism. I do share Scott's mistrust of IMDb and Amazon reviewers, bloggers, and other amateurs more or less giving away their work, even though I am precisely part of the problem there. But what do you do? We need the eggs, as the old joke has it. ("My brother thinks he's a chicken." ... "Thinks he's a chicken! Why don't you take him to a doctor?" h/t Woody Allen.) At any rate, one of the hardest parts for everyone is defining critics and criticism, which Scott gives a go. You can argue he fails at defining it precisely, but he certainly draws a large circle around everything it might be. His sources are fun to follow as he reaches back for Aristophanes, Samuel Johnson, Susan Sontag, Yvor Winters, and any number of formidable figures of the past who have engaged his questions. He even includes Socrates-style dialogues with himself in short intervening chapters. He looks for the popular image of critics in intriguing places, such as the movies All About Eve and Ratatouille. He boldly claims criticism as a creative endeavor coequal with all other arts. He suggests that art itself is a kind of critique of life, with the artist in the reviewer's position. Artist and critic both use their respective materials toward the ends of judgment, or discernment, and sharing experience. In spite of his wit and light touch, Scott seemed a little gloomy to me about the prospects for the 21st century. He makes a strong argument that as long as there has been print there have been critics. In fact, in some ways it's depressing how much criticism there is and always has been. Today's bloggers are yesteryear's ink-stained wretches writing bad reviews of Moby-Dick. But that's not entirely fair. All critics miss obvious things. Just a few weeks ago I was remembering the animus Rolling Stone used to have for Led Zeppelin. And, in fact, one of Scott's best sections here is called "How to Be Wrong," addressing the inevitability and perhaps even the necessity for error, in assessing the ongoing competitions between innovation and convention, the latest shiny new thing versus musty old reliables. Scott observes the widespread exasperation with critics and criticism—the truth is most critics feel that way about them too. But he knows well the siren call of it, that urge to share a profound experience with others, which often is legitimated by encountering criticism for the first time. Scott does a nice job of outlining the situation, both from the outside and the inside, and he makes a good case for the various utilities of criticism too.

In case it's not at the library.