E-Bards and Print Reviewers

[Criticism] 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.

YES. Yes, this. I admit, I have a special soft spot in my heart for A.O. Scott, based on the random fact that he went to my high school (though not at the same time as I did). But that aside, I feel like in all the recent debate about the future of criticism — whether blogs are killing newspapers or will newspapers turn into blogs, and why should anyone trust what some shmoe in a bathrobe* tells them about a book or a movie anyway — in all that hubub, I have been waiting and waiting for someone to express this take on the matter.

All I would add to Scott’s analysis is that criticism is a kind of writing — or, fine, let’s say a “mode of discourse”, so we can include critics who use tv or youtube as their medium. But either way, it’s like any other kind of writing/discourse — the only way to judge it is by how it performs. So I know that a lot of people are shocked — shocked! — that ordinary people are allowed to leave reviews of books and movies and other products on sites like Amazon or Librarything (—>), and worse yet, other innocent consumers who don’t know any better might read these reviews and, horror or horrors, believe them. But such horror misses the point of criticism entirely. Good critics produce interesting criticism, bad critics produce dull criticism. If a review on LibraryThing is well-reasoned, well-researched, eloquent, and fully engages with the material under review and its cultural context, can’t I, as a reader, be trusted to figure that out from reading the review itself? And why shouldn’t I incorporate that review into my understanding of the text, just because the writer doesn’t happen to have a syndicated newspaper column?

But of course, that’s not the real issue at stake. And believe me, I understand that people who write reviews for a living would like to continue to get paid, and thus feel threatened by e-reviews that are produced for fun, not profit. Hey, I’d like to get paid for writing reviews too! But I don’t see why the readers of reviews should be expected to care about such an issue. Let the cream rise to the top — if newspaper reviewers are so much better at this craft than bloggers, they should have nothing to fear from us.

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*and I mean… aren’t like 90% of writers basically shmoes in our bathrobes? Well, personally I wear a sarong to write, but still.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 5th, 2010 at 5:52 pm and is filed under books, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.