Not so long ago, I had this very interesting conversation with a friend (doing a thesis on movie critics) about the relevance of critics (the persons, not the comments).
It is so easy to crush the work of someone in a few paragraphs when yourself, you are not creating anything. “That should not even be an actual job” I said. I proceeded then by explaining how I perceived them, as the title says, as frustrated, failed artists.
Actually, food critic Anton Ego from Ratatouille movie sums up my thought quite well (sorry for the long quote):
” In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.”
Of course, this is not taking into account positive critics, but does anyone really remember good critics? I don’t think so.
I was also wondering what satisfaction the critics had from harshly criticizing (movies in this context, but could be applied to music, books, etc…). There’s often hard work behing a project like a movie, and I felt like critics sometimes lack empathy in their comments.
So in the end I was asking my friend, why bother consulting critics?
At this point my friend simply asked me if I had read any real critics. And that’s when I realized that I didn’t really know what I was talking about. I wanted to reply yes, but actually, I had probably only read comments from people who had seen the movie, people like you and me.
And that’s probably why critic is an actual job. Because according to my friend (who knows his subject, he’s doing a thesis on it!), critics actually go beyond emotions and flat critics (“It’s an awful movie”) and explain why it is awful. They give insight on what is bad (production, acting, etc…) and how exactly. He explained to me how it was actually interesting to read the critics, see the movie and then re-read the critics.
Moreover, they actually do create. Their paper are well-written, smart, nuanced and worth reading.
Basically my mistake had been to assume that the public could criticize in the same way as a critic. I made a huge generalization.
I think being a very sensitive and empathetic person, I focused too much on emotions. But truth is, real critics are constructive, even when negative, and will allow the persons concerned to improve.
Lessons learnt! I’ll think twice before ranting about a subject I actually know nothing about!
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