Daily-newspaper bosses across the country have been letting cultural critics go en masse, no doubt due to the crappy economy, no doubt due to the predominance of the blogosphere. Smarty-pantses are all verklempt about the situation. Apparently, no one’s told them that glossy mags and alt-freaking-weeklies are alive and well, thank you very much! Jerks. As if daily newspaper criticism is the only criticism that matters. Puh-lease. Some of that crap is so poorly written it’s embarrassing. And yet you can bet that daily-newspaper critics are making more money than us alt-weekly and mag folks. Drives me crazy.
Anyway, the Times’ A.O. Scott believes that criticism itself –– shitty writing on shitty blogs notwithstanding –– is in the same shape it’s been in since, well, the first caveman shook his head glacially and scrawled a big “X” through another caveman’s drawing of a bison. That state? “Miserable and full of possibility,” Scott writes in a recent column. “The world is always falling down. The news is always very sad. The time is always late.”
And there will always be a need for informed criticism, with “informed” being the optimal word. In an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times a couple of years ago, TIME’s film critic Richard Schickel compared blogging to “finger-painting” and went on to say, “I don’t think it’s impossible for bloggers to write intelligent reviews. I do think, however, that a simple ‘love’ of reading (or movie-going or whatever) is an insufficient qualification for the job. … We have to find in the work of reviewers something more than idle opinion-mongering. We need to see something other than flash, egotism, and self-importance. We need to see their credentials. And they need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion.”
Scott isn’t worried about criticism’s purported death knell. “It is not a profession and does not stand or fall with any particular business model,” he writes. “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.”
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this alt-weekly in particular has some of the best critic’s around. thanks mariani
Thanks, Ma.
Losing Punch Shaw would be addition by subtraction. He writes bumper stickers, not reviews…
Speaking of crappy journalism. Can someone shed some light as to why the Star Telegram is doing that DFW.com thing? I cannot believe there was a meeting where the higher ups thought this was a good idea. Why would they think that dumbing down our market with is a good idea w/ gossip crap. I know they are trying to steal ad dollars from you all at the Weekly, but I do not know a single person who has ever seen this or read it.