Sometimes I think I would be a happier person if I only read books, listened to music, watched movies and TV, and never engaged in any discourse about any of it. This presents a bit of a problem for this newsletter, which is mainly supposed to be about cultural criticism, so I probably ought to pay attention to what other critics are saying about this or that movie or album or book. But honestly? I don’t care. I find myself almost wholly uninterested in reading criticism right now,1 whether it’s for something I loved or hated or something in between. Even the joy of reading a good pan has curdled into something unpleasant, like laughing at an ugly joke. I choose to believe that this is an indication that there’s nothing wrong with me, but something wrong with the universe. Most criticism these days just isn’t that interesting. It doesn’t tell me much about a piece of art, or an artist, or how the critic arrived at their positions. Often enough I finish reading a review with the feeling that I’ve been invited to a party with either a boring or nasty crowd, and I simply don’t want to go.
Criticism is in crisis, supposedly, along with everything else, and while I agree that the field suffers from a general aura of toxic positivity (and profitable negativity), low pay, a lack of decent outlets for writers, and a general lack of public respect for expertise, I think there’s also a basic problem with criticism itself as currently practiced. Much of the time, contemporary criticism seems to demand that readers accept the critic as an objective observer, whose job it is to sort the deserving singular artist from the horde of undeserving frauds. It’s similar to the way that award shows are often regarded—even by very intelligent people—as a mechanism for determining the best movie, book, artist etc of the year. Even if these award committees weren’t hopelessly corrupt and biased, as they nearly always are, I don’t think it’s metaphysically possible to determine whether one piece of art is the best. Different works of art are, definitionally, different beasts; there’s a Humphrey Bogart quote out there somewhere about how if actors are going to be competing for the same awards, they should be performing the same roles. You can compare a Hamlet to another Hamlet, but that’s more or less where it stops. Maybe you can choose 5-10 really good films out of a single year, 5-10 really good books, 5-10 really good albums, etc, but how do you determine which is the objective best, the winner? And why do we need, so badly, to pick a winner; in fact, why do we need to pick so many winners, in a nearly constant parade of awards ceremonies and best-of lists?
Much as with electoral politics, a lot of cultural criticism is fixated on winning: the daily horse race of who’s up and who’s down. In fact I keep running across reviews that seem totally divorced from the works themselves and more invested in the preferred meta-narrative of a given artist’s career and predictions about their future. The anticipatory hype and critique for Taylor Smith’s messy and feelings-first Tortured Poets’ Department was largely about whether it would be a bad album or a good album: whether she’s peaked or is so back/never left. A number of critics have described The Tortured Poets’ Department as lacking a danceable, radio-friendly pop hit, a fact which is treated as either good or bad depending on the critic’s particular narrative of Swift’s career and artistic ambitions. But—though I can’t speak to what radio stations will do with it, plus who listens to the radio anyway—“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” is obviously a danceable song. In fact, it has extreme Drag Race lipsynch-for-your-life energy.2 Maybe these critics do not watch Drag Race religiously? If so, this is a personal problem on their part, and I can’t help them.
I don’t really care if someone dislikes an album I liked, or vice versa; I do care very much whether it feels like they actually listened to it, or if they showed up with a pre-cut idea in their head that they stretched to fit. Lately a lot of criticism feels pre-arranged and algorithmic to me; critics (and audiences) see and hear what they want, expect, or hope to see and hear, especially if they spend a lot of time engaging in the discourse beforehand. Of course, it’s very easy to accuse someone else of algorithmic thinking and not yourself; I think we all tend to assume that our taste is relatively fair and objective, at least in comparison to other people who are deliberately or unconsciously dishonest. Most of us think we go into a new work of art with a clean, expert, and unbiased mind. This is another reason I don’t trust the pretense of objectivity in criticism; mathematically, we can’t all be right. (Okay then, let’s say only some people are right, and most people are wrong. Which people are right? Well obviously, that would have to be me and my friends, who have excellent taste; though of course, just about everybody believes this to be true about themselves and their friends. This would mean that, mathematically…oh no…)
Artists seem well-aware of this algorithmic approach to criticism and the fixation on meta-narratives, and they create accordingly. Beyonce just put out a whole album which functioned as a meta-narrative insisting on her place in American music history. I generally liked the songs on Cowboy Carter, but was bothered by the extra-textual flourishes and organization of the tracks which felt like an anxious attempt to control the critical narrative in advance.3 I kind of wish the album had just punched me in the face—Beyonce doesn’t need my approval!—but I think I understand why she chose the route she did. Artists from marginalized backgrounds can’t simply trust in the myth of critical objectivity; they’re always being judged on whether they deserve their status. They have to prove it, over and over again. A bad album (or book, or movie) isn’t just a potential misstep, an ambitious but failed stab at something: it could be an indication that It’s So Over, forever. This wouldn’t necessarily mean that a super successful artist would stop working, just that their new work would always be met with automatic, algorithmic mockery and dismissal; and no one, no matter how famous, is thick-skinned enough to handle that.
The current obsession with objectivity in criticism probably has a lot to do with the fact that artistic fields are less dominated by white men than they used to be. The meta-narratives for famous white male artists are rarely concerned with whether they deserve their status (unless they’ve done an extracurricular sex crime, in which case the algorithmic discourse cycles are different but equally predictable). If these artists put out a mediocre album or a bad movie, it doesn’t really matter for their legacy; their next work always has the chance of being brilliant (and of course there will always be a next work, at a certain level of success that’s a guarantee). Ridley Scott’s Napoleon was very bad, I thought, and few critics disagreed; Scott’s career has been checkered with huge successes and embarrassing misses, more of the latter than the former. It doesn’t matter. He can march into the winter of mediocrity, forever. But a marginalized artist, a woman artist—critics have to determine, with each successive work, whether she objectively deserves the attention we have so graciously bestowed upon her. It doesn’t matter how famous she is, how rich, how beloved by how many crazy fans. It’s not about that. It’s about whether she can be allowed.
What’s critically allowed—what’s agreed upon as good, what you’re supposed to like—is always a complicated, contingent question. Because no one can literally, physically disallow a grown-up from liking anything; yet the anxiety about being judged for the “wrong” aesthetic opinions remains a very powerful and shaming force. I cover this in more detail in my upcoming book, but in brief, a lot of our criticism rests on a basic presumption that bad art is bad for you and good art is good for you. If you enjoy a bad album or a movie or a book, then you’re wasting your time with stupid, degrading garbage; if you enjoy good art instead, then you’re educating yourself above the common man. You aren’t “just” bopping along to an album you enjoy, but engaging in a form of serious and important Protestant soul-making and proof of deservingness. So it helps a lot for critics to reach a consensus and tell us what the objectively good and healthy art and artists may be. But a consensus critical opinion is just that: a consensus opinion, usually with many dissenters, since critics often disagree with each other, wildly, even if they possess the same kinds of education and expertise. Disagreement, I think is what makes criticism interesting: the endless living argument, not a strict finished authority.4
The best critics, for me, are the ones who are aware of themselves as a flawed subjective eye and ear and are interested in explaining their flawed subjectivity to their readers. And they’re also interested in larger matters; interrogating not just whether they found something good or bad but why something is good or bad, and why that matters. I’ve started my little series on critically-acclaimed and (in my opinion) mediocre science fiction and fantasy not because I’m interested in determining whether these largely women writers “deserve” their status (I hate that piece of it and find it uncomfortable, which is why I’m locking these posts)5 but because the very mediocrity of these works seems to indicate larger failures of production. People are reading less science fiction than ever—and when they are, they’re reading old classics rather than new novels— which further suggests that something has gone desperately wrong with the apparatus of popular fiction production and the critical praise-machine, both of which feel increasingly algorithmic to me. But a person who disagrees with my opinion about the goodness or badness of a particular contemporary science fiction novel is not objectively wrong, or stupid, or graceless. They just experienced it differently. Maybe, if I can explain myself, they’ll see the work differently, and gain a new angle on how art is made, and why artists make particular choices and not others. That’s all criticism can be reasonably expected to accomplish.
Obviously my beloved friends and their criticism are exempt, because—just as obviously—they are objectively good and right and interesting.
I don’t think all elements of criticism are pure subjectivity. “Has a beat that people can dance to” and “sounds a whole hell of a lot like a Drag Race number”—these are not really subjective statements. But “this song is good” “this song is bad” usually boils down to something more like “I like this” “I don’t like this” “I feel like this ought to be something else” “I feel like this could be better if it did X or Y” which are opinions. And potentially very interesting opinions too! but not the same as “beat is fast.”
For example, I think Beyonce could have just opened with “Sixteen Carriages” and saved the lovely cover of “Blackbird” for the back half of the album.
I am aware that this is a very Jewish/Talmudic approach. It’s also correct.
I promise I will do more on this series soon, but I’m in the middle of packing for a move and just haven’t had time.