A critics’ cartel?
I’ll cop to the irony here right away: I’m taking a critical look at a critic’s assertion that criticism should be reserved for the critical elite.
Hey, I’m a novelist. This is a critically important topic. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.).
Richard Schickel, a longtime film critic for Time magazine, is unhappy with the Web-enabled democratization of criticism of books, movies, art or any other cultural pastime that lends itself to judgment. In an essay published over the weekend in the Los Angeles Times, Schickel declared that most bloggers haven’t earned the right to be taken seriously as critics. “We need to see their credentials,” he wrote. “And they need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion.”
Leaving aside the constitutional implications of that declaration, Schickel has made a point with which anybody who’s ever been the subject of a review would surely agree — specifically, that critics ought to know what the hell they’re talking about.
I can quibble with some of Schickel’s other points — and I will in a moment — but he’s dead-on with this one. If you’re going to review a movie by, say, Martin Scorcese, know something about Scorsese’s other films and the general trend of his career and work. In short, be informed about the subject. Place whatever you have to say in a larger context. Connect your criticism not only to the work itself, but to the culture and the world.
Too bad Schickel didn’t do that very thing in his essay.
Schickel doesn’t seem to realize how much his effort to keep criticism in the hands of the learned elite parallels the movement, centuries ago, by clerics to keep the Bible out of the hands of peasants. Prior to the invention of the printing press, Bibles were copied by hand and jealously protected. If ordinary people, who were almost entirely illiterate anyway, didn’t have access to a Bible, then they were entirely dependent upon the priesthood for their access to God and his teachings. The “democratization” of literacy that followed the creation of the printing press took scriptural interpretation out of the hands of the few and put it into the hands of the many. History shifted dramatically as a result.
That’s what the Web has done for modern society. It has taken mass communication out of the hands of the few and placed it in the hands of the many. There’s an undeniable downside to it: Millions of ill-informed yahoos are yammering away on a daily basis. (Cough, cough.) But there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle.
Still, Schickel’s essay is worth reading. It’s right there on the Web, available to all — not just to people in Los Angeles. Irony abounds.