Critiquing the Critics
There’s nothing quite like being reviewed in the city of Manhattan. Whether it’s art, food, theater or design, the reviewers in this town pride themselves on never being impressed. They live in New York, so they’ve seen, heard it, worn it, tasted it all before, ho hum.
Omniscience must be exhausting. Quite a cross to bear knowing how much better it could/should/would have been. Had we only consulted them beforehand.
With print space for the arts dwindling, and a multitude of amateurs clogging the blog-o-sphere, the reviewer has as much to prove as the artist. How does one distinguish themself? Certainly not by being agreeable and appreciative. Misery, cynicism and splenetic snark now rule. The reviewer believes the review itself is an art form.
It was somewhere in the mid 1990’s when it became an unspoken fact that the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times was essentially for sale. After dropping however hundreds of thousands for a double-page color ad, you’ll be sure to see a glowing “profile” on the next page.
My favorite illustration that critics don’t know shit about shit came from a Hollywood prank. A frustrated screenwriter had been trashed in “coverage” one too many times. Who are these “readers” hired by studios to judge our work? Do they have any qualifications?
So said writer takes the cover page off of The Godfather, changes the character names, and sends the script all over town. The coverage came back universally negative. Everyone passed on the script. No on had a fucking clue.
So don’t take it personally when your work is poorly reviewed. And don’t be afraid to critique your critic. Here’s a few bromides to help you get through it.
“I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, “I wanna grow up and be a critic.” —Richard Pryor
“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
“Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.”
—Joan Didion
“Too often do reviewers remind us of the mob of Astrologers, Chaldeans, and Soothsayers gathered before ‘the writing on the wall’ and unable to read the characters or make known the interpretation.”
—Charlotte Brontë
“How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.”
–Benjamin Disraeli
“Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.” –Christopher Hampton
“Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain – and most fools do.”
–Dale Carnegie
“After all, one knows one’s weak points so well, that it’s rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.”
–Edith Wharton
“To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” –Elbert Hubbard
“Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”
–Eleanor Roosevelt
“Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.”
—Franklin P. Jones
“Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.”
–Henry Fielding
“Pay no attention to what the critics say… Remember, a statue has never been erected in honor of one!”
–Jean Sibelius
“Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.”
– Goethe
“Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.”
–Zeuxis