[COLUMN] What is the Point of Criticism? | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Last week, Vulture cultural critic Angelica Jade Bastién published a review of Beyoncé’s concert film, Renaissance. It was a powerhouse piece that interrogated Beyoncé’s meticulously stage-managed public persona in the context of carefully curated concert film, exploring the gulf between what the film implied about the artist’s social conscience and its very insistent apoliticality. It was a thoughtful, considered, and ambitious piece of critical writing that put Renaissance in context.

It was provocative, in a very literal sense. It provoked an army of Beyoncé fans, representatives of “the Beyhive”, who reacted immediately and aggressively. Fans launched a coordinated campaign to get the review removed from the aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Bastién deleted her X (or Twitter) account and set her Instagram to private. As Stacy Lee Kong put it, Bastién’s review “made a sizable contingent of Bey’s stans super mad, and sparked an entire discourse around art criticism.”

This is not a unique occurrence. Anybody who works in criticism is familiar with the tendency of fandoms to overreact to anything other than unqualified praise. Amy Nicholson has talked about the harassment that she received for writing a three-star review of The Avengers. Later that summer, Marshall Fine had the misfortune to post the first negative review of The Dark Knight Rises, which resulted in death threats. Taylor Swift fans have a history of targeting critics of the artist’s work.

Increasingly, celebrities seem to treat criticism as a sort of personal attack. Samuel L. Jackson used social media to push to get A.O. Scott fired for his negative review of The Avengers. Seth Rogen recently lamented, “I think if most critics knew how much it hurts the people that made the things that they are writing about, they would second guess the way they write these things.” Everything Everywhere All At Once director Daniel Kwan had to tell fans to stop harassing critics.

The entire cultural sphere is undergoing a seismic shift, and it is perhaps solipsistic to focus on how that affects criticism. After all, writers and actors just got out of a massive strike in which one of the central conflicts concerned the idea that they could be replaced by artificial intelligence. So much art is now devalued as “content”, and then packaged and distributed as a formless “content soup.” Studio executives like Bob Iger seem intent on managing any humanity out of the creative process.

Still, to bring the focus back to the idea of critics and criticism, the past decade or so has seen a palpable shift in how pop culture criticism is perceived. When Samuel L. Jackson eventually got his wish and A.O. Scott resigned, he cited modern fan culture as a key factor in his decision, arguing that it was “an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mind-set that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies.”

Over the past few years, it seems like the role of the critic has been largely usurped by that of “the influencer”, with many studios opting to screen movies like Barbie for influencers ahead of critics. The new wave of film critics on the social media platform Tiktok, known collectively as “MovieTok”, often feel like an extension of marketing and publicity rather than criticism. They are just another form of advertising for the next big release, rather than engaging in traditional film critique.

This all gets at one of the most fundamental questions about the profession as whole: what is the point of film critics? What exactly does the job entail? What purpose do they serve? What is the end goal of criticism? It is a big question, and it’s perhaps both self-serving and hubristic to proffer an answer in a column dedicated to pop culture criticism. However, it might be useful to consider how the perception of criticism has changed in recent years.

At its broadest, criticism is a mode of conversation about a work of art. It is a writer or a commenter or a pundit putting forward their own argument about the meaning or context of a piece. There are any number of ways that a critic might approach it. They could consider the object in the context of its creator through auteur theory or separate from its architect through the death of the author. They might compare it to similar works or even place it in a larger cultural framework.

There is no single correct mode of criticism. Every approach has its strengths and its weaknesses, and some modes will appeal to individual critics and audience members over others on a case-by-case basis. There is no standardized mode of criticism, which is why if three critics talk about something for more than two minutes, they are liable to come out with eight different opinions. This isn’t a bug. There is no objective or quantifiable metric. There is no right answer to be mathematically derived.

However, there are narrower definitions of criticism. In practical terms, there is the idea that the critic is an advocate for the consumer, a recommendation engine. This makes a certain amount of sense. There is a lot of media out there – and more of it all the time – and it is impossible to watch all of it. The average consumer needs a way to find the media that will appeal to them. Critics are helpful in this sense: they see a lot of stuff and have a deeper understanding of its mechanics.

Of course, there are obvious challenges to this approach. The most obvious is that taste is subjective. Different people like different things, and critics are also people. The best advice to any potential audience member is to find a critic that they respect and trust, and to pay attention to the particulars of what an individual critic enjoys. Why a given author enjoyed or disliked a particular work is often more predictive than whether they enjoyed it at all.

However, criticism is a business like any other, and there has been a push towards stripping out a lot of this individuality. To be fair, it is a trend that has been happening for decades. Star ratings invite readers to skip the actual criticism and just take the critic’s score. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert introduced the ruthlessly efficient thumbs-up/thumbs-down binary. Sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes aggregate dozens or hundreds of opinions into a shareable score and neat pass/fail metric.

This trend has created the illusion of objectivity. Anything seems more objective when it can be distilled to a simple number or a true/false binary. Something either is or is not, there is no room for the complexity of human experience or response. This is why fans obsess over Rotten Tomatoes scores and why there are campaigns to manipulate easily gameable and unreliable metrics like user scores.

It’s a philosophy that ignores the actual content of the “content.” It minimizes the reader’s actual engagement with criticism by boiling a critic’s opinion down to a score that is thrown into a blender with a host of other similarly derived scores. It’s a model intended to drive traffic to sites like Rotten Tomatoes and stop it there. It has contributed to the “enshittification” of the internet and reflects the same philosophy that treats large language models as synthesizers of oceans of source material.

As with chatbots, this approach to criticism seems to reduce the artform to a mirror. Perhaps taking that idea of critics as consumer rights advocates to its logical extreme, there’s an increasing sense that criticism exists largely to validate the reader’s pre-formed opinion. That is, after all, at the heart of the pushback against Bastién’s review of Renaissance or Nicholson and Scott’s reviews of The Avengers. Those critics didn’t like something that fans liked, or they didn’t like it enough.

This is a very limiting view of criticism of an artform. It is entirely possible to imagine a future of computer-generated critics that serve as personal assistants to individual audience members, regurgitating their opinions back at them as a form of validation of their taste. At the same time, even if this were desirable, it is also impossible to imagine any human critic accomplishing something similar. There are too many people with too many different opinions to possibly appease them all.

More to the point, this misses the potential of criticism as a forum for cultural conversation. Most viewers already know how they think or feel about a given work. Most audience members are capable of forming an opinion on their own. However, the beauty of a good critic is that they offer a unique way of looking at a particular work, a fresh and cleanly articulated argument that may never have occurred to an individual reader.

To a certain extent, this is the function of all art – and criticism is an artform. Roger Ebert described cinema as “the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts”, because it provides a literal window into another world. The audience is asked to see a story through another set of eyes. At its best, criticism can accomplish something similar, albeit from a slightly different perspective. Reading or watching a good piece of criticism, an audience member is invited to think differently about a work.

Siskel and Ebert were famous for their thumbs, but were beloved because they could articulate how they felt about a given work. They often didn’t feel the same way, but a viewer got a sense of why each held their view. One could disagree with Ebert’s review of Dead Poets Society while still considering what he perceives to be the film’s contradictions. The duo’s criticism of slasher movies might have been knee-jerk, but they engaged with big ideas about how those films were consumed.

Bastién is one of the finest critics working today because she continues that tradition. Her review of Wonder Woman 1984 is a stunning piece of cultural criticism that interrogates the surface-level progressivism of so many modern blockbusters in a thoughtful manner. In the specific context of Renaissance, it’s not as if Bastién set out with an axe to grind against Beyoncé. She raved about Lemonade. However, there is value in interrogating and exploring the work of a totemic artist.

In some ways, the debate about the larger function of criticism can be boiled down to a more basic question: who does criticism serve? Are critics there to serve as “influencers”, as a de facto publicity arm promoting the content of gigantic multinational corporations? Are critics obligated to make artists like Samuel L. Jackson and Seth Rogen feel good and comfortable? Do critics exist to validate the opinions of extremely vocal online fans? Those all seem like very cynical definitions of the role.

At their best, critics exist to push the conversation forward, to invite debate about a work and to encourage audiences to consider things that they hadn’t thought about themselves. It’s not something that can be reduced to a binary or an algorithm or a content-generating chatbot. It’s something profoundly human – at least to me.