The word “critic” may (at least if Wikipedia is to be believed, and when do journalists not?) come from the Greek “κριτικός, kritikós” (one who discerns), which itself arises from the Ancient Greek word “κριτής, krités”(a person who offers reasoned judgment or analysis). But though the idea of critics therefore has an ancient legacy, the practice of being “professionals” — paid to pass judgement on what we see — is a relatively modern invention; and it may be going as quickly as it came, at least if a chastening article in the LA Times has it right. Peer review may have been the buzzword kicking around the recent debate on the Arts Council’s shenanigans when they imposed their night of a thousand cuts recently, but peer reviews are the thing nowadays. According to the LA Times feature, the position that many younger cultural consumers adopt to guide their entertainment choices can be summarised as: “I trust my friends more than I trust that guy writing the review.”
The writer of the feature, Patrick Goldstein, goes on to say, “There was a time when critics were our arbiters of culture, the ultimate interpreters of intellectual discourse. When I was growing up, eager to write about the arts, it was just as important to read Pauline Kael, Frank Rich and Lester Bangs as it was to see a Robert Altman film, a David Mamet play or listen to the latest Elvis Costello album. Critics gave art its context, explained its meaning and guided us to new discoveries.” But, he adds, “Those days are going, going, gone. Critics today are viewed as cultural dinosaurs on the verge of extinction.”
A recent piece in the New York Times showed how this isn’t just speculation but fast becoming a fact amongst the realm of film critics.
Pointing out that the venerable New York weekly arts paper The Village Voice (now a freebie) has recently dispensed with the services of one of its two film critics, Newsday has released two writers and Newsweek another, the piece says they are “deemed expendable at a time when revenues at print publications are declining, under pressure from Web alternatives and a growing recession in media spending.”
But it goes on, “Given that movie blogs are strewn about the Web like popcorn on a theater floor, there are those who say that movie criticism is not going away, it’s just appearing on a different platform. And no one would argue that fewer critics and the adjectives they hurl would imperil the opening of Iron Man in May. But for a certain kind of movie, critical accolades can mean the difference between relevance and obscurity, not to mention box office success or failure.”
According to Scott Rudin, producer of this year’s Oscar winner for Best Picture, No Country for Old Men as well as the nominated There Will Be Blood, “For those of us who are making work that requires a kind of intellectual conversation, we rely on that talk to do the work of getting people interested. All of the talk about No Country, all of the argument about the ending, kept that film in the forefront of the conversation”, and helped it win the best picture Oscar.
One local film critic, the Salt Lake Tribune’s Sean P Means, is also a blogger, and has posted a list of fellow critics who have lost their jobs in the last two years, the tally of which has reached 28. So the times (and maybe one day soon, The New York Times) are a-changin’.
In Variety, Anne Thompson points to a possible reason for their demise, by citing that amongst students she teaches a film criticism course to at USC, they “can’t name a working critic other than Ebert, and that’s thanks to his TV fame. They scan Rolling Stone or Entertainment Weekly but they don’t know critics Peter Travers or Owen Gleiberman. They check out film rankings at Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic and dip into some reviews, but they haven’t found a particular film critic they trust to steer them straight…. These students — and today’s youth auds in general — more often get their movie info straight from the studio marketing departments, who couldn’t be happier. These kids go to YouTube, Yahoo Movies and Apple to find trailers. As they surf the Web, bits of movie flotsam and visuals planted by the studios on MSN Movies or IGN or JoBlo eventually cross their eyeballs. But they also listen to their friends more than any authority figures, and distrust obvious studio hype.”
As Goldstein confirms in the LA Times, some of the students he teaches “put little stock in critical opinion, lumping it in with the cascade of hype that accompanies today’s entertainment”, and he quotes one as saying, “We tend to be wary of anything that seems over-hyped, whether it’s by critics or over-advertising.” But others do rely on review panels that have aggregated the various critical opinions: “Whenever I spend time with young students, I see an even more intriguing concept at work. Although they are heavily influenced by peer group reaction to films or music, they do listen to critics, but largely as a group, not as individual brands. The age of the singular critical voice is ending — people prefer the wisdom of a community. Having just spent an evening with students studying entertainment reporting at the USC School of Journalism, I asked them Friday for their take on critics. Nearly everyone said that when they want to read up on a film, they often go to metacritic.com or rottentamatoes.com, websites that offer a healthy sample of critical consensus.” He quotes one student saying, “They put all the reviews in one easy, convenient, conglomerated source that gives you a breadth of opinions from trusted sources and some less familiar ones.”
This, of course, is something that various papers do in the UK, too, in their weekly panels of reviews of the reviews, such as in the Independent on Saturdays and Guardian on Mondays (though it’s a striking fact the latter only includes the so-called “quality” papers in its tallies, and ignores the tabloids to produce an “overall” star rating, for the major events of the week in each arts form).
Critics become a homogenised voice in this process, and although it is no bad thing that power isn’t vested in a single one (as, for many years, the power of the New York Times held sway over the fate of Broadway theatre, but no longer does), this process is diminishing the overall impact of the paper’s own critical voice, which is revealed to be not the only one that matters.
Leave a comment