| “Complaints about the state of criticism are a very old story,” writes Jed Perl in the Review’s November 6 issue. But lately, with writers “scrambling for an ever-diminishing number of magazine assignments [and] little inclination to pay critics real money when the Internet is saturated with opinions available for free,” questions about the value and importance of criticism seem to bubble up everywhere. “The challenge of distinguishing the few pieces of serious criticism from the overload of mere ratings and reportage,” Perl observes, “has created a chaotic situation.” Amid that chaos—the Chicago Tribune no longer employs a full-time film critic; The New York Times has recently reassigned four of its arts critics to, among other sections, the obituary desk—Matthew Aucoin, also in the November 6 issue, finds a glimmer of opportunity: The problem is that the critic’s initial, unchanged mind, suffused only with the knee-jerk superficiality of a first impression, is usually treated as authoritative.... I wonder if newspapers should think of a review’s webpage as a dynamic document, one that could feature a brief “first look” assessment the day after a premiere and that could be subsequently fleshed out with more detailed impressions and revisions upon repeated hearings.
Below, alongside Perl’s and Aucoin’s essays, are five pieces of criticism about critics from our archives. Silicon Valley firms like Palantir and Anduril are threatening the foundations of US industrial policy even as they call for reenergizing it. What made their current bid for power possible? The decline of traditional newspaper reviews of new music offers an opportunity to expand our ideas of what music criticism could be. The drama of Elizabeth Hardwick’s life emanated from an elemental restlessness and a desire for sovereignty over her intellect and emotion. —April 21, 2022 “Clement Greenberg, for a slew of reasons, was the most influential art critic in American history.… He was also nearly the last, and by far the best-known, of the self-taught art critics; practically no one goes into this field today without an armor-plating of specialized degrees in art history, but such things were not considered necessary fifty years ago, when most American art criticism was written by poets, painters, polemicists, and enthusiastic amateurs.” —October 21, 1993 “I often thought of Cyril Connolly in middle age as a phenomenal baby in a pram, his hands reaching out greedily for what he saw, especially when it was far beyond him, or, if he got it, delighted for a moment and then throwing it out and crying to get it back. Marvelous at amusing us, lost or sulky when alone: a baby talked about by the nannies, principled, spiteful, or bemused, who, of course, gathered around the resourceful only child.” —March 15, 1984 “Well into his seventies, Edmund Wilson would march into the Princeton Club and order a half dozen martinis, to be prepared not sequentially but simultaneously—six shining glasses in a bright row, down which Wilson would work, all the while talking and thinking at a rapid pace. To the end of a long life, he kept on making the only thing he thought worth making: sense, a quality almost entirely lacking in American literature where stupidity—if sufficiently sincere and authentic—is deeply revered, and easily achieved.” —September 25, 1980 “Ms. Kael’s quirks, mannerisms, tactics, and excesses have not only taken over her work so thoroughly that hardly anything else, nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility, remains; they have also proved contagious, so that the content and level of critical discussion, of movies but also of other forms, have been altered astonishingly for the worse.” —August 14, 1980 Image from Sunday Night Movies by Leanne Shapton, 2013 To find love for yourself, or to place a gift personals ad for a loved one, take advantage of our limited-time special offer. Special Offer
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