Portrait of John Berger.
‘What is the good? A vast and terrible question-mark which seizes the critic by the throat from his very in the first chapter that he sits down to write,’ writes Charles Baudelaire in 1848. Under the subtitle, ‘What is the good of criticism?’, this is a relatively early text within the art criticism, and yet it’s striking how full of anxiety it is.
The role of the critic has a surprisingly thin history. While people have discussed and written about culture more broadly, the idea that a single individual would dedicate themselves to the task, even taking it as a full-time role, is only made possible through wider changes in the art market and publishing industry. Terry Eagleton, in the The Function of Criticism, makes this point in describing the rise of criticism and its relation to the bourgeois public sphere. This is intimately tied up with class, as his John Barrell quotation suggests:
‘The gentleman was believed to be the only member of society who spoke a language universally intelligible; his usage was ‘common’, in the sense of being neither a local dialect nor infected by the terms of any particular art.’
Baudelaire's text builds upon his predecessor, Denis Diderot, who’s writing on the Salon from 1759 to 1781 took a more descriptive approach. Where Baudelaire's writing blurred the boundaries between poetry and criticism, often exploring emotionally charged narratives around the artworks, Diderot emphasised content and clarity – particularly artworks that conveyed virtuous messages or addressed social issues. By contrast, originality and innovation flow from feeling, Baudelaire argues. Just as the artist ‘without temperament is not worthy of painting’:
‘The critic should arm himself from the start with a sure criterion, a criterion drawn from nature, and should then carry out his duty with passion; for a critic does not cease to be a man, and passion draws similar temperaments together and exalts the reason to fresh heights.’
Much of this feels dated now. To talk about criteria would be an absurdity, and the references to temperament and passion feel particularly rooted in intellectual fads of the time. But the identification with writing and feeling, the flirtation with poetry and criticism, is a commonplace claim today as it was then, as is the suggestion that this is a novel perspective on criticism itself.
I’m less interested in wading into this debate in particular, although I do find the ways this rhetorical landscape shifts and turns through time interesting. What is most useful now, I think, is simply to chart out this territory and notice the many claims being laid to the structure of feeling inherent to criticism.
Take a recently published article in the Guardian by film critic Manuela Lazic for instance. It’s interesting initially as a first person account of the quite remarkable marketing feat behind Barbie, but also calls upon a historically loaded structure of feeling. The opening kicks off with an evocative anecdote that speaks to the texture of contemporary culture’s cycles of hype and promotion:
‘Feel free to share your positive feelings about the film on Twitter after the screening,” said the usher introducing the London press preview screening of Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s Mattel-produced film. The embargo for reviews, however, would not be lifted until two days later, closer to the film’s release. The audience generally didn’t bat an eyelid and it wasn’t the first time my colleagues and I had heard such directives, yet we were left feeling censored: if they won’t allow for our negative reactions, why should they get our positive ones?’
In discussions about the role of the critic, questions of feeling and intent are closely connected to anxieties about complicity and purpose. As Lazic’s outlines, attempts to control the critical and public reaction to cultural products is not new, especially within the studio-dominated film industry, but what was jarring was the ‘extreme’ lengths they were going to. Although, it’s curious the ways in which their argument conceives of the agency of these respective parties involved. The potential of a review to be ‘negative’ is put forth as proof of the independent thought held by the critic, a role essential as ‘how is the audience to think critically of what is being sold to it?’
Here, the audience is passive – a broad mass of consumers, easily swayed by marketing lest a hard nosed critic intervenes. While articulating a recent aspect of contemporary culture, the conversation has swayed to a classic formulation of what criticism is. Where the real critic’s generic aspiration is for cinema ‘to be as artful and life-changing as it can be’, this is contrasted with a vague notion of ‘a purely commercial enterprise meant to make us buy more things.’
They continue, describing one strand of critics who in advent of YouTube, TikTok and streaming platforms are so frightened of ‘ruffling any feathers’ that they don’t want to dissuade any potential audiences from attending a physical cinema by writing a negative review – best they see a film, any film at all. Certain forms of criticism, cultural reportage and fan culture can be easy to muddle here, and they do invite different people and carry distinct responsibilities, but perhaps that’s the point too, that categories of public discussion are increasingly blurred with the rise of social media.
It is true that some culture section editors have expressed their disinterest in running negative reviews, although this is often justified due to the limited page space available: why publish to a take down when their readers are largely looking for recommendations? It’s a reasonable point considering the function of an arts section is to engage readers and not to support critics, but this has always been the case, particularly for widely read newspapers, which should ground a more frank understanding of the stated and unstated roles critics adopt, regardless of their intent.
I make this point to suggest that our questions about the relationship between criticism and compromise should begin before the category of the influencer is introduced (and I think more interesting things can be said about the dynamics of influencers and the aesthetics of fandom than charges of cynicism or stupidity).
The value placed upon ‘negativity’ in this piece and in wider conceptions of criticism is curious, and worth considering further. Negativity is not simply a counterpoint to positivity, they are part of an evaluative judgement. The critic encounters culture, and delivers a judgement in public. This judgement enters the public sphere and is received by the audience, either guiding their choices as consumers or facilitating wider discourse (about the specific cultural work, its producer or larger trends).
Within this framework, the critic takes on a remarkably similar function to the influencer. Each role carries its own cultural baggage and sense of status, yet I am less interested in pitting one against the other, if only so we can think about these roles and the economic structures that underpin them in more expansive ways.
Criticism is not just an activity performed by critics for an audience, it is an engaged form of discussion itself, carried out by a wide range of figures – from artists themselves, to writers of many sorts, other cultural workers and the public themselves. The full-time critic represents only a partial account of the history of criticism, and is often not the most productive, generative or creative force within it.
The negative review is essential to preserve the credibility of the positive review. The so-called independence of the critic affirms the status of certain intellectualised cultural discourse. And on this point, I think an oft-quoted piece on book reviews from the editors at N+1 is worth considering:
The main problem with the book review today is not that its practitioners live in New York, as some contend. It is not that the critics are in cahoots with the authors under review, embroiled in a shadow economy of social obligation and quid pro quo favor trading. The problem is not that book reviews are too mean or too nice, too long or too short, though they may be those things, too. The main problem is that the contemporary American book review is first and foremost an audition — for another job, another opportunity, another day in the content mine, hopefully with better lighting and tools, but at the very least with better pay. What kind of job or opportunity for the reviewer depends on her ambitions.