Film Criticism in the Digital Age 9780813570747
Over the past decade, as digital media has expanded and print outlets have declined, pundits have bemoaned a “crisis of...
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FILM CRITICISM IN THE DIGITAL AGE

FILM CRITICISM IN TH E D I GITA L AGE Edited by

M at ti a s Fre y a nd C ec ili a S aya d

Rutger s Uni v er sit y Press New Brunswick, New Jersey and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Film criticism in the digital age / edited by Mattias Frey and Cecilia Sayad. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–8135–7073–0 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7072–3 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7074–7 (e-book (web pdf)) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7364–9 (e-book (epub)) 1. Film criticism. 2. Motion pictures—Philosophy. 3. Mass media—Technological innovations. I. Frey, Mattias, editor. II. Sayad, Cecilia, editor. PN1995.F4573 2015 791.4301—dc23 2014030640 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2015 by Rutgers, The State University Individual chapters copyright © 2015 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction: Critical Questions Mattias Frey

vii 1

Part I. The Critic and the Audience 1

Thumbs in the Crowd: Artists and Audiences in the Postvanguard World Greg Taylor

23

2

Critics Through Authors: Dialogues, Similarities, and the Sense of a Crisis Cecilia Sayad

41

3

“The Last Honest Film Critic in America”: Armond White and the Children of James Baldwin Daniel M c Neil

61

Part II. New Forms and Activities 4

The New Democracy? Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, Twitter, and IMDb Mattias Frey

81

5

The Price of Conservation: Online Video Criticism of Film in Italy Giacomo Manzoli and Paolo Noto

99

6

Before and After AfterEllen: Online Queer Cinephile Communities as Critical Counterpublics Maria San Filippo

117

7

Elevating the “Amateur”: Nollywood Critics and the Politics of Diasporic Film Criticism Noah Tsika

137

v

vi

Contents

Part III. Institutions and the Profession 8

American Nationwide Associations of Film Critics in the Internet Era Anne Hurault- Paupe

157

9

Finnish Film Critics and the Uncertainties of the Profession in the Digital Age Outi Hakola

177

10

The Social Function of Criticism; or, Why Does the Cinema Have (to Have) a Soul? Thomas Elsaesser

195

Part IV. Critics Speak 11

The Critic Is Dead . . . Jasmina Kallay

211

12

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Movies Armond White

217

13

Who Needs Critics? Nick James

225

14

Excerpts from Cineaste’s “Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet: A Critical Symposium” Theodoros Panayides, Kevin B. Lee, Karina Longworth, The Self- Styled Siren (Farran Smith Nehme), and Stephanie Zacharek

231

Afterword Cecilia Sayad

243

Selected Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

249 261 265

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors would like to thank the contributors, Leslie Mitchner and the Rutgers University Press staff, the anonymous reviewer, Peter Stanfield, and the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Film and the Moving Image at the University of Kent. Some chapters presented here have appeared previously. A different version of chapter 4 appeared in Mattias Frey, The Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism: The Anxiety of Authority (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015). Chapter 11 was originally published in Film Ireland, September/October 2007, 26–27, © 2007 Jasmina Kallay/Film Ireland. Chapter 12 was originally published in New York Press, 30 April 2008, © 2008 Armond White. Chapter 13 was originally published in Sight and Sound, October 2008, 16–18, © 2008 Nick James/Sight and Sound. Chapter 14 contains excerpts from the eponymous article originally published in Cineaste 33.4 (2008): 30–45, © 2008 Cineaste Magazine. All are reprinted by permission.

FILM CRITICISM IN THE DIGITAL AGE

INTRODUCTION Critical Questions MATTIAS FREY

“Today film criticism is a profession under siege.” So begins—as a white text over a black screen—Gerald Peary’s documentary For the Love of Movies: The History of American Film Criticism (2009). As the introduction to a chronicle of a profession, its tone is more or less apocalyptic. Nevertheless, Peary’s take on the state of film criticism as activity and institution is hardly aberrant. In fact, judging by the many journalistic articles,1 regular symposia and conferences,2 and the increasing scholarly output on the subject—which bemoan a “crisis of criticism” or mourn the “death of the critic”3—it might seem safe to claim that the aims, status, and institution of arts and culture criticism in general, and film criticism in particular, are, indeed, facing possible extinction. This is hardly a case of academic navel-gazing or journalistic self-indulgence; if we are to believe chroniclers such as Sean P. Means, who listed fifty-five American movie critics who lost their jobs between 2006 and 2009,4 the threat is real. In an era in which criticism is offered “free” to the reader without sustainable levels of online advertising, and print circulation and advertising have permanently eroded, ontological questions about the purpose and worth of criticism have become urgent. This anthology seeks to understand the current state of film criticism and how it has developed. It aims to examine the challenges and possibilities that the Internet offers to the evaluation, promotion, and explanation of artistic works, as well as digital technology’s impact on film criticism as an institution and profession. How has the status of the critic changed with the development of new digital media and the transformation, consolidation, and demise of traditional media outlets? To what extent can critics—whether moonlighting bloggers or salaried writers—intervene in current popular discourse about arts and culture? 1

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Although these questions have been the source of much journalistic discussion, academics have addressed these issues only in a piecemeal or oblique fashion. In general, film criticism—rather than film history or theory—is just beginning to receive serious scholarly attention. The reason for this lacuna is surely complex; nevertheless, the long-term goal of film studies to establish itself as a serious subject of inquiry and maintain an institutional presence at universities and other highbrow cultural institutions has meant that, for generations, scholars have attempted to distance themselves from “mere reviewers” and to differentiate their profession from journalism. In recent years this regard has come into question, and there has been a flurry of activity surrounding film criticism. Nevertheless, these studies have mainly revolved around the biographies of prominent critics, such as Pauline Kael, or indeed collected the writings of important critics—Kael, Manny Farber, Richard Roud, and others—as primary sources.5 Where histories of film criticism have existed, they seek primarily to telegraph broadly rather than analyze precisely; see, for example, Jerry Roberts’s The Complete History of American Film Criticism, which speeds through more than a hundred years of writing and an even larger number of critics.6 Raymond J. Haberski’s It’s Only a Movie! Films and Critics in American Culture presents a similarly sprawling survey of American film culture and a synopsis of the country’s film critics. It dashes through a century of major events (debates about the aesthetic value of cinema; Cahiers du cinéma and the American “auteur theory”; the establishment of the New York Film Festival and the American Film Institute; New Hollywood and the rise of film-school directors) in a matter of paragraphs. Haberski’s American story is told as a familiar, consensual, and national tale; his synoptic, monocultural approach represents the straight story of film criticism that urgently needs to be challenged.

The Current State of Debate on Criticism Five interlocking debates, discourses that overlap and inform each other, have dominated writing about arts and culture criticism in general, and film criticism in particular, in the digital age. To survey the current debates—but also to preview the thematic emphases of this book—we need to outline the major focuses and fronts of these discourses. Each of the contributions to this volume contemplates at least one, if not all five, of these questions and their relationship to film criticism. Should Evaluation Be a Function of Criticism or Even Its Principal Aim? This subject is a holdover from earlier eras; it is a debate that has reemerged, especially in academic treatises on criticism, because of the general return to ontological and existential questions about criticism. Just as the advent of digital formats

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precipitated a return to ontological debates about “what is cinema?” in the postcelluloid world, the rise of digital media and the demise of print have led commentators to reexamine the most basic questions about the purpose of criticism. For centuries the purpose of criticism has been a subject of debate, and this is not the place to rehearse the various viewpoints in depth. For now it must suffice to say that these purposes have included education or refining the taste of the audience; personal or artistic expression on the side of the critic; creating a dialogue with an audience or enlivening a public sphere; describing, deciphering, demystifying, contextualizing, or categorizing the work or its relationship to society; or simply judging the aesthetic or entertainment value of the examined cultural product.7 Rather than telegraphing the history of the idea of criticism, the more pressing task here is to examine where the current debate stands and how, in fact, the ascent of digital media has inflected and energized contemporary discourses on the purpose of criticism. On this subject, although some journalists and a smattering of treatises by academics argue for an anarchy of opinion and agitate for alternative purposes for criticism (more on this in the discussion of John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts? below), without a doubt the main theme and thrust of contemporary scholarly writing on criticism has argued that evaluation is or should be its main purpose. In the recently published On Criticism Noël Carroll deploys examples from film, music, performance, and visual arts to advance the thesis that criticism’s primary function is not—as is sometimes claimed—description, interpretation, the demystification of hidden meanings, or the uncovering of latent ideologies. Instead, criticism should always aim to evaluate; “criticism,” according to Carroll, “is essentially evaluation grounded in reasons.”8 For Carroll evaluation’s role as the engine of the critical project should be self-understood; indeed, the original etymology of the word critic, kritikos, “one who serves on a jury and delivers a verdict,” implies evaluation. Traditionally, “criticism has been generally aligned with evaluation.”9 Only recently have critics renounced their task to judge objects according to their aesthetic value. To substantiate how widely criticism has become decoupled from evaluation, Carroll refers to a recent poll of art critics: 75 percent maintained that evaluation was the least significant aspect of their professional duties.10 Opposing skeptics’ thesis that evaluation is doomed to be “subjective” and that the artist’s intentions are unknowable, Carroll demonstrates that “although we do not have so-called direct access to the artist’s intention, we have lots of indirect evidence for it,” because most artists produce works that belong to recognized categories such as genres, movements, styles, periods, or oeuvres. According to Carroll, the function of the critic is to judge the extent to which the work achieves the artist’s intention; this is the work’s “success value.”11

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Carroll’s treatise is informed by the vocabularies and concerns of analytic philosophy, and his disdain for the lack of rigor in ideological-symptomatic traditions and interpretation in general is well documented.12 Nevertheless, other prominent commentators whose research and perspectives are far different have also advocated (a return to) evaluation as the most important purpose of arts and culture criticism. Rónán McDonald, a literary scholar and major recent interlocutor in this debate, narrates the history of criticism to argue that this practice has become devalued as a social good; the reason for this, in his view, is a historical itinerary that has progressively departed from evaluation as the purpose behind criticism. This path was put into motion by the agenda of university scholars working under the auspices of cultural studies, which resolved debates about how to assess aesthetic value by driving “a steamroller over hierarchies, flattening all into indifferent practices.”13 Because of cultural studies’ implication that all cultural products are equally worthy of serious inquiry, McDonald argues, they also suggest that culture is equally worthy of being ignored. Besides the object and purpose of inquiry, the very language—obscure vocabularies and jargon— that scholars have been prone to use since the heyday of cultural studies has precipitated, according to McDonald, a fundamental divergence between scholarly and journalistic criticism by which the public imagination became “immune to issues and debates” in academia.14 What Should Be the Nature of the Relationship between the Critic and His or Her Audience? This question, too, has been a perennial one that has reemerged with the transformations engendered by the new media; most often, as we see in the preceding argument by McDonald, the fronts in the debate about the nature of the relationship between critics and audiences have followed from the previous question about the very function of criticism. The exact nature of the relationship between critic and reader and the potential for the critic to mediate between the audience and the work has been a subject of long deliberation as, indeed, mediation speaks to the very purpose of criticism.15 Traditionally, scholars have noted how the critic, unlike the “reader/ viewer,” “includes the concept of ‘arbiter,’ of arbitrage.”16 But surely, the opinions on the quality of this mediation range from educator (à la Matthew Arnold) to a more personal negotiation with the work, in the vein of Oscar Wilde.17 Much of the scholarship was either purely theoretical or based on more or less anecdotal evidence. More recently, researchers working with rigorous empirical methods have tested the claims that critics can function as “tastemakers” or “gatekeepers” and significantly exert influence on the success or failure of a film. The “gatekeeper” thesis has traditionally maintained that the critic

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shapes the reader’s reception of the film—or at least provides the preconditions or point of departure for his or her later viewing. Tested empirically, however, sociologists have doubted the extent to which critics can perform this function.18 Wesley Shrum’s study of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, for example, concludes that, despite anecdotal claims to the contrary,19 critics “do not have the power to ‘make or break’ shows”; indeed, the “visibility provided by reviews is more important than their evaluative function.”20 According to Shrum’s research, which is also useful for film, the critic only has an effect on certain type of productions (“legitimate” genres such as art-house) or certain types of readers/ viewers (those who seek to refine a discriminating sensibility for art).21 Some strict proponents of cultural studies have questioned that there is any real distinction between critics and readers; for commentators such as John Carey, “what critics think about this or that artwork . . . is necessarily of limited and personal interest.”22 Indeed, for these believers in the absolute constructedness of the subject, all criticism is only “personal opinion.” Unlike psychology and sociology of art or pure audience research (to his mind rigorous methods to account for taste), criticism is a vaguely subjective measure of the immeasurable: artistic value. It follows that works of art cannot be rigorously evaluated as “better” or “worse” than any other. In turn, Carey disputes what has been the traditional justification for a critic and his or her relationship with an audience, namely, that the critic’s judgment to understand and evaluate art and his or her ability to communicate this judgment are superior to a layperson’s capacity. For Carey, “to claim that our feelings are, in an absolute sense, more valuable than someone else’s (as opposed to simply more valuable to us) does not make sense.” If all opinions are equally valid or invalid, we cannot rationally “call other people’s aesthetic choices ‘mistaken’ or ‘incorrect,’ no matter how much we happen to not like them.”23 Pace Carey (but also the large number of bloggers who practice film criticism outside of traditional institutions and rarely theorize its practice), in today’s academic deliberations over the role of the critic, the strongest current advocates a powerful critical authority figure who will guide the reader from a position of superior knowledge. Before we examine the major commentators who write in this vein, it is worth mentioning how widespread this position is in film culture. Indeed, among professional journalistic critics there is extreme anxiety about this function and about its possible loss: this mentality is the one on offer, for example, in Gerald Peary’s documentary, in Sight and Sound and Cineaste dossiers on criticism (excerpts thereof are reprinted in this volume), and in the regular screeds in publications like Variety, such as the one that asks “Are Film Critics Really Needed Anymore . . . or Is It a Washed-Up Profession?”24 Contemporary academic studies of criticism mourn the “death of the critic” and call for the critic as strong authority figure, a type—they assert—that once

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existed. Terry Eagleton invoked a “crisis of criticism” already in 1984, contending that “in a period in which, with the decline of the public sphere, the traditional authority of criticism has been called into serious question, a reaffirmation of that authority is urgently needed.”25 Maurice Berger’s 1998 collection of prominent critics’ thoughts on The Crisis of Criticism strikes a similarly elegiac chord: “now the critic is often expendable in the process of determining what is good art and what is bad art”; according to Berger, at the threshold of the twenty-first century “the critic has lost his or her aura of respect.”26 But perhaps the most prominent and articulate proponent of this thesis today is McDonald, whose Death of the Critic argues that the role of the critic has transformed from a mediator, “a figure to whom a wide audience might look as a judge of quality or a guide to meaning,” to a puppet who “confirms and assuages their prejudices and inclinations rather than challenging them.”27 Above all, McDonald advocates new “public critics” along the lines of Kael or Susan Sontag, who, he opines, do not currently exist in contemporary media and society. Charting a historical trajectory that includes the “age of criticism” and prominent professionals such as F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling, McDonald asserts that the early 1970s marked the beginning of the end of a period in which critical writing flourished nearly indistinguishably between broadsheets and academic journals, and critics made authoritative, evaluative pronouncements to a broad public.28 The “death of the critic” entailed an end to a communicative mediation between a learned authority and a willing, engaged reader; since then scholarly and journalistic criticism have increasingly diverged, and the vacuum of authority has been replaced by a host of nonexpert bloggers and a dispersive field of reviewing that fails to capture the public imagination.29 How Have the New Media Changed Film Criticism as an Activity and Form? If the first two debates have taken place mostly in university humanities departments, and only occasionally or indirectly been addressed by film critics working for daily newspapers or magazines, professionals have had no choice but to confront the ways in which criticism is—in a very tangible and material way—a very different activity than it was only ten years ago. If personal computers and floppy disks transformed the way that copy was written, edited, and submitted, and the early years of widespread Internet access meant that reporting from film festivals became a much more immediate affair, the arrival of Twitter, blogging, and other forms of virtually instantaneous communication have revolutionized the possibilities—and in many ways forced the hand—of those who write about film. In the not-so-distant past, information about films—which, even skeptics such as Shrum agree is a function of criticism—was largely limited to marketing and advertising on the one hand (trailers, posters, perhaps an advance interview—all circumscribed by physical locations and times), and on the other

Introduction

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to the critic’s notice, which would generally appear on or near the day of the film’s general release. Today the viewer has a whole wealth of information to consume when and where he or she wants: the film’s website, online trailers, advance reviews from other countries, even entire pirated copies of the film itself. Against this seemingly endless stream of available information, the critic must compete. This takes the form of blogs but also Twitter feeds; these days, one has the chance to read several dozen tweets of film critics as they walk out of press screenings at festivals halfway across the globe. Even if we were to accept the thesis, proposed by McDonald and others, that in the twenty-first century there are fewer or no “public critics,” no one could argue with the fact that critics have become more public. Mark Kermode, Nick James, A. O. Scott, Peter Bradshaw, Leonard Maltin, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Carrie Rickey are just a handful of the hundreds of “professional” film critics who actively tweet, let alone the thousands of “amateurs” who perform more or less the same service, if perhaps more anonymously and without salaries. We are a long way from the days of reading about films on a monthly basis (Monthly Film Bulletin); even traditional daily trade papers such as Variety and the Hollywood Reporter have lost ground to more innovative, even faster providers of entertainment news (e.g., Deadline Hollywood). Programmers (the British Film Institute’s Geoff Andrew) and film festival directors (Edinburgh’s Chris Fujiwara) tweet in their own names, and institutional accounts (the Film Society at Lincoln Center, Melbourne Cinémathèque, Viennale) communicate with stakeholders via short messages. Today—at least as far as the straight story goes—film criticism as a form and activity (both composing and receiving) has become more amateurish, shorter, more immediate, and less considered. If we are to believe alarmists such as Andrew Keen, “today’s internet is killing our culture and assaulting our economy.”30 The new media, according to this argument, are the logical extension of the unstoppable momentum of the last years of print media—less column space, more lurid illustrations, more advertisements, less pay for writers. This critique usually corresponds to one of two related discourses: a complaint about the atomization or “fragmentation” of the public sphere and, perhaps more often, bemoanings about the “dumbing down” of film criticism and its audiences.31 This type of thinking is widespread both among journalistic critics and among academics writing on the subject. For McDonald, “the public critic has been dismembered by two opposing forces: the tendency of academic criticism to become increasingly inward-looking and non-evaluative, and the momentum for journalistic and popular criticism to become a much more democratic, dispersive affair, no longer left in the hands of experts.”32 Rather than more bloggers and a false “democratization” of critical writing, McDonald argues, erudite, authoritative critics who are able to challenge prevailing tastes and communicate to a wide audience are needed to reunite the fragmented public sphere.33 Indeed,

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even a cursory glance at the forums that accompany today’s online reviews would seem to confirm the worst suspicions of Sight and Sound editor Nick James, who writes that these days the “culture prefers, it seems, the sponsored slogan to judicious assessment,”34 or legendary critic Armond White’s polemics about “Internetters” who “express their ‘expertise,’ which essentially is either their contempt or idiocy about films, filmmakers, or professional critics.”35 Take, for example, the response to Philip French’s review of Flight (2012), published in the Observer and on the common website for the Observer and sister newspaper the Guardian on 3 February 2013.36 One of the first posts made after the review, by “elmond02012,” asks of the reviewer—perhaps Britain’s most famous, who has been the chief critic for the Observer since 1978, published several books, and was awarded an OBE for his services to the field—“Who is this French guy?” In the many instances such as these it would be very tempting to believe that there has been a permanent breakdown of any dialogue between the learned critic and the curious, respectful reader; a cacophony of voices and opinions and a malicious discourse have drowned out the “gentlemanly” tones of yesteryears. Although some of this criticism may be justified, however, we must be careful not to simply default, once again, to the cultural pessimism of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno or Jean Baudrillard.37 These perspectives lazily assert either a conspiracy theory that an inevitable “dumbing down” is taking place, orchestrated by elites or “the system,” or some sort of descent into a brave, new simulacrum and the end of history. To contend that the new forms of criticism simply mirror today’s slick and evanescent popular entertainment spoon-fed to apathetic masses of an “ADD society” is reductive, condescending, and wrong. It would be a mistake not to take account of the new possibilities that film criticism in the digital age offers. The new film criticism has often taken advantage of innovative ways to configure time and space. I have already written about the way that online reviews and tweets allow for an immediate reaction to films, a compression of the temporal cycles that used to govern films and their reception and a circumscription of even the shorter forms of capsule reviewing. But often ignored behind the “dumbing-down” rhetoric about 140-character tweets and ill-considered remarks in Internet forums is the fact that online reviews and blogs often allow for an expansion of space for writing. There can be a utopian design to these new forms. Whereas print columns have continued to shrink over the decades in the switch to smaller tabloid formats and to give more space to dwindling advertisement, online reviews and blogging allow at least the possibility of five-thousand-word treatises, unscathed by the machinations of rogue copyeditors or subeditors’ mangled titles. Critics have the opportunity to write more and consider further aspects of the film and can also be afforded more liberties about how they write: unconstrained by house style (or politics), they might invoke informal, personal,

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or other idioms that they believe best befit the object. Furthermore, unlike in the days of print, opinions can be revised. Although certain film critics made claims to the permanence of evaluation (notably Pauline Kael), many others have noted how the meaning of a film can change with time and in the course of cinema history (e.g., Andrew Sarris).38 Online reviewing, in its various forms, allows for these revisions to be undertaken with little effort and cost. In this the new film criticism returns to the precinémathèque days: an evanescent and changeable form and activity meant to be consumed spontaneously and at best darkly remembered, rather than necessarily archived and stored permanently. Unlike literary criticism, the new film criticism allows for a fundamental formal innovation: the new digital media finally enable film to be easily subjected to review or critique via the very same medium. Not only can online journalists include the film’s trailer or a clip to illustrate an important point; these days critics can make a video review themselves. Later in this book, Giacomo Manzoli and Paolo Noto will deliberate on the possibilities and present tendencies of the online and video review form.39 Finally, let us not forget—looking forward to debates on the sustainability of business models for journalism and criticism and the institutional organization of professional film critics—that at the moment there is more or less free access to a huge range of film criticism, a smorgasbord of writing about motion pictures, which means that, with a simple click of the button and most often without any payment whatsoever, the thoughts of critics from Nigeria, Germany, Japan, or Brazil on any given film can be accessed. For now at least, consumers have the utopian possibilities of “Film Studies for Free,” to quote Catherine Grant’s popular blog. To return briefly to what I first presented as a largely negative example—the reactions to Philip French’s review of Flight—there is at least a measure of hope that one can take from what at first seems to be a miserable sign for the “dumbing down” of film criticism in particular and society in general. After “elmond02012” posted a reaction, a polyvocal discussion ensued, in which the initial polemic (“Who is this French guy?”) was answered (“He’s one of the greatest film critics of the last half century”) and debated.40 It extended well beyond the merits of Philip French and his short review of Robert Zemeckis’s film to spawn a heated discussion on the purpose and value of film critics in general. Despite the sometimes rancorous or childish tone (this is not a university lecture hall after all), some sort of spontaneous education took place in an ad hoc community; it enabled a dialogue that would not have been possible in the top-down “letters to the editor” era of public participation in film criticism.41 There is at least the potential of an international public sphere, an international cinephilia in which both “professional” and “amateur” critics can communicate, debate, and discuss films, whether they live in the West or East, in the city or in the countryside.42

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How Have New Media Changed Film Criticism as a Profession and Institution? Of all the major areas of debate, this one is perhaps the most speculative: we currently find ourselves in a transitional stage—in terms of the shift from print media to digital media but also vis-à-vis the reorganization of media companies and their business models—which has a profound and material effect on the very status of the writer-journalist-critic within this landscape. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, media “reorganization” or “consolidation” have become two sober euphemisms for the shrinking number of newspapers and journalists and the increasing frequency by which existing media organizations have been merged under common ownership.43 For some commentators we are witnessing not only the end of print media but perhaps even the end of a pluralistic media landscape that addressed local, regional, national, international, and niche audiences.44 This sense of institutional crisis, which no doubt is a major factor in the present “crisis of criticism,” has spawned websites such as Newspaperdeathwatch, which furnishes industry reports and statistics of the most apocalyptic kind. It is difficult to put a positive spin on the fact that newspapers in the United States hemorrhaged nearly 50 percent of their market value and 30 percent of their staff in the first nine years of the century;45 the many large print-media groups to have become insolvent in the last few years include Canwest Global, Frankfurter Rundschau, Freedom Communications, the Journal Register Company, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Philadelphia Newspapers LLC, the Sun-Times Media Group, and the Tribune Company.46 Local newspapers are merging or ceasing to exist; once thriving organs, from the Seattle P-I to Newsweek, are forced to make do with a skeleton staff and an onlineonly presence.47 The publishers who remain face a fundamental dilemma: how does one incentivize readers to pay for something that they have been receiving—since the heady, early days of the Internet, when almost all newspapers rushed to put most or their entire content online—for free? The New York Times, The Times (of London), the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and even the Onion have forms of paywalls: some require payment for all content, others for some content, and still others charge only after a certain number of articles have been called up within a certain time period.48 Others have changed their coverage (e.g., “hyperlocalism”) or the type of content that appears on the websites according to time of day (i.e., “dayparting”), offered specialized content not available elsewhere, bundled their content (e.g., subscription plus iPad), sought out sponsors, or created membership systems or groups (e.g., wine clubs, dating sites) that engender a feeling of community and exploit the relationships of trust that they enjoy with loyal readers.49 These business models have met with varying success, and it seems that no one sustainable model can truly fit every organization.50 The irony—and this

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reveals the situation as a business failure, rather than necessarily a fragmentation or dumbing down of the audience—is that although media companies are failing, their audiences are actually growing; the thirst for news and criticism is bigger than ever before.51 Indeed, if we look beyond Europe and North America, worldwide and especially in Asia and Africa we actually find huge increases in print circulations and new titles.52 What the controversy over free-content online publications (e.g., the Guardian) versus paywalls ignores, however, is that even when print media consumption still dwarfed the incipient digital media, changes were taking place. Looking at the US “alternative weekly” sector, which has included the Village Voice, LA Weekly, Chicago Reader, and Boston Phoenix and has traditionally figured as one of the most important gateways of film criticism, we see that consolidation was already well under way. Already a few years into the new century, the sector was reduced by vertical or horizontal integration. As an example of the former, Boston Phoenix parent company Phoenix Media/Communications Group owned also the Portland Phoenix and Providence Phoenix papers, nightlife magazine Stuff, and a number of area radio stations, local printing facilities, and social network and dating websites. (This consolidation failed to prevent the demise of the Boston Phoenix in 2013.) For an instance of the latter, witness the 2005 merger of the New Times and Village Voice newspaper chains, so that the following alternative weeklies/listing magazines became part of a common ownership: Phoenix New Times, Denver Westword, Miami New Times, Dallas Observer, Houston Press, SF Weekly (San Francisco), Cleveland Scene, St. Louis Riverfront Times, Kansas City Pitch, New Times Broward–Palm Beach, Village Voice, LA Weekly, OC Weekly, Minneapolis City Pages, and the Nashville Scene.53 Not only were alternative weeklies increasingly consolidated under common ownership, switching to the tabloid format, eliminating staff positions in favor of freelancers and interns, forgoing film festival and other costly coverage— they were also (becoming) free.54 These usually progressive, left-leaning newspapers were subsidized by their traditionally strong classified advertising but also by reserving hefty portions of ads, often in separate pull-out sections, for strippers, escorts, and other sex workers. Indeed, according to some, the influence and rise of free newspapers (including the international Metro, the London Evening Standard, and the American alternative weeklies) has been far more damaging to the business than the move to digital.55 In any event, with the rise of Craiglist and other online classifieds this market has dried up too.56 These general macrotroubles in the traditional print organs of film criticism— dailies, listing magazines, and cinephile monthlies—have had a profound effect on the material microexistence of individual film critics and produced a great amount of anxiety and soul-searching about the institution and worth of film criticism. Prominent stories have been written about the Village Voice laying off

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J. Hoberman, Nathan Lee, Michael Atkinson, and Dennis Lim.57 “Every day,” one commentator writes, “it seems there’s news of a fresh kill.”58 Some of these claims have surely been overstated: when the now late Andrew Sarris was “fired” from the New York Observer, it initiated a number of nervous notices.59 In reality his contract was transformed to freelance status. But perhaps more troubling than the prominent “kills” are the very many critics who featured on Sean P. Means’s list. These smaller stories, results of local and regional downsizing, often mean that newspapers no longer have a film critic—that is, if those duties had not already been consigned to a national syndicated columnist like Roger Ebert years before. These cases do raise serious questions about the status and value of film and other arts-and-culture critics in our society and about the ever-present debate regarding the precise relationship between news and commentary, criticism and “reviewing,” reportage and opinion—not to mention material ethical questions about stable, salaried working conditions versus freelancers, exploited interns, and the unpaid.60 Bloggers’ lack of public, visible institutional contexts (such as that which the traditional newsroom provided) have destabilized the traditional picture of the critic.61 Indeed, the troubles at traditional media and the rise of an “army of [unpaid] opinionated bloggers”62 raise further fundamental queries about the profession. No matter how many people read your reviews, if you are not earning money or not enough money to feed and house yourself, is your writing a profession or a hobby? According to New York Magazine critic Matt Zoller Seitz, “we’re fast approaching the point where criticism will become, for the most part, a devotion rather than a job.”63 Who Can Be a Critic? Has Criticism Become More “Democratic”? These days anyone and everyone can be a critic, a development celebrated by some and repudiated by others (see Armond White’s essay herein). In the past becoming a film critic entailed an Oxbridge or Ivy League education or another form of social connection, a laborious apprenticeship of writing capsule reviews, a journeyman existence of freelancing or writing for the local media in an undesirable market, or other time-intensive efforts. Today, in a matter of minutes and at no cost, one can set up a WordPress blog and “publish” a review.64 The Internet and the new media hold, according to journalism scholar John V. Pavlik, “the promise of a better, more efficient, more democratic medium for journalism and the public in the twenty-first century.”65 A “fragmented” but more positively polyvocal style of discourse is replacing the traditional “top-down” model and “endowing readers with agency, production and distribution capacity.”66 Nevertheless, another persistent question remains: even though everyone can become a critic, can anyone be read? Despite all prescriptions from commentators such as McDonald that the authoritative critic has died (and should

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be resurrected), powerful critics such as A. O. Scott and Peter Bradshaw still exist, opinion leaders who, even if they cannot “make or break” a film, can perhaps rescue it from total obscurity—in particular a film without a multimilliondollar marketing and advertisement budget. Have the barriers to enter the profession—in yesteryear regulated by tony backgrounds, expensive educations, and networking skills deployed in physical settings such as cocktail parties— remained just as high but simply been updated to who can market themselves, network “socially” online, or manage the results of search systems, in order to collect the most “followers”? I take up this question more closely in my chapter in this book. This issue—about which and how critics emerge in the digital order—causes us to reflect on the unexamined past of criticism and reevaluate the makeup of the profession. It was not so long ago when the British Film Institute, following a government report on a new national film policy, transplanted the editorial team of an undergraduate cinephile magazine at Oxford University to London and put them in charge of the most important organs of national film criticism, Sight and Sound and Monthly Film Bulletin.67 In North America and Europe film critics have been predominantly white, middle class, and male. “Film criticism,” as one commentator has recently demonstrated, “is one of the most gendered pathways in film culture,”68 and we need to deal more closely with this important, but often neglected, issue. In this book Maria San Filippo and Noah Tsika examine—using both historical and contemporary examples—the ways in which a gendered, sexual, and ethnic economy is at stake and very much at the heart of film criticism as a profession and institution but also as an activity and form. New access to media has meant that niche demographics outside of the traditional dominant white patriarchy have opportunities to express themselves and that, in turn, audiences interested in these viewpoints and cultural products have points of access and communities with which to connect.

Film Criticism in the Digital Age This is the first book-length study of its kind; it is the first volume to address these five major, overlapping debates directly and rigorously. The chapters, written by leading experts in the field (many with a background in film criticism themselves), present these issues in a broad cultural context. Whereas most interventions hitherto have tended to pose arguments about the film criticism of a particular country or national tradition (e.g., For the Love of Movies: The History of American Film Criticism; The Complete History of American Film Criticism; It’s Only a Movie! Films and Critics in American Culture), the Internet has no border fences or passport checks. Technological changes have dramatically altered the composition, circulation, and consumption of criticism worldwide, and this

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book, for the first time, looks at this phenomenon both with transnational panoramic views and with close-up studies sensitive to national and regional issues. Studies of film criticism—especially as conducted by film scholars rather than sociologists or economists—tend to examine personalities (Kael versus Sontag versus Sarris), literary styles (The Language and Styles of Film Criticism), or schools of interpretation (auteurists versus structuralists). As important as these procedures are—and they are surely essential to understanding the subject—they are insufficient to comprehend a phenomenon with serious and determinant cultural, medial, institutional, and economic factors. These mixtures gesture toward the hybrid essence of film culture: it exists between profession and hobby, art and entertainment, pleasure and business. The present volume is the first work to approach this topic with a comprehensive selection of appropriate methodologies. Some of the contributions engage with empirical methods and seek thereby to make larger claims about film criticism as a profession. Indeed, unlike the “cult of personality” approach, this volume is very much concerned with institutional and economic analysis—how critics and criticism are organized and regulated in specific contexts and how technological change and market forces exert pressure on the shape of this practice. Another major emphasis is historical analysis. This is particularly urgent in the examination of what—for many journalistic discourses about the phenomenon of criticism in the digital age—is plied with the rhetoric of a “brave new world.” Our contributors look at larger historical developments and how analogous examples can help us to understand and confront present challenges. Criticism has experienced past “crises” and showed a tremendous capacity for adaptation; reviewing historical case studies demonstrates that, pace technological determinists, human influence and innovation can be decisive.69 Finally, the following chapters take especial regard of sociocultural factors. Film criticism involves mediation between a cultural object and an audience; society and culture factor in all three segments of this communicative model and are implicated in the act of mediation itself. The chapters examine sociocultural factors that influence and shape today’s film criticism but also recognize how the opposite is also true: every film review is a political act. Common to all perspectives represented in this collection is the measured assessment of both the positive and the negative impacts of the Internet and other new media. “Part I: The Critic and the Audience” contemplates the purposes of the critic and the renegotiation of critic-audience relations in the twenty-first century. Greg Taylor begins the volume by revisiting his seminal work Artists in the Audience. In some ways the Internet has realized the vanguard project of Manny Farber and Parker Tyler: in the Age of Evaluation and Facebook “likes,” criticism has become equated with the very articulation of spectatorship. This is not perhaps as dire as it seems, Taylor argues, elaborating on the ideas of Carroll, McDonald,

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and others. Evaluation allows us to construct and situate our self-identities among others’; the Internet provides “millions of disparate, like-minded connoisseurs the sense that they are all in this together.” Cecilia Sayad engages with and complicates Taylor’s work by arguing that the dynamics of the critic and the audience are best understood as a threesome. Tracing the history of film directors’ criticism and how auteurism has often structured approaches to cinema, she argues that critics and authors have always competed over interpretation and status. To appreciate the “crisis” discourse invoked here in the introduction, the overlapping triangulation of critics, audiences, and authors needs to be taken into account. In turn, Daniel McNeil’s contribution investigates the case of Armond White. McNeil draws on a genealogy of African American thought to demonstrate that, far from being an atavistic curmudgeon, White’s agitation against bloggers and amateur pundits represents an important and misunderstood voice in the current critic-audience debate. In a world flooded with unconsidered punditry, White—and to a lesser extent other writers influenced by James Baldwin, for example, bell hooks, Elvis Mitchell, and Cornel West—reminds us “that artful critics consider it a public duty to respond to works of art honestly and to question the motives of artists and other critics.” “Part II: New Forms and Activities” examines the new modes and platforms of film criticism and the effects that new media have on professional and “amateur” critics. Following from part 1, it further considers to what extent these new forms rebalance the old opposition of “professional critics” and “amateur readers.” My chapter dissects so-called democratic challenges to critical authority. Closely inspecting the aggregate review organ Rotten Tomatoes, I test the claim that such sites provide increased objectivity, access, and participation in film criticism and argue that on the whole such platforms venerate the traditional ideas of criticism and erect new barriers to enter the profession. Drawing on the historical specificities and conditions of criticism in Italy, Giacomo Manzoli and Paolo Noto analyze another new form, online video reviews of film (vlogs), and evaluate their supposed innovation. They conclude that the new medium is applied to familiar ends: the particularly Italian “will to preserve the alleged function, and the distinctive jargon, of traditional film criticism” prevents vlog-critics from taking advantage of technological possibilities. In her chapter Maria San Filippo considers how interactive web-based communities act as counterpublics organized around queer cinema and cinephilia and examines closely AfterEllen, the premier community of queer female “amateur critics” talking about queer women in film and television. Situating AfterEllen in the historical and institutional context of queer women’s writing on film, San Filippo demonstrates how the 2006 corporate takeover of the site has led to a homonormative broadening of thematic scope and user address.

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Closing the section, Noah Tsika examines a case study of a culture with limited indigenous critical traditions. Recent online Nigerian blogging—blogs written in Nigeria and among the significant diaspora populations worldwide—has filled this vacuum with an embrace of “amateur” vernaculars, much like the Nollywood industry itself. “Part III: Institutions and the Profession” revolves around institutional groupings, examining film criticism as a professional activity within national contexts. All three contributions deploy empirical or historical research to make broader claims about the status of the critic and the purpose of criticism in the new millennium. Anne Hurault-Paupe uses discourse analysis to examine the web presence of the leading US critics’ associations. The sites’ historical changes and focus on their annual awards reveal how these groups seek both to legitimize themselves as highbrow connoisseurs and yet still compete with the Oscars’ red-carpet glamour. This ambivalent positioning between industry discourse and amateur blogging discloses how the “crisis of criticism” has become manifest on the institutional level of professional American criticism. Outi Hakola likewise identifies a change in critics’ assessments of status. Comparing historical and contemporary surveys of professional Finnish critics and examining self-reflexive statements in the most important national critics’ trade journal, Hakola concludes that perceptions of the profession’s health are largely age-related. Nostalgic senior critics are more downbeat than enthusiastic upstarts, who are more adept at exploring technological innovations and less apt to consider criticism a fulltime career. Thomas Elsaesser concludes the section by examining the purposes of criticism that have existed in the guise of Béla Balázs, Siegfried Kracauer, Edgar Morin, and Parker Tyler, and he makes a plea for their survival in the age of Twitter. Quality writing on film has always successfully addressed an audience, taken account of broader society, and maintained a personal dialogue with the reader. Regardless of form, such soulful, social criticism is necessary. When Cecilia Sayad and I began this project, we envisioned a dialogue between film scholars and critics. We quickly found that although most of the critics primarily writing for magazines, newspapers, or blogs were keen on the idea, many were unwilling to countenance delivering a chapter without financial compensation. I mention this not as a self-reflexive footnote to the realities of scholarly publishing but as a symptomatic disclosure of the very issues that this book broaches. The divisions between salaried academic and paid-per-article writers are not simply petty rivalries and puerile suspicions: they are symbols of the very material distinctions that regulate our labor. As a way to balance the field, we reprint a series of critics’ self-reflections in “Part IV: Critics Speak.” These statements were, not coincidentally, all originally published in 2007 and 2008: the worldwide recession, then just beginning to

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bite, took a number of reviewers as its first “victims,” which in turn catalyzed a wave of soul-searching. Besides being formatted to fit this volume, these pieces appear in their original forms, as artifacts of the crisis of criticism. Jasmina Kallay’s “The Critic Is Dead . . .” was perhaps the most elegant deliberation on the issues surrounding authority and its loss in the context of studio-sponsored press screenings for bloggers and ubiquitous top-ten lists. Armond White delivered (and performed) a lesson in stylistics to fly-by-night amateur critics in his plea for professionalism, “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Movies.” In turn, Nick James wondered in his piece, “Who Needs Critics?” Looking back at historical British debates on the purpose of the profession, the Sight and Sound editor-in-chief ultimately aligned himself with the tradition of Lindsay Anderson’s “committed” criticism and advocated a distinctive style of writing that agitated against Hollywood hegemony. Finally, we include excerpts from Cineaste’s symposium on “Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet.” In these passages five bloggers—Theodoros Panayides, Kevin B. Lee, Karina Longworth, the Self-Styled Siren, and Stephanie Zacharek—provided passionate counterbalances to the pronouncements of the “professionals.”

Notes 1. See, e.g., Patrick Goldstein, “The End of the Critic?” Los Angeles Times, 8 April 2008; Vin-

cent Rossmeier, “Where Have All the Film Critics Gone?” Brooklyn Rail, June 2008, http:// brooklynrail.org/2008/06/express/where-have-all-the-film-critics-gone; John Hess, Chuck Kleinhans, and Julia Lesage, “The Last Word: Fretting About Film Criticism,” Jump Cut 52 (2010): www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/lastWordCriticism/index.html; Nick James, “Goodbye Mr French,” Sight and Sound, November 2013. 2. These include the conference organized by Sight and Sound editor Nick James on 8 October 2008 at the British Film Institute; Giacomo Manzoli and Paolo Noto’s symposium “Critica della Critica” at the University of Bologna on 31 January–1 February 2013; the inaugural BAFTSS conference in April 2013; “The Future of Film Criticism in the Internet Age” conference at King’s College London, 27 November 2013; and the “Who Needs the Professionals Now That Everyone’s a Critic?” conference at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 13 June 2014. Cineaste magazine has three times convened a written symposium on the subject. See, e.g., “Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet: A Critical Symposium,” Cineaste 33.4 (2008): 30–46 (excerpts reprinted in this volume). In the interests of full disclosure: we do not deny both chronicling and thereby participating in this phenomenon. Witness our symposia at the University of Kent: “Film Criticism in Dialogue” (11 November 2010) and “Cultural Criticism in the Digital Age: Media, Purposes and the Status of the Critic” (7 June 2012). 3. See Rónán McDonald, The Death of the Critic (London: Continuum, 2007); and Maurice Berger, ed., The Crisis of Criticism (New York: New Press, 1998). 4. Sean P. Means, “The Departed—No. 55, Phil Villareal,” Salt Lake Tribune, 7 May 2009, http://blogs.sltrib.com/movies/labels/disappearing%20critics.htm. 5. These studies include Greg Taylor, Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Phillip Lopate, Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: Essays and Criticism from a Lifelong Love Affair with the Movies (New York:

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Anchor/Doubleday, 1998); Phillip Lopate, ed., American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now (New York: Library of America, 2006); Manny Farber, Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, ed. Robert Polito (New York: Library of America, 2009); Brian Kellow, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (New York: Viking, 2011); Pauline Kael, The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (New York: Library of America, 2011); and Richard Roud, Decades Never Start on Time: A Richard Roud Anthology, ed. Michael Temple and Karen Smolens (London: British Film Institute/Palgrave, 2014). 6. Jerry Roberts, The Complete History of American Film Criticism (Santa Monica, CA: Santa Monica Press, 2010). 7. See, e.g., Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984); for film-specific examples see Taylor, Artists in the Audience. 8. Noël Carroll, On Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2009), 5, 8. 9. Ibid., 14, 6. 10. Ibid., 15. 11. Ibid., 75, 72, 5, 53, 66. 12. See, e.g., David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). 13. McDonald, Death of the Critic, 116, 120, 125. 14. Ibid., 134, 113. 15. For the model of reception that the reviewing process entails, see Wendy Griswold, “A Methodological Framework for the Sociology of Culture,” Sociological Methodology 17 (1987): 12; for an assessment of how the Internet has changed the relationship between all news organizations, journalists, and their many publics, see John V. Pavlik, Journalism and New Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), xiii. 16. George Steiner, “‘Critic’/‘Reader,’” New Literary History 10.3 (1979): 428. 17. See, e.g., Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in The Portable Matthew Arnold, ed. Lionel Trilling (New York: Viking, 1949), 239–267; and Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 340–408. 18. See Wesley Shrum, “Critics and Publics: Cultural Mediation in Highbrow and Popular Performing Arts,” American Journal of Sociology 97.2 (1991): 351; Morris B. Holbrook, “Popular Appeal Versus Expert Judgments of Motion Pictures,” Journal of Consumer Research 26.2 (1999): 144–155; and David A. Reinstein and Christopher M. Snyder, “The Influence of Expert Reviews on Consumer Demand for Experience Goods: A Case Study of Movie Critics,” Journal of Industrial Economics 53.1 (2005): 27–51. 19. See, e.g., Emanuel Levy, “Art Critics and Art Publics: A Study of the Sociology and Politics of Taste,” Empirical Studies of the Arts 6 (1988): 137. 20. Shrum, “Critics and Publics,” 347. 21. Ibid., 369. 22. John Carey, What Good Are the Arts? (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 167. Perhaps symptomatically, writers such as George Steiner have traditionally attempted to delineate the distinction between the “critic” and the “reader.” See Steiner, “‘Critic’/‘Reader.’” 23. Carey, What Good Are the Arts? 167–168, 171, 249. 24. See Nick James, “Who Needs Critics?” Sight and Sound, October 2008, 16–18 (reprinted in this volume); “Are Film Critics Really Needed Anymore . . . or Is It a Washed-Up Profession?” Variety, 25 April 2007, www.variety.com/article/VR1117963778?refCatId=1043. 25. Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, 103. 26. Maurice Berger, “Introduction: The Crisis of Criticism,” in The Crisis of Criticism, ed. Maurice Berger (New York: New Press, 1998), 4.

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27. McDonald, Death of the Critic, 3, 7. 28. Ibid., 1, 77. See also Raymond J. Haberski Jr., It’s Only a Movie! Films and Critics in Ameri-

can Culture (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), which deploys the phrase the “golden age of criticism.” 29. McDonald, Death of the Critic, ix. 30. Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy (London: Nicholas Brealey, 2007). 31. For more on the “fragmentation” discourse see Alan McKee, The Public Sphere: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); for an analysis of the “dumbingdown” argument see Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 32. McDonald, Death of the Critic, ix. 33. Ibid., 7, 15. 34. James, “Who Needs Critics?” 16. 35. Armond White, “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Movies,” New York Press, 30 April 2008, http://nypress.com/what-we-dont-talk-about-when-we-talk-about -movies. Reprinted in this volume. 36. Philip French, “Flight,” Observer, 3 February 2013, www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/feb/ 03/flight-denzel-washington-zemeckis-review. 37. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1982); and Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotexte, 1983). 38. See, e.g., Andrew Sarris, “Billy Wilder Reconsidered,” in American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now, ed. Phillip Lopate (New York: Library of America, 2006), 307–311. 39. See also Pavlik, Journalism and New Media, xiv, for the new “storytelling devices” (video, hypermedia) that can be employed. 40. French, “Flight.” 41. On the issue of user-generated content and its impact on professional online journalism see Alfred Hermida and Neil Thurman, “A Clash of Cultures: The Integration of UserGenerated Content Within Professional Journalistic Frameworks at British Newspaper Websites,” Journalism Practice 2.3 (2008): 343–356. 42. For more on these possibilities see Jonathan Rosenbaum, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 43. Janet Jones and Lee Salter, Digital Journalism (London: Sage, 2012), 21. 44. Pavlik, Journalism and New Media, xiii. 45. Jeff Kaye and Stephen Quinn, Funding Journalism in the Digital Age: Business Models, Strategies, Issues, and Trends (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 8. 46. Suzanne M. Kirchhoff, “The U.S. Newspaper Industry in Transition,” Congressional Research Service Report 40700, 9 September 2010; Michael J. de la Merced, “Freedom Communications Files for Bankruptcy Protection,” New York Times, 1 September 2009, www .nytimes.com/2009/09/02/business/media/02freedom.html. 47. William Yardley and Richard Pérez-Peña, “Seattle Paper Shifts Entirely to the Web,” New York Times, 16 March 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/business/media/17paper .html; Ed Pilkington, “Newsweek Goes Online but Leaves Lasting Print on the Newsstand,” Guardian, 19 October 2012, www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/oct/19/newsweek-online -only-print. 48. Jones and Salter, Digital Journalism, 43; Kaye and Quinn, Funding Journalism in the Digital Age, 36.

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49. See Kaye and Quinn, Funding Journalism in the Digital Age, 35–53, 95, 133, 139, 143, 146; Jones and Salter, Digital Journalism, 47. 50. Bob Franklin, “The Future of Newspapers,” Journalism Practice 2.3 (2008): 306–317, 312; Kaye and Quinn, Funding Journalism in the Digital Age, 173. 51. Kaye and Quinn, Funding Journalism in the Digital Age, 9, 12–13. James Surowiecki, “News You Can Lose,” New Yorker, 22 December 2008, www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2008/ 12/22/081222ta_talk_surowiecki; Kenny Olmstead, Jane Sasseen, Amy Mitchell, and Tom Rosenstiel, “Digital: News Gains Audience but Loses Ground in Chase for Revenue,” The State of the News Media 2012, http://stateofthemedia.org/2012/digital-news-gains-audience -but-loses-more-ground-in-chase-for-revenue/. 52. Franklin, “The Future of Newspapers,” 307–308. 53. Richard Siklos, “The Village Voice, Pushing 50, Prepares to Be Sold to a Chain of Weeklies,” New York Times, 24 October 2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/10/24/business/24voice .html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 54. Kaye and Quinn, Funding Journalism in the Digital Age, 19. 55. See Piet Bakker, “Free Daily Newspapers—Business Models and Strategies,” International Journal of Media Management 4.3 (2002): 180–187; and Piet Bakker, “The Simultaneous Rise and Fall of Free and Paid Newspapers in Europe,” Journalism Practice 2.3 (2008): 427–443. 56. Siklos, “The Village Voice, Pushing 50.” 57. Eric Kohn, “J. Hoberman Laid Off as Chief Film Critic at The Village Voice,” Indiewire, 4 January 2012, www.indiewire.com/article/264fda20-3734-11e1-97b6-123138165f92. 58. Rossmeier, “Where Have All the Film Critics Gone?” 59. For a critical assessment of these notices, which usually failed to mention that Sarris indeed still wrote for the paper, if on a freelance basis, see Dave Kehr’s blog item, “Andrew Sarris Persists and Endures,” www.davekehr.com/?p=337. 60. See Jones and Salter, Digital Journalism, 49–50; see also Laura Oliver, “Journalism Job Losses: Tracking Cuts Across the Industry,” Journalism.co.uk, 3 August 2010, www.journalism .co.uk/news-features/journalism-job-losses-tracking-cuts-across-the-industry/s5/a533044/. 61. Jones and Salter, Digital Journalism, 1. 62. James, “Who Needs Critics?” 16. 63. Quoted in Rossmeier, “Where Have All the Film Critics Gone?” 64. Jones and Salter, Digital Journalism, 49. For the pejorative discourses that often critique the fact that these days “anybody with a Twitter account could have a crack,” see Jones and Salter, Digital Journalism, 3. 65. Pavlik, Journalism and New Media, xiii. 66. Jones and Salter, Digital Journalism, 171. 67. See Mattias Frey, “The Critical Question: Sight and Sound’s Postwar Consolidation of Liberal Taste,” Screen 54.2 (2013): 194–217. 68. See Melanie Bell, “Film Criticism as ‘Women’s Work’: The Gendered Economy of Film Criticism in Britain, 1945–65,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 31.2 (2011): 192. See also Melanie Selfe, “Circles, Columns, and Screenings: Mapping the Institutional, Discursive, Physical, and Gendered Spaces of Film Criticism in 1940s London,” Journal of British Cinema 9.4 (2012): 588–611; and, on this general issue, Antonia Lant, ed., Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema (New York: Verso, 2006). 69. Janet Jones and Lee Salter make a similar claim for journalism; see their Digital Journalism, 4.

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THUMBS IN THE CROWD Artists and Audiences in the Postvanguard World GREG TAYLOR

I first began recording some of the ideas that eventually led to the book Artists in the Audience on a 512k dual-floppy drive DOS PC in orange type.1 If I recall correctly, the computer and compatible printer cost me close to a thousand dollars in the late 1980s—a considerable sum for what was in fact a glorified word processor and certainly not a research tool. The critics who served as the focus of my study—acerbic B-movie aficionado Manny Farber and psychomythological Hollywood hallucinator Parker Tyler—had to be unearthed through more laborious means, though this was itself an attractive prospect insofar as their importance seemed to me to stem not simply from their apparent formative influence on those who appeared in their wake but also from the subsequent obscuring of this very influence over time. They were cult figures to me—insufficiently known, underacknowledged, and therefore deserving of serious metacritical rehabilitation. Poring through Farber and Tyler’s critical oeuvres thus meant harassing used-bookstore owners and weary interlibrary loan clerks and perusing microfiche and musty bound volumes, which I recall being heavy and also difficult to position correctly on a photocopy machine. But in the end all that effort made these legendary figures seem that much more special, and worthy of rescue from cultural marginality, much like the movies—and unplumbed depths of movies—they had championed in their day. Some twenty-five years later, dual-floppy DOS PCs exist only as junk— having been rendered even more useless than the manual typewriters they once replaced—and the Internet has turned cultural marginality into an increasingly puzzling concept. At the time of this writing, entering “Manny Farber” (with the 23

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quotation marks) into Google nets some 49,000 results, which apparently takes the search engine 0.22 seconds to produce. For “Parker Tyler” the total is 60,200, which, curiously enough, happens 0.09 seconds faster. Does this make Tyler slightly more “popular”—or even more culturally “present”—than Farber? It’s an interesting question. Googling “pink polka dot elephant” (again, with quotation marks intact) nets 105,000 results in 0.21 seconds, which tells us something about Google’s special insight into cultural value. At any rate, however, specialness sure ain’t what it used to be. In this seemingly postvanguard world both Farber and Tyler even have their own Facebook pages, despite the fact that Farber passed away in 2008 and Tyler has been dead for nearly forty years. What is a “postvanguard” world? It is not a world in which the assumptions and methodologies governing cultist and camp appreciation (as detailed in Artists in the Audience) have become invisible, outdated, or irrelevant, as witness the lasting interest in Farber, Tyler, cult films and directors, obscure cultural objects, and mainstream cultural objects viewed through a skewed, revelatory perspective—but also (and more importantly) the larger zeitgeist of engaged spectatorship and fandom that so dominates our age and drives our allencompassing celebratory and putatively user-driven interaction with pop culture. It is, rather, an age in which the vanguard perspective’s sheer ubiquity has so colored the very fabric of contemporary Western culture that for all intents and purposes it now is that culture. There’s no escaping it. Since the 1990s and with the dawn of the Internet age, America has gone right through empowered spectatorship and out the other side, emerging into a world where the very notion of cultural obscurity has been rendered problematic, because everyone has access to everything, every thing has personal importance to at least someone, and anyone can (in theory) share the personal importance of any thing or experience with the rest of us. The “death of Cool” doesn’t mean that nothing is cool anymore, but it does mean that the playing field on which the value of cool is determined is so vast and crowded as to render that value highly relative and highly personal (“cool” rather than “Cool,” perhaps), robbed of the validation and authority once granted by a single coherent counterculture that no longer exists as such. Thus, the point is not so much that cultism and camp simply exhausted themselves in their search for new material to reclaim for vanguard rehabilitation—margins still exist, both on the fringes and deep within cultural texts—but rather that the vanguard gesture of reclamation of margins has itself lost most of its potency, insofar as everyone seems to be claiming cultural authority and specialized cultural knowledge at the same time, and both are so readily available. As a result the sense of individual empowerment that once issued from such knowledge—for example, knowledge of vanguard film critics or of the works they championed—has necessarily given way to a deeper if perhaps illusory sense of shared or collective cultural mastery. So while it may

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be initially disheartening to realize that the obscure song, band, radio station, movie, or critic you treasured and effectively “owned” within your small circle of like-minded friends back in the day has lost its cachet, and that thousands, perhaps millions, of others have in fact shared your rarified knowledge and taste, there is nevertheless a certain comfort in community and in the realization that user-driven cultural engagement is now a way of life. If the Internet and related social media represent in many ways the ne plus ultra of empowered, creative spectatorship—and thus the ultimate realization of the vanguard project, writ large—the diffusion of vanguard ideals within the public sphere also raises the question, “What next?” What happens after artists fill the audience and after spectators are granted the means, opportunity, and encouragement to assert their active ownership of culture? And more specific for us, what happens to criticism, given the presumably compromised cultural authority of old-time expert tastemakers—and heightened cultural authority of everyone else—within this brave new world? The answer is that following art itself, criticism has now also expanded and exploded in a thoroughly unprecedented manner, to the point where anyone is capable of being a critic, and (more important) what counts as “criticism” in effect encompasses practically any form of articulated spectatorship. Because there are no longer any gatekeepers significantly regulating public expression (the Internet having revolutionized self-publishing) and because the vanguard intervention blew the walls off long-standing assumptions of taste and decorum in criticism, anyone who wishes to state anything about any cultural product now has a forum in which to do so; furthermore, that statement can legitimately range anywhere from fanboy/-girl celebration or reclamation, to a pithy Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic or 6-Second Moviefone review, to complex audiovisual analysis on a specialty blog. It all counts, and—most important for us here—none of these articulations is “uncritical”— including the expression of fandom—if only because in the postvanguard world the simple gesture of liking something or declaring it special (pace Warhol) is sufficient to confer on it a sense of aesthetic significance, even if (or perhaps especially because) almost no one uses the terms aesthetic or art anymore. It doesn’t matter, because cultural interest and aesthetic significance are now virtually the same thing—or can be, at any rate. When I post an image of an artwork, or an intriguing photo of a sunset, trees, or waves on Facebook or Tumblr, I am in effect making an evaluative claim by expressing that this image is of value and worth sharing, offering it to the world as a reflection of my elevated taste. I can choose to add a short title or caption such as “interesting photo I came across— love the composition,” but my point is that I needn’t do so in order to make a critical gesture. Others—at the very least my friends, I hope—can post their own comments affirming my good taste and expressing their own, and they can then repost the image on their own Tumblr page, if they want. Then others may do

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the same, and so on. This practice of posting and reposting, asserting and reaffirming, now happens millions of times every hour. And each time it happens, an instance of criticism takes place. Readers may balk at my looseness with the term criticism here. Surely posting an image is not the same thing as writing a sophisticated review or analytical essay or even a journalistic blurb. And it’s not. But it is an implication of aesthetic assessment, and as such it now meets the minimum requirement for a critical gesture—and thus, for an act of criticism—because vanguard cultism and camp, as they developed in the 1960s and thereafter, eliminated the need for coherent aesthetic criteria when asserting specialized cultist knowledge and liberated camp taste. Coherent aesthetic criteria could get in the way or be counterproductive and, at very least, might drag the spontaneous flamboyance of the countercultural gesture back into the mundane traditionalism of judicious assessment. And, of course, the mundane traditionalism of judicious assessment ran counter to the very spirit of the vanguard enterprise, which initially sought to promote aesthetic renewal through aesthetically aggressive engagements with presumably nonaesthetic material—here, popular movies. That cultist and camp interventions were always fundamentally aesthetic in nature is absolutely essential to our understanding of their form and function. However effaced such underlying aesthetics were in practice—they had to be, in order to make the critic the revealer of aesthetic import—and however taken for granted, buried, and ignored they variously became through subsequent popular dissemination of vanguard approaches, they nonetheless form the backbone of cultism and camp, which could not exist outside of a broadly aesthetic context. My argument in Artists in the Audience was that both Manny Farber and Parker Tyler assumed the validity of their own aesthetic frameworks and ideals as a given. For abstract painter Farber—a product if also harsh critic of the New York School moment— aesthetic vibrancy, vitality, grit, unpretentious rough-hewn action seemed to be appearing more authentically on the margins of American movies than in the mammoth, sleepy, middlebrow canvasses of Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko. For poet Tyler—a product of the American surrealist scene—Pollock’s faux-revelatory baked-macaroni canvasses were more beside the point, eclipsed in interest by the true revelations made possible by the poetic, indeed erotic, spectator’s engagement with the movies in his or her midst, which could be reformed by criticism into complex American quasi-surrealist texts.

Like Without Why— Goodness and Badness in an Age of Evaluation But at least both Farber and Tyler were fully cognizant of their own aesthetic biases, biases that made engaging with popular cinema productive and fun to

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begin with. For those who have surfaced in their wake, however, things have not necessarily been so obvious, in part because mainstream modernist aesthetics became so thoroughly sullied by the taint of Establishment orthodoxy but also in part because cultist isolation of vital margins and camp appreciation of the hidden riches of just about anything could rely so heavily on sheer force of gesture (the ability to claim that I like what I like, know what I know, see what I see) as to make oppositional spectatorship and the cultural distinction it promised seem ends in themselves.2 No wonder the vanguard impulse caught on in such a big way: for hipsters and academic scholars alike it offered authority over the vast expanse of pop culture while playing down the very terms of aesthetic discernment, the evaluative criteria assumed but also naturalized within the vanguard gesture’s assertion of rarified acumen and taste. Being a critic thus first and foremost meant mastering the gesture, which could be as easy as saying, “I think Bruce Lee movies are great works of art, much better than the films of Jean Renoir,” as moderately difficult as memorizing all the major production credits of every movie and television program Bruce Lee participated in, or as complex as arguing that the formal depiction of the body in specific Bruce Lee films lends them a surprising psychosexual or psychogendered richness. Backing up the gesture with an articulation of criteria by which judgments of goodness and badness have been conferred is, in the first two cases, subject to whatever rhetorical leeway the relaxed scrutiny of the recipients of the gesture will allow and, in the third, neither relevant nor necessary because the entire issue of aesthetic goodness and badness has been buried beneath questions of ideological complicity and resistance. My point is that even as it developed its own orthodoxies, the vanguard tradition benefited from its ability to allow one to claim cultural authority over popular works without necessarily having to argue in any coherent detail exactly why specific popular works were of high aesthetic quality. Indeed, this helps to explain why the approach gained such cultural traction to begin with. On the one hand it was fundamentally countercultural, setting itself against dominant culture’s perceived notion of “popular art”—that is, middlebrow. Yet on the other hand it could also be loose enough to accommodate any brow’s desire to claim cultural distinction by appealing to pop works without mounting a complex defense of pop artistry. In offering a new, user-friendly mode of critical discernment that also allowed for fun, active engagement with popular art, the vanguard perspective was bound to threaten the authority of established popular and middlebrow critics; with the subsequent explosion of what has sometimes been dubbed Web 2.0, the toppling of the old regime began in earnest, with the firing of a host of newspaper reviewers across the United States coinciding with the rise of net-based criticism and analysis in blogs such as Ain’t It Cool News, Arbogast on Film, Cinetrix, girishshambu, and the Self- Styled Siren

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and the diffusion of critical gestures, shorter reviews, and personal evaluative essays alike throughout millions of other Internet sites, blogs, wikis, and social media postings across the globe. The subsequent vigorous (and sometimes alarmist) discourse in the print community surrounding the purported “death” of film criticism as an enterprise was thus to be expected, not least because it suggested an even more dire and public expression of the doomsday scenario for criticism that had already been proffered within neighboring disciplines such as visual art, literature, and music.3 The battle was pitched in the familiar terms of young versus old, upstart versus establishment, popular versus elitist, mess versus decorum, illiteracy versus expertise, and democratic versus meritocratic; as Thomas Doherty put it, “if the traditional film critic was a professorial lecturer who lorded his superior knowledge and literary chops over the common rung of moviegoer, the web slinger was a man-boy of the people, visceral and emotional, a stream-of-consciousness spurter with no internal censor or mute button.”4 It seems equally telling, however, that even those authoritative figures sympathetic to the shift (including those who have argued that a new Golden Age of Film Criticism is upon us) tend to celebrate in a somewhat guarded fashion, noting that while the new stuff is a decidedly mixed bag ( J. Hoberman: “On the one hand, blogs are spontaneous and unedited; on the other, blogs are spontaneous and unedited”), there is still much worthwhile and intelligent writing out there to be discovered, given enough sifting and the taste required to know what makes good criticism good and bad criticism bad.5 “Bad” criticism is assumed to be poorly written (Stephanie Zacharek: “even though film bloggers are often ‘real’ writers [or could be], what they’re doing isn’t ‘real’ writing”), poorly argued, and too frequently commits the cardinal sin of functioning as consumer guide or—even worse—mouthing the industry’s own promotional piffle and thus implicitly performing as middlebrow apologists.6 Superior criticism, by contrast, is independently spirited, artistically minded, thoughtful, analytical, and driven toward the continual elevation of film culture above the incessant grind of the Hollywood machine. In other words Web 2.0’s new democracy may have released a torrent of fresh critical voices, but beyond that, nothing really has changed; what might have been the demise of film criticism instead becomes a reaffirmation of its guiding principles within an expanded discursive field. Yet those who wish to hold on to such guiding principles while assiduously separating wheat from chaff are in a sense missing the point. Web 2.0’s radical redistribution of critical authority didn’t just add new voices to the mix—it changed the game entirely by fulfilling the vanguard dream, legitimizing all forms and articulations of evaluative critical spectatorship, from pure gesture to complex analysis. So while we can still argue about what counts as “good” criticism and “bad” criticism and deride simple, unsubstantiated evaluative responses as mindless cultural noise (Zacharek: “There’s a lot of ‘weighing in’ going on, but

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not so much actual thinking”), the fact is that this cultural noise is actually the sound of millions of people making aesthetic judgments as they have always done, except that now these judgments are memorialized within an intersubjective context in a manner impossible before the advent of the Internet and social media.7 Furthermore, while evaluation is fundamental to criticism, criticism is usually more than just a simple evaluative claim—but in this postvanguard era it doesn’t need to be more than a simple evaluative claim.8 Now, even a cyber“Like” counts. Indeed, if the vanguard impulse aggressively asserted the primacy of evaluative and often celebratory judgment over cool, sober assessment of popular works, the Internet and social media have made personal appropriation of the pop landscape a way of life, while leaving the critical justification and exploration of one’s aesthetic judgments optional and open-ended. So instead of dubbing the contemporary climate a new Golden Age of Criticism, we might do even better to call it the Golden Age of Evaluation, an era of rampant, unbridled, and public aesthetic assessment of all stripes. This is an era absolutely obsessed with critical evaluation, reevaluation, and ranking of all manner of cultural products, from movies and burgers to sitcoms to superheroes. It seems to me, then, that to examine criticism within this contemporary climate means, first and foremost, to examine varieties of articulated evaluative spectatorship. Aesthetic evaluation is not something we discuss very much, which seems odd, given its ubiquity. In part this is because evaluative response seems complex and fuzzy—and it is. In part it’s also because details of evaluative response are often effaced or naturalized in taste. Often we know what we like but don’t quite know why; at other times we know we like this character/performance/scene but not that one, or we decide we like elements of a work but don’t really like the work as a whole. Judging badness and goodness is surely one of the most important ways in which we engage works of art on an ongoing basis and a key source of spectatorial pleasure. In fact, I would venture to guess that ongoing evaluation and reevaluation are so bound up with our experience of aesthetic objects and processes that we don’t ever stop judging the quality of such objects and processes, even when we’re seemingly enraptured by them. People who make (and mentor the making of) art, or indeed anything creative, find the process just as fundamental to their enterprise as well, as it’s impossible to write a story or blog, compose a song, or choreograph a dance without engaging a constant and often grueling process of creating, judging, and revising. Are the ongoing evaluative assessments of a spectator in a movie theater or a composer writing a pop song fixed, objective, and definitive? No, they are provisional, relative, and flexible, subject to revision given new information or consideration. But that doesn’t imply that these assessments are trivial or meaningless or that they can’t seem objective and definitive to us, for good reasons. The standards by which we measure aesthetic success or failure serve as relative contexts—that is,

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they always depend on what you expect, and what you value—but shared aims and expectations can seem pretty powerful and self-evident, especially when they take the form of basics such as unity, subtlety, and expressivity. In other words, when we decide a particular work stinks, we’re making an important claim about it, and the fact that this claim is unverifiable except through intersubjective reinforcement (your friend tweeting “OMG you’re right! That movie was so bad”) hardly lessens its potential truth-value. And in this era of intersubjective reinforcement and intersubjective challenge that constitutes so much of the roar of cyberspace, the nature of that truth-value seems of particular interest. Does it lie anywhere in the work at all, or are all evaluative judgments nothing more than “projections of the evaluating subject,” as Leo Koerner and Lisbet Rausing put it?9 The consensus is overwhelmingly with the latter, as when Barbara Herrnstein Smith argues that “all value is radically contingent, being neither a fixed attribute, an inherent quality, or an objective quality of things but, rather, an effect of multiple, continuously changing, and continuously interacting variables” that shape the relative and functional judgments of author, reader, gatekeeper, and scholar.10 But I think we ought to tread a little cautiously here. Granted, evaluation always takes place within the personal and sociopolitical frameworks that shape taste, consolidate shared values, and feed oppositional energies, and our judgment claims about artworks are always made against complex ideological backgrounds we necessarily never fully understand. But the fact that our evaluative convictions can indeed feel so objective to us—to the point where we can direct an awful lot of rhetorical energy into convincing others of the objective validity of our opinions—also suggests that something else is at play. That “something else” is, in the end, the work itself, which exists as a set of qualities and relationships to which we respond in the first place. Our personal evaluative convictions spring from the subjective assessment of these qualities and relationships within the framework of shared cultural expectations, shared cultural and subcultural values, and (no doubt) shared neurobiological responses to common stimuli. Yet even if neuroscientists confirm that humans exhibit universally shared responses to certain qualities such as balance and unity, this will hardly provide us a set formula for achieving artistic success by using these qualities or a machine for measuring artistic success and failure in some objective manner.11 As Malcolm Budd reminds us, artistic value is not simply intersubjective but also fundamentally incommensurable.12 This makes evaluation a particularly messy process, imbued not simply with social, cultural, and ideological interests but with imprecision, indeterminacy, and contingency, and founded on a subtle and complex interplay between subjective and objective, individual and shared. We may ultimately engage in this activity as part of a fun or serious jostling for cultural authority within a class, subculture, community, or circle of

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friends, but this in itself does not explain the particular ways in which we link up specific qualities in works with evaluative assessments (both specific and general) or indeed the fact that we really do seem to believe such assessments to be merited by our perception of such qualities. Unfortunately, we still lack a reliable and specific means of conceptualizing the ways in which formal elements hook up with value judgments within evaluation or the ways in which we assess a work’s overall merits relative to its individual elements. We might call this the “hard problem” of evaluation studies, as it is understandably one that many writers on the subject try to circumvent. In her influential book The Substance of Style, for instance, Virginia Postrel suggests that in our radically pluralist “age of look and feel,” our liberated subjective responses to the wildly varied sensuous surfaces of contemporary design are sort of like our responses to food.13 This isn’t simply because personal tastes that underlie subjective assessment can differ radically (I like Brussels sprouts, you don’t) but also because increased exposure to aesthetic competition makes us “more sensitive to quality,” so that “the more steak you’ve eaten, the more likely you are to discriminate among good, better, and best.”14 But Postrel has no way of telling us what makes a good steak good and a better steak better and seems to have chosen an analogy that will keep such distinctions conveniently ineffable so that (for instance) she can make the intuitively sound claim that professional designers “experience more, more varied, and more sophisticated styles than the average person,” without having to spell out the precise terms of such sophistication in any detail.15 Surely John Ford is the Peter Luger porterhouse to Richard Donner’s Ponderosa chuck, but spelling out exactly how and why is not so easy, and comparing lesser buddy movies from each—say, Ford’s Two Rode Together (1961) and Donner’s Lethal Weapon 4 (1998)—can leave one feeling a bit queasy, with Pauline Kael seemingly having the last laugh. Still, connoisseurship as a refinement of sensibilities is not something we want to give up on too quickly. We just need to be careful not to equate elevated taste with better people—just with more informed and discriminating spectators, which is what we present ourselves to be every time we prefer Ford over Donner, this HBO drama over that one, early Fellini over late. Even if it’s not enough to say that we simply know a better steak when it hits our tongue, it does seem important that we probably will have tasted steak before and that we know what we are looking for in a good steak—something juicy and tender and not dry and rubbery, a piece of beef with strong flavor but not too much fat and gristle, and so forth. To be simply blown away and left speechless by an amazing steak is obviously wonderful, but if it’s not a rare occurrence, it risks making one seem cheap and easy. And for real steak lovers it is a rare occurrence. Certainly the sensation of being wholly overwhelmed by a meal—or a work of art—is one of the great joys of life, but it also tends to stymie articulate, detailed critical response; when elements of

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the meal or work seem to mesh so seamlessly in support of a single voice, they start to feel less like parts and more like an indivisible whole. Sometimes it’s fun to allow one’s articulated evaluation to begin and end with a blanket positive assessment (as in the cyber-“Like” or the 6-Second pan), but spectators who find any fault whatsoever with a work will probably reject seamlessness as an option and instead settle on specific defects or inadequacies that do not seem to mesh with or reinforce other more successful elements, in the process weighing and balancing individual artistic elements against each other and against the whole. This process was already nicely summarized by Alexander Gerard in his 1759 essay on taste: A perfect and faultless performance is not to be expected in any art. Our gratification must in every case be balanced against disgust; beauties against blemishes: before we have compared and measured them, we can form no judgment of the work. For want of the quickness and compass of thought requisite for this, or of inclination to employ it, we often err in our decisions. . . . But a person of true taste forms his judgment only from the surplus of merit, after an accurate comparison of the perfections and the faults.16

Now, what Gerard could not know, and in any case would never admit, is that his persons of “true taste” are all of us, all the time. “Proper” critics like to think of themselves as elevated experts and so routinely associate the impression of seamlessness with the ignorant boobs who lack the ability to weigh parts against wholes. But they’re wrong. As Simon Frith points out, “the essence of popular cultural practice is making judgments and assessing differences,” which means that consumers of pop culture are no different from middle and highbrow spectators in this regard.17 And makers of art take for granted that in striving to make their works better, stronger, they shift and shuffle aesthetic elements like so many pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; strong artworks tend to be successful and robust marriages. Instruction in art making usually follows a similar path, with editing teachers urging students to try different shot arrangements, directors asking actors to try different attacks, screenwriters dropping pages of material in order to move up plot points, all in the interest of favoring beauties over blemishes, gratification over disgust, perfections over faults. And in a particularly composite form such as narrative cinema such arrangement can be pretty nakedly on display—the acting can seem terrific at some moments but shoddy at others, the special effects spectacular but the script weak, and so on. The forces of personal history, identity, and culture that impinge on our ongoing evaluative response certainly make our take on a film or sitcom or restaurant meal extremely loaded and complex, but such response is also always rooted in our reactions to identifiable aesthetic elements and combinations.

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Aesthetic evaluation is closely tied to our ongoing apprehension of parts and wholes and to our concomitant culturally, psychologically, and ideologically laden assessment of that very apprehension. To break it down simplistically, I would venture to guess that we tend to see (and seek) wholes as much as parts, and we assume that artists do the same, even as we also assume that artists must use parts to construct aesthetic wholes. And when we assess, which we do inevitably, we tend to do so both globally and locally. Sometimes evaluation begins and ends at the global, macrolevel; in these cases judgment is often summary and sharp, either positive or negative (“I just don’t get that—this does nothing for me”; “I don’t know what to say—this just carried me away”), because the constructive information needed for a more nuanced understanding is either unavailable or undesired. But to the extent that parts make themselves apparent, either by design or because the spectator is sufficiently informed, skilled, and/ or willing to sense them, evaluation proceeds by normative assessment of those parts, of relationships between those parts, and of relationships between parts and wholes. In the end this amounts very much to an experience comparable to that assumed by the artist or artists in making the work in the first place, and in our ongoing aesthetic assessment of a work, we in a sense project ourselves “back into” the art assembly process, not actually making aesthetic choices but nevertheless feeling the efficacy of those choices in our judgment of micro, macro, and the interplay between the two. As spectators we judge the pleasure provided by an element or combination of elements, the skill, technique, ambition, originality, and richness on display, and (perhaps most significant) the appropriateness and purposefulness of elements in relation to the whole and to larger cultural and generic norms. And we do this constantly, in an ongoing give-and-take. So a film can seem dramatically lightweight and sloppy overall while one performance really stands out, or it can seem admirably ambitious and enthralling on a large scale but also loaded with material that seems excessive or unevenly presented. It can surprise us with how well it exceeds its modest ambitions or depress us with its pandering cynicism as it seeks to impress us using the least possible effort. Some of the evaluative norms we implicitly or explicitly appeal to when assessing (for instance, the metanorm of assumed purpose, of a work’s “purposive structure,” as Noël Carroll puts it) may be pan-cultural, but most will be more specifically culturally driven, if not culturally determined.18 Individual cultural norms may stress that (for instance) visual represe