
Since this a place for working artists to speak their mind, I don't suspect there will be much love for critics. After all, we have probably all had work that we were deeply proud of dismissed by people we thought didn't understand it or were just plain dumb. This has very real consequences - psychic, financial, and artistic. Bitching about critics is an artist's God given right.
And yet...
I read tons of reviews - book reviews, movie reviews, theatre reviews. In some way, I must love them. No one's got a gun to my head. If I hate reviews as much as I purport to, why do I spend so much of my valuable and limited free time reading them?
The simple answer is that the arts are what I care about most, and if I'm going to read about the arts I'm giong to read alot of reviews. But I think it goes deeper than that. I love dissecting works of art, to find how they work on their own terms and what they mean culturally. And while I'm very particular about the reviews I read (salon and New Yorker for movies, those two and NYT for books), I'm always incredibly eager to read what they have to say, even if I disagree with it (e.g. I disagree with Stephanie Zacharek at salon all the time, but she's still my favorite film critic).
This got me to thinking about Pauline Kael. When I was 13, I was forced to watch the INTERMINABLE Dr. Zhivago in European History class. I was bored out of my mind. When I went home, for some reason I picked up 5001 Nights at the Movies to find what Pauline Kael thought of it. She hated it too! And for all the same reasons I did! Only she articulated it a thousand times better than I ever could.
That moment was incredibly freeing to me. It taught me to trust my own judgement. It taught me that just because everyone else thought something was great didn't mean that I should, even if I couldn't artiuclate why. In the years that followed, I read Kael religiously. To this day, I own all her books. I can quote her chapter and verse about literally hundreds of movies. In some way, I think I found out what I thought about art by hearing Pauline Kael express it.
But she's a critic. And aren't we supposed to hate critics?
I'd be interested to hear from any of the other writers if they had critics that meant a lot to them in the same way that Kael meant so much to me. And how do we resolve the paradox of hating critics in response to our own work but loving to read criticism?