Wesley,
I still suspect that architecture critics don’t get hate mail that says “It’s only a building; just tell me if it’s structurally sound or not, you wanker.”
Your comment about writing to enrich somebody’s experience of a movie sorta struck me. I guess that’s what we arts writers tell ourselves every day–that we’re a small but functional part of somebody’s film-viewing/record-listening/TV-watching experience. But I think our self-perception is at odds with the way most readers see criticism–namely, as a filter, part of their film-GOING/record-BUYING experience. It’s the service journalism model–tell me how to allot my disposable income and (maybe more important) my valuable and limited leisure time.
So the question is, if most readers want service journalistic picks and pans, and we ignore that to spend time talking about why Tom Green matters (read: why Tom Green matters to US), are we shutting our readers out and writing exclusively for our critical cronies? In the end, are Film Comment and the music section of the Village Voice just a de facto “Breakfast Table,” a closed loop? In the end, are we nothing but the nerds they say we are?
More important, does the disconnect between what critics try to achieve in their writing and what readers want from critics just serve to highlight the pointlessness of criticism in general?
Please attempt to address all these questions without making reference to “dancing about architecture.” (I hate it when people dance about architecture; all that hopping around never tells me whether the building is any good.)
AP
