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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Bit of a meta comment, but: it’s popular to rag on critics but I think it’s a tragedy that the professional critic is less and less of a thing anymore. It’s the same phenomenon as the widespread loss of trust in “professionals” and institutions, but in the cultural sphere.

Critics can sometimes be aloof or out of touch, but the alternative is basically just money-driven populism untethered to any deeper notions of quality.

They could be huge jerks, but I lament the fact that people like John Simon or H. L. Mencken don’t exist anymore. Nowadays people like them would probably be unable to make a living.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Simon_(critic)

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The web2.0 made the professional critic obsolete. Back when punishing was difficult, those with the means to disseminate information needed a reliable way to get opinions on a topic: the professional critic. But around the turn of the millennium that changed, and we now have a plethora of ways to just access the opinions of fans and laypeople.

Of course paradoxically we now also have more professional critics than ever before. We just call them reviewers and influencers. A lot of them shallow or outright bought, but that has always been an issue with critics. But if you avoid the bad actors you will find insightful critics on the most obscure topics. And if you don't you can always just ask the relevant subreddit

This is the popular narrative, but what it misses is how relying on the public/internet at large to fund criticism (or even art in general), you’re not going to get the kind of niche hyper-expert analysis that previously would have been funded by a newspaper or magazine owner. Fifty years ago, you could pick up a newspaper and expect the critic to be fairly educated in the topic. Nowadays you have to go to the third page of YouTube results to find a similar level of expertise, if you can find it at all, and that critic isn’t making a living at it.

Reddit has plenty of its own biases and isn’t a great source either.

This type of analysis is heavily rooted in personal preference. Critics have their own biased. Relying on mass review system should represent more of what the average person like rather than some elitist idea of a critic of what should be.

Rotten tomatoes seems like a good case study in the value of both by presenting a critics score and a general audience score. Usually when they diverge greatly is when it is most valuable for me, e.g. critics loved it and audiences hated it, it is probably pretentious and arty and I can skip, audiences loved it and critics hated it, it is probably mass appeal slop.

Note that this is prone to review bombing.

Often series and films get accused of having an "agenda" and a lot of non-fans join in review bombing. It can still be good media if "fan reviews" don't like it.

Just to note that this is even more common in gaming and Steam has developed strong countermeasures, not to outright suppress review bombing because there are legitimate cases that look similar, but to highlight it and give some options to filter it out.

Curious what you make of the The Last Jedi then: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_the_last_jedi

A terribly lazy movie that even the popcorn-guzzling public could see through, but which mysteriously received rave reviews from the “culturally elite” critics.

The one starting with a zillion giant spaceship built while nobody noticed? If at least they were conjured out of thin air by magic. And many other oddities in the first five minutes, then it slows down back to near normality. I stand with the 41%.

Still one of the most financially sucessful movies of all time.

Also the last Star Wars movie of all time for me (and probably many others).

“But it makes money” has to be one of the worst concepts humanity has come up with.

Sure, but the parent comment claimed only critics liked the movie. This is clearly wrong.

Why do you think that was?

Because it is a fantastic movie, with fascinating characters, a thrilling storyline, and full of interesting concepts.

The popcorn and soda public loved it - it was the highest grossing movie in 2017.

There is no mystery in its rave reviews. Both critics and general public enjoyed it. The vicious hate this movie gets is from Star Wars fans only. Nobody hates Star Wars as much as its fans.

I'm not sure if those still count as fans or former fans suffering from nostalgia. Consider Call of Duty. I really liked 3 and 4. After that, not so much, and I have not even bothered with recent ones. They could've stopped there, as far as I'm concerned. I also did not really like The Phantom Menace either, but I get the appeal for _others_ (and I liked the next one a lot more). Do I include that in my review? If it is a personal review, no. If it were a professional review for a magazine or website (i.e. critic)? Sure. I believe (cannot prove) the main reason the latest Star Wars movies gets a lot of flak is Star Wars = Disney, and Disney is too 'woke' for some people. They don't like a female POC lead.

> I believe (cannot prove) the main reason the latest Star Wars movies gets a lot of flak is Star Wars = Disney, and Disney is too 'woke' for some people. They don't like a female POC lead.

If you earnestly believe this, you really need to seek out more diverse news. Everyone I know absolutely hated both TLJ and TRoS, and I can guarantee it's not because they're racist or misogynist. They are just really bad movies (TRoS in particular is a series of nonsensical mcguffin quests held together by the most nonsensical plot). TFA is pretty universally agreed in my experience to have been fine, but too safe.

It also feels like a big stretch to call Kelly Marie Tran the lead, even if the harassment she experienced was abhorrent. It's an ensemble cast and she has 12th billing.

41% is not terrible either, but if you want the most blatant example from that universe, take The Acolyte: 18% given by the audience for a show of high school project-quality was quite generous, even.

The issue is for finding stuff that doesn't cater to the "average person". I'm not interested on what the average person like if I'm looking for artistic value.

Exactly, and with most dubjects what the average person thinks is useless. The average person knows very little about most subjects.

Sure, there is some value in knowing what the average person thinks about it. But if I want a more expert or educated opinion, then there is more value in asking someone that knows more about the topic.

The labeling of any sort of expert opinion as “elitist” is precisely the issue.

For now.

If you thought botting on reviews was bad now, LLMs and the like are going to supercharge spam and drown us all in a grey goo of bullshit.

Well-known critics are valuable for two reasons, even if they have wildly different likes and preferences from me:

1. they have seen/heard a lot. A professional movie critic watches more films in a month than I have in years. That gives him opportunities to compare, or to draw connections that I cannot.

2. they are known quantities. We have a certain image of Roger Ebert (as an example) in our minds and can adjust his reviews to get closer to our hypothetical opinion about the film. Also, we get to know his mannerisms and idiosyncracies.

Nothing makes Roger Ebert a priori a better reviewer than Mike from 4chan who obsessively watches films, but having a handful of critics we recognize is more valuable w.r.t. these two points than having thousands of unknown reviewers.

> 2. they are known quantities. We have a certain image of Roger Ebert (as an example) in our minds and can adjust his reviews to get closer to our hypothetical opinion about the film. Also, we get to know his mannerisms and idiosyncracies.

I'm guessing choosing him as the example means he's one of the biggest names in professional critics, but he's as unknown to me as Mike from 4chan. I really do wonder how much the average person actually payed attention to critics like him compared to trailers/commercials and friends.

Access journalism has damaged reputation of many professional critics. When a new product is launched, e.g. a video game, people want reviews on launch date, they aren't willing to wait. The only way to have a review out on a launch date is to get a pre-release access from the publisher. But the way to get pre-release access from the publisher is to have a good relationship with the publisher and you won't have a good relationship with the publisher if you are going to give negative reviews (even when it's well deserved).

"IGN 7/10" became a meme in the gaming community for meaning "we think the game has some serious flaws but we don't want to appear too negative". People pick up on this stuff, if bad products are 7/10, then reviews get meaningless and people seek more niche critics who are more honest and are not afraid to rate the latest release 2/10 if it deserves it.

Excessive positivity in art/game/movie/book/music reviews is an issue even with non-compromised actual-customer reviews. If giving a quantifiable rating (rather than binary), very few people are willing to give a score that's even 50% of the total even if their written review totally pans the piece. Positivity-bloat also occurs with binary yes/no reviewing, but to a much lesser degree.

For some reason this doesn't apply to eg. non-book/movie/music/etc. Amazon purchases though - people are willing to call garbage garbage there. Perhaps the greater the real-world utility of a purchase, the more picky people are about it? Or that only fans are willing to purchase art in the first place, much less review it at all, and so fewer who are likely to criticize ever encounter it?

This. People forget that when everyone's opinion matters, no one's matters. Alot of hobby cultures are alot more fragmented with the advent of social media today than in the early 2010s, and we do suffer for it. Fan OC works are down, modern works don't have lasting impact, it's the same tired discussions going in circles every year, there isn't really a sense of continuity in ideas anymore.

I find the whole concept of a critics bizarre. I don't need other people to decide whether to like something or not. If I like some music and the critic does not - what of it? He's just another human being with ears and an opinion.

You don't, but it can be helpful if you find a critic that strongly aligns with your preferences, or even strongly misaligns with your preferences. Just like a reccomendation from a friend, you can use it to consider if something is worth even giving a try.

https://youtu.be/lG2dXobAXLI

The point isn't to decide whether to like it or not; it's whether to listen to it or not.

You can't listen to even 1% of the music in the world in your lifetime. You need to filter somehow.

And good criticism should deepen your experience of the art, whether a positive or negative critique.

Sometimes the critics don't tell if it's good or bad, but what's in there. The story about Asimov and the critic explains that pretty well https://wiki.c2.com/?AsimovAndTheCritic

TL;DR: "Just because you wrote it, what makes you think you know anything about it?"

Yeah, this is a pretty big difference to lack of trust in "experts" and "institutions". If someone doesn't trust medical experts that they should vaccinate their kids, they perpetuate objectively dangerous illnesses. If someone doesn't trust critics, at worst they perpetuate...subjectively bad movies and music?

An unbridled race to the bottom in art seems bad IMO.

I expect an (ironically academic) argument about how monomaniacal focus on mass-market appeal doesn't necessarily entail a race to the bottom.

I'd be surprised if someone believes that in reality a monomaniacal focus on mass-market appeal doesn't entail a race to the bottom, though.

I mean, if you consider what critics don't like to be bad, then yes, critics being ignored would be a bad thing for what gets produced. My point is that what critics think is bad is entirely subjective and not everyone will agree with them. If you start from thinking of critics as "on top", then sure, you'll end up with a race to the bottom without them, but if you think of critics having their own potential motives and their opinions not being some gold standard of what constitutes "good art", then it's not so obvious. Using TFA as an example, is it more likely that first and third albums are actually objectively better more often than not than second albums, and what everyone else thinks is actually wrong, or is it more likely that the critics have a distorted view on things?

> I expect an (ironically academic) argument about how monomaniacal focus on mass-market appeal doesn't necessarily entail a race to the bottom.

If the above sounds too academic and pedantically rejecting the idea of mass-market appeal entailing a race to the bottom, let's turn the question around: why are you assuming that the only two options focusing on mass-market appeal or focusing on what critics think? Do you really think that there wouldn't be any music produced for a niche audience if not for critics? There's plenty of existing music that isn't produced for mass market appeal already, and I have trouble believing that it exists only because of critics rather than in spite of them.

Fundamentally I think we want experts, not critics.

It matters less to me that they're not as eloquent, not professional public figures, not well renowned or have a fancy title at some prestigious publication.

In our fields we have many of that, I'm thinking at people like John Siracusa, with a background in doing things first, and using it to comment on stuff that pick his interest.

In the musical field I see podcasts like Switch on pop in the same vein, where they're not critics by trade, and will dive into the music mainly from a technical viewpoint.

> Fundamentally I think we want experts, not critics.

I think both have their spaces, but honestly, I would like to have more critics.

With the advent of podcasts and YouTube channels, we have an unprecedented level of access to experts. In my case, I was about to record an album with my band, and back in the day it was hard to get information on what happens in a studio. I saw one video from a band that I liked and got more or less the idea about the process and what it takes [1].

Regarding the critics I agree with others that access journalism corrupted the role of the critics, and I tend to think that we're in thins moment another side of the layman or surface critics (in this context someone who can translate small nuggets of technical knowledge to a broader public, or infotainment) dictating part of the discourse based on cultural aspects.

One example was the whole debacle related to the Disney Star Wars series Acolyte.

The surface critics dunked the series on YouTube, and on the other side, the access journalism tried to protect the series due to the relation or personality of their authors.

I watched the whole series and even though I personally rated it 3/10, I really would like to understand the artistic and technical aspects of why the show wasn't great.

- Why the writing aspect was the main problem of the show? - What's the role of cinematography in the scenes? - How does this piece tie with the lore and what are its implications? - What are the issues with the sound and depth? - And regarding acting, which elements went wrong?

I tend to agree that the old 3 superficial paragraphs critique is gone, but I do not think that the new critique via Podcasts and Youtube are great substitutes either.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y40ZyDQXfoE

I've never gotten any value from professional critics- their opinions are totally uncorrelated with my own, and before I realized this they would often turn me off from trying music or movies I later found I enjoyed very much.

Moreover, they tend to seem jaded, and are either unable to enjoy anything, or feel the need to pretend not to enjoy anything to appear sophisticated. Seeing that negativity before experiencing something reduces the enjoyment of it.

There are plenty of critics and review channels on YouTube. Like everything else, criticism is no longer controlled by a central authority.

These are almost always just random people with typical (or at best, idiosyncratic) opinions, they aren’t highly-educated professionals who saw the role of the critic as something worthy in itself. YouTuber critics are basically just product reviewers. It’s not the same thing as the critic culture of yesteryear.

> random people with typical (or at best, idiosyncratic) opinions,

> highly-educated professionals who saw the role of the critic as something worthy in itself.

Which one then describes men like George Plimpton, Gore Vidal, or Alistair Cooke? The distinction you've made is unclear and unsubstantiated.

The latter. I don’t think any YouTube movie reviewer is remotely close to someone like Gore Vidal’s level of erudition. (And even he had plenty of faults.) Maybe Every Frame a Painting is the closest thing?

Every? No. Some? Yes.

But not every "professional" critic was worth paying any amount of time to eiter. Just because your brother worked at the paper you got to be "the critic" back then.

I think that what people demand of criticism has evolved, and the supply has evolved with it.

Scholarly critics were much more interested in understanding how a work fits into the cultural canvas, and how it innovates and advances culture. Identifying patterns and making sense of distinct movements that would otherwise look like chaotic cultural dynamics. They also cared about criticism as a legitimate literary form and a craft to master in itself.

I believe that's what you are missing, that makes a lot of sense, that is an important social service, but I'm not sure we associate that with the purpose of a critic anymore. It has become much more pragmatic now, it's much more about guiding a purchase decision, as well as, sometimes more importantly, to entertain with humour and snark. That is quite different.

I believe that actually most readers always read criticism mostly to make purchasing decisions and had to reluctantly go through the rest of the "erudition". The more cynically entertaining critics were always the most popular too. We've cut the cruft and made it more like what the audience wants, which is a shame, but we have to be realistic.

That being said, YouTube is much deeper than it seems and looks very different to different users, for better or worse the recommendation engine is amazing. Seek out good critics and you will find more, there are strong niche communities of full-time critics like you describe that have been doing it for over a decade and are masters of their craft. They might not be in the newspapers everyone reads, but there are more of them, and even if they might not sound as scholarly, I believe they are more substantive and they are just better at it than those hiding behind flowery language.

I think you’re right that criticism as an exercise in well-written insight is harder to find. However, criticism as a filter is abundant. Those YouTubers might not be producing erudition, but as long as they have watched a ton of content and decided what the good stuff is, and as long as their tastes seem to align to mine, then their opinion is still very useful.

> as long as their tastes seem to align to mine

This is the crux of it for me. A good critic will be of great use whether their tastes align with yours or not.

What is this “great use?” It seems like the purpose of critics isn’t to entertain people with an opinion about a record, but instead bolster the feelings of the insecure who aren’t sure what to think and need someone else pointing the way to an ideal of what cool is.

Critics feed ideas to those that attend parties so those can have an opinion to express when they feel no confidence in their own taste. Critics are Cyrano de Bergerac.

Like always, one needs to engage with a critic over time to get an idea of how they view the world and to be able to project it onto your own preferences. YouTube greatly facilitates this.

And every decent reviewer makes an effort to lay out the facts in front of you and try to be somewhat objective, or at least account for diverse tastes, for a portion of the criticism, so you can reach your own conclusions.

There are tons of excellent full-time critics that know what they are doing. They might not sound as scholarly as in the past, but that was mostly a stylistic choice and I'm skeptical about there being much more substance behind the flowery language.

Yeah this highlights an idea that seems increasingly rare today: you should go see a movie/piece of art because it's important to see and not merely because it aligns with your preferences. A good critic can make you understand that.

Sure, they’re still useful as information for consumers. But that’s what makes them product reviewers and not critics. Someone like John Simon saw himself as upholding artistic standards in theatre, writing, and other art forms, not writing product reviews for consumers.

> Those YouTubers might not be producing erudition, but as long as they have watched a ton of content and decided what the good stuff is, and as long as their tastes seem to align to mine, then their opinion is still very useful.

In most of the (big) YouTuber movies and TV shows critics, I have a very hard time knowing what is their taste and what is a piece of art.

I think in the future the role of a critic will be more to the technical aspect of the piece, and how it fits in their lore than something related to the taste specifically.

In my case, I cannot watch most of the modern TV shows 'cause most of them lack good cinematography, character development, and sound which are important aspects for me in terms of immersion and engagement. Most of the shows today with CGI, only closed camera takes, and lack of external shooting look like sitcoms of the 90s.

That's I think most of the Youtube Critics channels lack, that kind of nuance around those technical aspects.

Quite the critique.

Every human in the world is a random person, including you.

If that were the case, then we would pick surgeons by randomly grabbing a person off the street, and not use surgeons that have been trained for years in their profession.

But then you might say, "Medicine is a science, and art isn't. All art is relative and no one's opinion is better than another."

With that, I don't agree. I think someone who has spent more time studying a topic probably, not always, but probably has more insightful things to say about it. A Shakespeare scholar probably has more insights about Hamlet than a guy who read it in high school twenty years ago. In short, I reject the idea that expertise doesn't exist in evaluating the arts.

You didn't get it. The surgeon is by necessity a random person before he learns his trade. Just like a reviewer. You're not born into it. Expertise in evaluating art is usually self-made expertise (the academic expertise in this field has zero value), meaning they're all "random people".

I “didn’t get it” because you wrote one cryptic line and didn’t communicate clearly.

If you think academic expertise has no value, there isn’t much point in continuing this discussion.

Do you think it takes a high level of education to listen to a song and tell you if you'd like it?

Not formal education but definitely needs a lot of training on listening critically to music to ponder about how it relates to the overall body of works.

That's much more needed in any non-mainstream analysis/critique of music. How do you expect someone who never listened, for example, to noise music to be able to judge the quality of a new artist in that field/genre?

I don’t care if you like it.

I care if I’ll like it.

How do you tell if someone else will like it without education?

And how do you do with education? And what education? How exactly do you educate yourself in preparation to be a critic? I firmly believe that's nonsense and nothing but gatekeeping.

Meh. Critics are just people with an opinion that have a way of writing that people like. My friend's movie critiques much better align with my personal taste than any critics opinion.

Critics are a privileged bunch and I'm happy the 'profession' is dying - or opened up for everybody to have a stab at it. I mean, there's thousands and tens of thousands of critics on YouTube.

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