Why do people despise critics?
December 22, 2021 12:20 PM   Subscribe

The Question Dave Hickey Dared to Ask. What are critics good for? There’s certainly no lack of commentary today; if anything, the current online environment is a flowering of critical prose. On platforms like Twitter, the shorthand of “the discourse” (trickled down from Foucault, but never applied with so much seriousness as to seem uncool) is pervasive. We’re having a conversation out here, and it would behoove you to pay attention, subject aside—perhaps there is a much-hyped novel or a possibly offensive artwork you need to become aware of (or, just as often, something even more fleeting: an image, a meme). “Takes,” hot or cold, follow; if we’re analyzing television, where the real man-hours are spent consuming culture, “recaps” regurgitate screen time into the following day: Writers are hard at work extending, reiterating, dissenting, providing nuance and context.
posted by Ahmad Khani (5 comments total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
All I know is, the films I enjoy the most usually get around 70-80% fresh rating from critics on rotten tomatoes. As far as I can tell, there is no correlation for audience ratings.
posted by nushustu at 3:06 PM on December 22, 2021 [4 favorites]


Hachi machi! It stinks!
posted by deadaluspark at 3:27 PM on December 22, 2021


I had no idea that Dave Hickey passed away until I read this. His work has always meant a lot to me and shaped how I viewed art, the world and "the art world." One of the things they gently touch on in the article, too, is how wrong he was about certain things. Later in life, he wrote (or maybe just gave interviews, I can't remember) about how his vision of the Big Beautiful Art Market and the democratizing force of people spending money on what they love while not letting the government get their hands on the messy, outsider coolness of art was misplaced, seeing what a dumb shell game of laundering money in nostalgic repetition it ultimately became. But he was always exciting, provocative and never boring. He was right about a lot of other things, including what's wonderful and fun about Liberace and Chet Baker. He was really, brutally smart and had an otherwise pretty good lay of the land and made important, clear and correct critiques of the stodgy liberal institutions and presuppositions of the academic, insular art world without ever seeming reactionary. Chuck Klosterman does a shitty impression of him, with all due respect.

Sad he's gone, but glad he's being remembered.
posted by StopMakingSense at 6:41 PM on December 22, 2021 [2 favorites]


Different reasons....I despise Stanley Crouch for dying before he completed his Bird biography, for example.
posted by thelonius at 12:11 AM on December 23, 2021 [1 favorite]


I'm enjoying this 1995 interview with Dave Hickey, which is full of interesting ideas. He's got some pretty good lines:
I mean, this may sound elitist, but given the social advantages that most artists grow up with, the extensiveness of their educations and the enormous public and private investment in their artistic freedom, it seems to me that art should be more interesting and exciting than rock and roll.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 8:09 PM on December 23, 2021


« Older FDA authorizes 1st antiviral pill for COVID   |   you have been infected with the anti-coronavirus... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments