A critique of the critics, and why art should be more simple than some want us to believe.
Exciting movie out. This movie sucks! Or does it?
I’m sure many of you have been tirelessly waiting for some movies to come out, watching the trailers every other day and checking to see if the release date has moved closer. The moment has arrived, the movie is out and so are the reviews from the critics: “Disappointing”, “dull”, “lacking substance”, “the story seems to come apart as the characters develop and the narrative simply can’t keep up”. These are all made up and I haven’t collected them from actual reviews but you get the idea: Rotten Tomatoes scores your anticipated movie at “4.5/10”, IMDB at “6/10” and the newspapers keep bombarding you with news about how some a once famous actor has done a sub-mediocre job in this latest movie.
Critics are like financial advisors: they can only see that which has been seen before. Very rarely will critics appreciate a movie for its face value like an action movie for its action, a comedy for its comedy and a drama for its … well… absurdity in a lot of situations. They will often base their present evaluation by analysing those aspects of a movie they have been trained to look for: the cinematography, camera movements, actors, method acting, some other technical aspects, or the plot and character development. Only after “the numbers” start coming out will they the consensus start to change.
Indeed, there are a lot of “behind the scenes” aspects to movie making or acting, however that is for the industry experts to evaluate it amongst themselves or for those hardcore art fans which have spent a lifetime learning about the subtleties.
Perhaps that’s what critics are for, except they aren’t. The general movie reviews are open to the public and want to inform the cinema goers about the quality of what they are about to watch. That’s why you see them posted in public places and in the columns of famous publications rather than in a specialised journal, magazine or conference. Nonetheless they often focus on a narrow view of the creative act failing to see the forrest because for the trees. The movie or TV show needs to be enjoyed as a whole and keep the ordinary viewer entertained, visually, intellectually or otherwise. For instance, the personality/backstory development of some of the characters might not be of interest to the viewer, as many psychological studies have shown the human mind can only keep track of about 7 objects in the short term/active memory. Thus, such extraneous details will often fall into the “Abyss of perception” while the more powerful audio-visual stimuli take the spotlight.
Art is for everyone, not just the few.
Just like with developing a taste for fine wine and honing a good sense of fashion, enjoying art comes with years of conditioning and training. Maybe. Sure, there are aspects that will escape the casual wine drinker or the pseudo New York fashionista posting Instagram pics of their new office outfit taken straight out Vogue, but a good wine is something that will get even the average person to say “damn, this is good” rather than “hmm, tastes like the other”, and an acceptable outfit is something that most people will think of as being “well put together” rather than saying “this looks so impractical, how do you manage to maintain it so well?”.
There might be subtle tones to the act of creating art, but perhaps artists and critics alike should learn from engineers. When that extra 1% makes no practical difference then it makes little sense to have it there if 99.99% of the population cannot perceive it. However this might be part of a more growing trend where some members of society have become self-proclaimed admirers and experts in modern art. I have to admit, this has been a frustration of mine for quite a while. I appreciate the creative art through the effort and thoughtfulness its idea as well as the execution, and I don’t believe for one second that months of ideation about “something” have culminated with a couple of straight lines on a canvas or a series of alternating spots. Simplicity is hard. It’s hard when you are trying to simplify a complex idea so everybody can understand and relate to it. Otherwise it’s just … *ahem* … simple.
A symptom of polarised society?
In the past few years the world has gone through some interesting changes at both a political and societal level with the polarisation of public opinion being at the highest in the past decades. People just seem to disagree on a lot of topics. This particular ailment is disconcerting because one of the main causes is subjectivism. Of course, art is subjective, cinema is subjective, critics are subjective and that’s the beauty of it: people don’t have to agree on it, but they must understand it for its purpose to be fulfilled.
However this particular ailment has taken an interesting turn in the more recent years, with people resulting to subjective interpretation of ideas, messages and even the well defined concepts around us (e.g. vocabulary, grammar, words, technical concepts) as a mean to psychologically guard themselves against a rapidly changing environment. It’s always easier to revolve your opinions and interpretation of the world around your ego because that’s something you can control, whereas the objectivity of thought is considerably harder as you would need to balance that against the subjective interpretations of others. One of most exploited subjective interpretations nowadays is anger and fear: you can be offended at what you see even if it wasn’t directed at you; you can get angry about something without exactly knowing why. Love and happiness are a lot harder to master because they depend more on others and unlike fear and anger they gravitate around a collective ego (e.g. a sense of belonging).
Digressions aside, the moral relativism and the accentuated increase of subjective opinions centred around one’s core psychological boundaries with respect to social, cultural and worldly interactions has lead to a society (at least in the Western sense) where the attribution of the message is not intentional. The message is no longer created, but instead it’s perceived.
Next time you go to a modern art museum and feel like you have absolutely no clue what the piece you are looking at is about, why it is there and why it is worth $5 million dollars don’t feel ashamed or like you are not cultivated enough to enjoy it. It is simply an overhyped piece of art, inadequate for public consumption, much like those movie reviews that came back terrible even though you enjoyed the movie.
