Objectivity in Criticism

Statues awarded at the BAFTAs to honor the best films, television shows, and games.

In my earlier years I was obsessed with a little-known website called Rotten Tomato. To me, it was like the bible of what movie to see and what movie not to see. But then everything changed when I saw the movie Passengers. At the time, it was one of the lowest rated movies of that season and I wasn’t excited to see it even though the movie starred Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt.

After seeing it though, I felt lukewarm towards the movie, but it didn’t offend my senses like critics proclaimed that it would. As I started to see more and more movies, I realized that review outlets were becoming more vapid to me. Video games are not alone. There have been many reviews for games that I thought understated or overstated the title’s quality the more games I played.

All of this begs the question, is there such a thing as objective criticism? If not, can criticism unfairly damage a work of art? Can criticism even be considered art? Before I dive into all of this let’s define what criticism is.

According to Merriam-Webster, criticism is “The art of evaluating or analyzing works of art or literature also: writings expressing such evaluation or analysis”. Analysis by nature is opinionated since the analysis itself is comprised of personal beliefs of the analyzer. However, this doesn’t mean that all analyses are opinionated.

Mother!, directed by Darren Aronofsky, was one of the most controversial movies of 2017 and for good reasons.

Look at it like this, one can’t argue with what’s on screen but rather how it’s presented on the screen. The “how” is what makes us question its purpose in the overarching story and if there’s even a deeper meaning behind it all. Because of this, you’ll run into many situations where critics’ reviews of one movie are sometimes drastically different from each other. A good example of these divergent interpretations of a film can be seen in Mother!. Some critics thought the movie was ambitious in that it did a stellar job channeling raw emotions while others thought that it needed to answer basic questions about plot and characters in order for it to be remotely good.

How can we fix this issue such that the general public can make an educated decision about what movie to see if every critic has their own reasons as to why something is terrific or abysmal?

Enter Rotten Tomato and Metacritic. They were made so that everyone could get a solid idea if something was good or bad by taking an average of all reviewers for a movie/game, but even this is a flawed approach towards objectivity.

The Shining and Scarface: a tale of two movies.

At its release in 1980, The Shining was lambasted for it’s slow pacing, unorthodox camera work, and its lack of fealty to the novel of the same name. However, by the 2000s, after the director’s death mind you, critics started to label it as one of the greatest horror movies of all time. Scarface (1983) initially received scathing reviews stating its violence, drug use, and profanity were too excessive and graphic. But now you’ll find many people, including critics, claiming that it’s a gangster movie on par with The Godfather.

So, what is it? How come general consensus can be one interpretation in one time period but not the other. Well the best way to look at it is most criticisms are indicative of the time period it’s from: like a time capsule. Political climate, the economy, or other socioeconomic factors could all have influence on critics’ analytical consensus. In the 80’s for example, people were more culturally and socially conservative. So movies that didn’t adhere to those cultural boundaries were more likely to be admonished much like Scarface. It could also be because the 80’s were going through a phase where movies didn’t focus so much on gloomy story presentation like the 70’s did. Instead, this decade focused more on blockbuster action which explains why the Indiana Jones series, Back to the Future series, and many other movies with heartwarming, triumphant themes were so successful.

So if criticism is dependent on the person as well as the time or place of when said criticism is published, can there even be such a thing as objective criticism. When we return to the original definition of criticism, you can see it says “the art of evaluating…”. Is criticism really an art-form?

Fountain, made by Marcel Duchamp in 1917, was an art sculpture made to make one laugh at art as a whole. In fact, the Society of Independent Artists couldn’t reject the sculpture since the artist paid the fee to have it exhibited: so anything can be art so long as you have the money.

In a nutshell, art is a commentary on culture. All art is representative of the time it originates from. I say this because modern art would be heavily criticized in an art gallery in the 1800s.

This isn’t because our art today is inferior per say, but rather our art is more fixated on making commentary about our culture and its standards because of events we have been through that make us question our reality: the World Wars, 9/11, etc. However, art in the 1800s witnessed the birth of the industrial revolution. So art back then focused more on the rapid progression of technology and it’s impact on people.

This obviously isn’t unique to works in galleries, this affects films as well. Think about how many films criticized the US government after the Vietnam War compared to before the war. Think about how after the 2008 recession there were more successful films that revolved around criticizing the Wall Street Machine.

In essence, criticism is indeed an art-form in a very technical sense because it provides commentary on cultural artifacts, those being books, games, movies, paintings, etc. Criticism will never be objective. One could argue that they can make an “objective” analysis of a cultural artifact by using evidence and making arguments for why it’s good or bad in quality. However, no matter how close you get to objectivity it’s still opinionated at the end of the day.

Thanks for reading. If you disagree with me, please roast me.

Sigma out.