Critiquing a Critic

I feel I can only accurately describe A.O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism as nearly 300 pages of self-validation and far-reaching references. Despite the last sentence, I’m personally not a critic by nature, but I have complete respect for what critics do. It takes a lot of courage and confidence to put oneself on the chopping block by praising or destroying something that is ultimately just another small piece of society. However, Scott seems to take some of his criticism to the edge of being anything constructive, and more into the realm of pretentiousness.

Yes, Scott makes some valid points throughout the book, but if the text was whittled down to just the ideas students need to hear and understand, I doubt it would be even half of its current length. As someone with a short attention span, I usually prefer authors with the same attribute, but the extremely haphazard train-of-thought style of Scott’s narration proved antagonistic to my comprehension of much of the piece.

Perhaps at this point in my life, having ever-changing opinions on most things doesn’t allow me to completely understand how someone can form such strong, controversial opinions over something as miniscule as 2012’s film adaptation of Dr.Seuss’ The Lorax. When reviewing how I arrived at the opinion that Scott bordered on arrogance though, I realize that it was the subtitle of the book itself, which reads “How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth”. This statement alone screams pretentiousness, but I suppose that could’ve been the point.