Criticism

What purpose does criticism serve? If you’re a child then the criticism you encounter is likely to be fairly unsophisticated; for instance a playground of kids chanting ‘Janet smells! Janet smells!’. Later in life you might start to encounter criticism of your creative efforts, as your work is branded ‘bland and lacking the essential element of whimsy prevalent in many of his contemporaries’, which is a bit fucking harsh given it was the first time you used finger paints and you were only five. Still later and one gets used to the knocks of opinion, which is useful for when you develop romantic feelings for somebody, go out with them and suddenly find yourself on the wrong end of a ‘it’s not me, it’s you’ conversation during which your insensitivity is mentioned no fewer than seven times before you realise you are being dumped. But don’t worry, you will eventually find somebody to settle down with who will criticise you but not leave.

There is a danger that criticism sometimes just seems like an excuse for the critic to show how clever they are by being both cruel and amusing, all the while demonstrating that they are not as talented as the person they are criticising and making a pretty good case for the argument that critics are just frustrated artists.

But people like to read reviews, because tickets are expensive and going to the theatre is time consuming. So you don’t want to waste your time and money seeing something that is crap only to discover afterwards that every critic was united in their opinion of its crapness. Of course worse still is coming out of a show thinking it was crap and not understanding the rave reviews. This is especially true of foreign films, which reviewers invariably praise because they are worried that if they say that a three hour documentary about an Armenian orphanage lacks even one decent car chase, they may be accused of being shallow.