Critics, by and large, get a bad rap in the media. They are often portrayed as bitter, hateful people who take out their own frustrations at being creatively infertile and devoid of real talent by viciously and joyously soiling the works of people more worthy and genuine than themselves. In addition, they are often portrayed as pretentious parasites, pathetic poseurs, and corrupt to the gills to boot.

Of course, all these media portrayals are created by the very artists who are subject to the critics’ scrutiny and analysis, so it’s not exactly like they are unbiased.

Nevertheless, the public tends not to view critics in a particularly favorable light, and of course, the artistic community has, at all levels, heaped scorn and abuse on particular critics and on the entire profession as a whole. Why do we even need these terrible people, ask the writers and the filmmakers and the musicians? All they do is say bad things about other people’s work. We would be better off if they all disappeared forever!

Note, people rarely say this after getting good reviews.

This view, while perfectly understandable, is nevertheless unsophisticated and immature. Critics play a very important role in the world of art as intercessionaries between the artists and their audience, and as much as the artists might resent it, without the critics, people would be a less willing audience for all forms of art.

In order to understand why the role of the critic is so vital to the world of art, you first to understand the experience of art for its audience.

Let’s start this off with a quote :

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Kurt Vonnegut

With all due respect to one of my favorite authors of all time, that is simply not the case. A novel, or any other form of art, might look, on the surface, like just a harmless collection of paper and ink (or canvas and paint, or light and celluloid, etc etc), but that is mistaking the medium for the content in a very serious way. After all, a needle full of cyanide is just glass and chemicals… until you inject it into your bloodstream.

And that is what we, as the audience, do with art. We take it right into our minds. We let it in, we give it access to our minds, our emotions, our thoughts and ideas. We let the art, and through it the artist, put their thoughts and images into our mind, implicitly trusting them not to hurt us. Art is, in fact, the closest thing we have to telepathy, and the more sensitive and sophisticated your audience, the more damage bad art can do to them.

And bad art hurts, despite what Vonnegut said. Consuming art is remarkably like consuming food or drink, and the more intelligent and deep your audience is, the deeper the art will go. Bad art does more than simply leave a bad taste in the mouth. If it’s truly bad, it will upset the digestive processes of the mind and leave a permanent memory of something terrible. In fact, bad art can have the same sort of powerful effect on the mind that bad food can have. Someone can form a very powerful negative association with a genre, a style, or an artist simply from one particularly bad experience, much as someone can go permanently off a certain food from one experience with some that was past its due.

So as a consumer of art, you are vulnerable and lost before the myriads of possible dishes available to the public. You want more of the kind of art you had before, but where do you find it? You can’t possibly sample every dish on this vast buffet in order to find the ones you like. And even if you could, how many truly terrible flavours would you have to experience before you found anything you liked? And once you found something you liked, how eager would you be to go blindly looking again once you had your fill of your first find? How excited would you be about this whole buffet thing in the first place?

Enter the critic. Far from being a knight attacking a sundae, a critic is a brave soul whose very job description is to try all these dishes before anyone else does and give the public some kind of idea what is in store for them should they decide to try them for themselves. Critics take that risk for us, letting any old artist into their heads to do what they will, with only their own developed tastes and intellectual toughness as protection from art’s worst.

Seen in this light, it is easy to see how the critic, far from being a parasite, is actually a very brave soul who is willing to be the king’s taster and try all his dishes before he eats them.

Except in this case, the king is… well us.

So enough with the critic-bashing, my fellow workers in art. Sure, there are terrible critics and terrible reviews. Critics are artists too, and no more perfect than the rest of us. Sturgeon’s Law is immutable and applies to critics as well. So feel free to lambaste this review as thoughtless and crude, or that critic as a blinkered Philistine who wouldn’t know good art if it violently sodomized them.

But enough with the wondering why critics exist, or why someone might well get angry at a piece of bad art.

The audience is letting you into their very minds. You expect them to do that without someone looking out for them first?