The ability of critics to make a living may be precarious, but criticism remains an indispensable activity. The making of art — popular or fine, abstruse or accessible, sacred or profane — is one of the glories of our species. We are uniquely endowed with the capacity to fashion representations of the world and our experience in it, to tell stories and draw pictures, to organize sound into music and movement into dance. Just as miraculously, we have the ability, even the obligation, to judge what we have made, to argue about why we are moved, mystified, delighted or bored by any of it. At least potentially, we are all artists. And because we have the ability to recognize and respond to the creativity of others, we are all, at least potentially, critics, too.
This means, above all, that our job is to think. As consumers of culture, we are lulled into passivity or, at best, prodded toward a state of pseudo-semi-self-awareness, encouraged toward either the defensive group identity of fandom or a shallow, half-ironic eclecticism. We graze, we binge, we pick up and discard aesthetic experiences as if they were cheap toys. Which they frequently are — mass-produced widgets from the corporate assembly line.
Meanwhile, in our roles as citizens of the political commonwealth we are conscripted into a polarized climate of ideological belligerence. Bluster substitutes for argument. Important political divisions are at once magnified and trivialized. There is little room for doubt and scant time for reflection as we find ourselves buffeted by sensation and opinion.
How do we sort through it all? How do we manage the prodigious too-muchness of the demands on our attention? The incentives not to think — to be one of the many available varieties of stupid — are powerful. But there is also genius around us, and within us. There is “Hamilton” and “To Pimp a Butterfly,” “Transparent” and the novels of Elena Ferrante. Take your pick! Make your case!
We are far too inclined to regard art as a frivolous, ornamental undertaking and to perceive taste as a fixed, narrow track along which we stumble, alone or in like-minded company. At the same time, we too often seek to subordinate the creative, pleasure-giving aspects of our lives to supposedly more consequential areas of experience, stuffing the aesthetic dimensions of existence into the boxes that hold our religious beliefs, our political dogmas or our moral certainties. We belittle art. We aggrandize nonsense. We can’t see beyond the horizon of our own conventional wisdom.
Enough of that! It’s the mission of art to free our minds, and the task of criticism to figure out what to do with that freedom. That everyone is a critic means that we are each capable of thinking against our own prejudices, of balancing skepticism with open-mindedness, of sharpening our dulled and glutted senses and battling the intellectual inertia that surrounds us. We need to put our remarkable minds to use and to pay our own experience the honor of taking it seriously.
The real culture war (the one that never ends) is between the human intellect and its equally human enemies: sloth, cliché, pretension, cant. Between creativity and conformity, between the comforts of the familiar and the shock of the new. To be a critic is to be a soldier in this fight, a defender of the life of art and a champion of the art of living.
It’s not just a job, in other words.
A.O. Scott is a chief film critic for The New York Times and the author of “Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth,” from which this essay is adapted.
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