Have critics become irrelevant?
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Sometimes I question why I write about music. Given what’s coming out these days, I often wonder what’s the point. Take, for example, the last five bands that got a review rating of three or below (out of ten) in Decibel: Suicide Silence, Molotov Solution, Psychostick, Iwrestledabearonce, and The Devil Wears Prada. (These ratings came from five different writers.) As of last night, these bands averaged over 8.5 million profile views and 150,000 “friends” on MySpace. Critical disdain obviously hasn’t held them back.
This reminds me of a great New Yorker article about the marketing behind Hollywood movies. I highly recommend it, if only so people are aware of the advertising forces they face. Now, marketing and advertising are not per se bad. The free market of information includes these things. Consumers are free to make up their own minds. But once enough money becomes involved, companies shift from making things that are good to things that sell.
These are not mutually exclusive, of course. Some big sellers are in fact good. Now that sites like Amazon and Yelp aggregate consumer opinion, bad quality is less likely to be rewarded. But how does one explain the multi-platinum success of, say, Nickelback or Hinder, who are routinely critically reviled?
The New Yorker article offers a clue:
Many studio executives argue that films can’t objectively be categorized as “good” or “bad”: either they appeal to a given demographic — and make the studio at least a ten-per-cent profit — or they don’t. “Most critics are not the target audience for most of the films being made today, so they’re not going to respond to them,” Sony Screen Gems’ Clint Culpepper says. “How a fifty-six-year-old man feels about a movie aimed at teen-age girls is irrelevant.”
Numbers bear this out. On rottentomatoes.com, which aggregates critics’ reviews, the top 10 grossing movies last weekend (July 3-5) averaged a 50.5% rating: utterly mediocre. Critics have become irrelevant because “quality” is no longer at stake. Only sales are. Kids at Hot Topic have little use for my thirty- and forty-something colleagues. In earlier times, critics commanded more cultural bandwidth. Now companies have figured out end runs around critical reaction. A newspaper review stands no chance against billboards, print ads, video trailers, and merchandise tie-ins.
Now, I am not bemoaning diminished influence on my part. I am just one guy. Anyone who bases consumption decisions solely on my opinions is a fool. People should aggregate information to make up their own minds. MySpace, YouTube, and downloading free people from depending on critics to know what things are like.
But I do bemoan the increasing irrelevance of criticism in general. Due to the abovementioned resources, the value of critics has shifted from reflection to refraction. Perhaps we can make people see things in a different light. Perhaps we can stimulate discourse that goes beyond the original object. But if nothing matters but sales, what’s the point? Once art gets to the level of Iwrestledabearonce or Suicide Silence, talking about it becomes meaningless. Reviews become ads plus text. If the text is unhappy enough, it can even backfire. People are more interested in low ratings than mediocre ones. If I rate a band low enough, I might actually get people to check it out. Criticism means little in a world where all publicity is good publicity.
