To You, The Reviewer

(This post has some harsh points of view and probably won't win me any friends. Why post it, then? Because it needs to be said.)

When I read a review of a new book or movie or album that tells you how completely it satisfied the reviewer’s criteria, it makes me want to puke.

So you, the reviewer, wish to be satisfied on every level. You spend your money and you expect to get the utmost satisfaction in return. To you it is all a business transaction.

You know what you sound like, don’t you? You sound like someone visiting a brothel. Before the financial transaction begins, you explain to your partner for hire what it is you expect, what you want her to do, and how much you are willing to pay for the services rendered.

This is not how it works, at least when it comes to art. Now maybe you don’t want art, and that is fine. But if that is the case, don’t pretend you’re judging your experience at that level. Let’s call the transaction what it is: a greasy trade of money for titillation and satisfaction of your baser desires. Don’t try to elevate it.

Let me tell you a little something about art. I know, your college English professor taught you everything there is to know on the subject, and you never once bothered to question his intent. He led you into a cozy little room stuffed with old books with gilt covers and there he seduced you. He lured you into a world of fine ideas while slowly separating those fine and beautiful ideas from the world in which ordinary people live. In short, he showed you the world that should be while increasing the gap between that world and the world that is.

And you bought it. He showed you a world in which you were better than the money changers and the manual laborers and the small-minded businessmen. He created for you a refuge you could hide in when the real world got to be too much. You were better than that. You were apart from it.

Except you weren’t, not really. You see, there was a price to pay for this refuge from the real. You had to protect the sacred vision and so you had to do whatever was necessary in order to hide it away from the ugly world.

In other words, in order to save the lovely visions of the possibility of a better world, you had to detach it from the reality that would tear it to pieces. Like an overprotective parent who believed their child too precious for the world, you kept your precious hidden. In truth, you did not have enough faith in what you cherished to place it in the outside world, permit it to survive or wither according to its vitality and rightness.

You created a fantasy world for yourself. You took the external trappings of stories, the kind that lure children into a deeper understanding of the world, and you abandoned the deeper truths the storytellers were trying to share. And you did so because those deeper aspects of your reading would have required you to reconnect to the outside world. You would have had to commit to such ideals, put them to the test, and you were afraid to do that.

You saw the beautiful words in Hamlet but you did not see inside the heart of the man who struggled with the existential essence of his life and dilemma. You never bothered to see deep enough into the character nor the man who wrote it. You excused yourself by calling Shakespeare an unfathomable genius rather than plunging into the depths of his genius the way one who appreciated genius would. You feared where such genius would lead you, and at the same time you feared not appreciating an acknowledged classic. Sometimes your tepid little soul even sought to pass your tepid little judgment on a great work, a profound work, by adding your advice on how the work or the author or the character was lacking.

You detached yourself from the essence of all that art is, because it frightened you. It was too bright, it was too brilliant. It pushed you away from your quiet reading spot, shoved you out the front door into the big bad world you wanted no part of, just as Gandalf pushed Bilbo into adventures that were more easily read about than lived. You wanted to believe in wizards, you just didn’t want them showing up in your neck of the woods.

Art is not a sterile thing. It is not meant merely as a distraction from the real world, not some abstract but beautiful and ornate creation upon which we can for a moment ignore the uglier aspects of our lives. No, art is intimately tied to our lives. It makes us see our lives, our reality, in new ways, makes us less satisfied with what is so that we can work upon creating what should be. It is a map that can lead us to places we never would have imagined. But instead of following that map, we too often frame it and hang it upon the wall.

It is the artist’s job to make you see things from a different point of view. It is the artist’s job to make you uncomfortable. You must enter into the relationship with these expectations. It is not that the artist is above you, superior to you, it is that the artist has spent a great deal of his time and attention on a particular line of thought that he puts before you and wants you to consider. It is his job, it is the one area where he is, through endless hours of research and practice, qualified to give you his expert advice. He is no different than a doctor or a mechanic, but like them, it is his job to tell you the facts, not tell you what you want to hear and make you feel cozy.

So this is art. Maybe you’re not interested in art, maybe you think art is shit. That’s all well and good, just don’t pretend it doesn’t exist. Don’t pretend that everything that is worth writing needs to conform to your criteria. It is easy as the reviewer to believe you can criticize without being criticized in return. But reviewing is a job as well—a review, a work--and as such it is worthy of criticism itself. If you cannot or do not relate to deeper aspects of a work, you leave yourself open to criticism. It is like judging a piece of music solely on the lyrics and rhythm, ignoring the melody.

Artists aren’t here to amuse you. We have all been amused for too long. As Neil Postman said, we are amusing ourselves to death. No, it is not my job to amuse you but to awaken you, to bring you from your extended adolescence into adulthood. To lead you from amusement to amazement. This is not a bad thing. No, it is a wonderful thing. Magic is not something that exists only in the mind of a child. It exists, really exists, only to the adult mind capable of perceiving it in all its glory. It is not so frightening, you merely need to take the next step…