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A lot of people don't understand art criticism. They assume it means to judge a piece of art and determine if it is good or bad. This is exemplified by the way

A lot of people don't understand art criticism. They assume it means to judge a piece of art and determine if it is good or bad. This is exemplified by the way most criticism is portrayed in the media, for example rotten tomatoes. Although judgment can form a part of criticism that is not its primary role, it is only a very small part. "art criticism, the analysis and evaluation of works of art. More subtly, art criticism is often tied to theory; it is interpretive, involving the effort to understand a particular work of art from a theoretical perspective and to establish its significance in the history of art." https://www.britannica.com/art/art-criticism https://www.britannica.com/art/art-criticism I was reminded of this when I watched a video on video games criticism with my son and he didn't understand how that was criticism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDtxueJZufs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDtxueJZufs

magarnicle 3y ago
Exactly. During my English & Film Studies major we studied all kinds of texts, some of them very poor quality e.g. the early 90s adaptation of The Scarlet Letter - but the lecturers always found something useful to say about them, and almost never talked about them as 'good' or 'bad'.
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rollplaymodus 3y ago
(hint: Two people conversation) REM: 'Literary life rarely offers splendid spectacles' (ducks) A lot of people don't understand critics. They assume it means to judge and determine... ..and you may think 'yes that may be about censorship' > Won't sound offending but 'idiocracy' is much more subtile, and left criticism tied to theory, interpreting, and ('shure' ^^) without involving any effort or understanding? ?! > And the moral is about: "Some people better insert their gold-coins their throat down, to not hand it out to thieves, burglarzz and criminals."? [dice-roll] P-:
WorldMaker 3y ago
There's a lot of great (meta-)criticism that tools like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic (the videogames relative of RT) by trying to treat reviews as simply scores and then trying to synthesize those in a frappe of a blended metric have been some of the worst things to happen to criticism and critical thinking. There's so much signal lost in the noise of review scores. There's so much subjectivity and nuance lost just jumping to the thumbs up/thumbs down without hearing the reasoning behind any individual review, that it becomes increasingly harder to fathom why people put any weight behind the metrics that scale that data loss up to such incredible volume. (ETA: It gets worse too, because then you get companies gaming these meta-metrics and reviewers that feel uncomfortable giving scores below certain thresholds for fear of their jobs or other punishments, so even the truthfulness of individual reviews starts to be questioned how much they are just doing for "the algorithm".)

magarnicle 3y ago

Exactly. During my English & Film Studies major we studied all kinds of texts, some of them very poor quality e.g. the early 90s adaptation of The Scarlet Letter - but the lecturers always found something useful to say about them, and almost never talked about them as 'good' or 'bad'.

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rollplaymodus 3y ago

(hint: Two people conversation) REM: 'Literary life rarely offers splendid spectacles' (ducks) A lot of people don't understand critics. They assume it means to judge and determine... ..and you may think 'yes that may be about censorship' > Won't sound offending but 'idiocracy' is much more subtile, and left criticism tied to theory, interpreting, and ('shure' ^^) without involving any effort or understanding? ?! > And the moral is about: "Some people better insert their gold-coins their throat down, to not hand it out to thieves, burglarzz and criminals."? [dice-roll] P-:

WorldMaker 3y ago

There's a lot of great (meta-)criticism that tools like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic (the videogames relative of RT) by trying to treat reviews as simply scores and then trying to synthesize those in a frappe of a blended metric have been some of the worst things to happen to criticism and critical thinking. There's so much signal lost in the noise of review scores. There's so much subjectivity and nuance lost just jumping to the thumbs up/thumbs down without hearing the reasoning behind any individual review, that it becomes increasingly harder to fathom why people put any weight behind the metrics that scale that data loss up to such incredible volume. (ETA: It gets worse too, because then you get companies gaming these meta-metrics and reviewers that feel uncomfortable giving scores below certain thresholds for fear of their jobs or other punishments, so even the truthfulness of individual reviews starts to be questioned how much they are just doing for "the algorithm".)