Opinion: Criticism is conversation, not an assault on your identity, SonnyBunch writes
Fans arrive for a costume contest before a screening of"Avengers: Endgame" at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, Calif., last month. By Sonny Bunch Sonny Bunch Bio Follow May 8 at 1:41 PM It’s open season on critics.
Artist and fanboy angst fused together in writer/director Alex Ross Perry’s essay* for Indiewire, in which he lamented being picked on as a kid for enjoying the dörkenkultur and suggested that anyone who believes comic book movies have become too dominant is little more than “a square, flat-topped father drinking a beer in a barca lounger while the game is on, telling his son to quit playing guitar/painting/writing/reading comic books/daydreaming and get a real job.
Still, what’s striking is the way that criticism of criticism is often couched in terms of identity. This is what Perry is getting at when he spends so much of his essay establishing his nerd bona fides, by recounting the comic books he liked and the gym classes he hated and the lockers he was shoved into. His nerd-dom isn’t just a collection of preferences — it’s an identity; it’s who he is.
Critics have responded by suggesting that criticism and art go hand in hand — indeed, that criticism itself is an art form, appropriating the identity argument for themselves. The best version of this idea is probably found in A.O. Scott’s book “Better Living Through Criticism,” in which the New York Times film critic suggests that criticism “is an art form in its own right” and that “a critic [is] anyone who is, at a given moment, practicing criticism.
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