Social Media Ruined Art Appreciation

Hospitality should be part of criticism

Photo by Nsey Benajah on Unsplash

Helpfully, my phone alerted me to the fact that I've spent 42% less time on it this week. It's hard to say whether or not it's happy about that.

Nonetheless, it seems that my commitment to absconding from social media with what's left of my sanity is paying early dividends.

With this new reflective distance, I've been thinking a lot about the nature of art reception lately. Yes this probably includes what we would call "criticism," but it's not limited to that professional activity. I'm thinking more broadly about how human beings allow themselves to experience art these days. Yes this includes the review-writers, but it also cascades all the way down to casual conversations that conclude with "that was awesome" or "that sucked."

In particular, I can't help but wonder what rattling sabers for two decades inside what Richard Seymour calls "The Twittering Machine" has done to our capacity to simply appreciate art.

Boilerplate Disclaimer for the “Yea, but…” Crowd

Before I flesh this out, let me begin by making it clear that I don't think all artworks are created equal. Some are better than others, some are more important than others. Also, I think it's silly to expect everyone to love the art you love in the way you love it. I certainly harbor no such delusions.

With That Out of the Way

But there is some distance between not finding a movie or a book engaging and sticking a cigarette in its mouth as you line it up for the firing squad.

It seems to me that the default way people talk about art now resembles the way we've learned to talk about everything online, with an alternative form of "toxic positivity:" the state of being poisonously positive that one's opinion or belief is unimpeachable.

I suppose this isn't some epiphany I've suddenly had after logging off for six days. Still, not seeing all the "takes" flitter across my screens has been noticeably refreshing.

I learned long ago to avoid the Daily Beast's asinine celebrity-gossip (packaged in a "News and Analysis" Trojan Horse) for movie, TV, or book reviews. I had found some comfort and, at times, genuine pleasure in some fan-oriented Facebook groups, however. I followed several dedicated to various subgenres of monster movies and other special interests. But, like everything else in the twittering machines, the incentive structure eventually wins out. The posts of pure appreciation have at late been outnumbered by "I can't believe they would dare to remake classic film x." I suppose it's unsurprising, though no less disappointing that fan groups collecting lovers of the classic Universal Monsters would be filled with bossy, unimaginative relics.

One of the last straws on this camel’s back was a few weeks ago when, on my own Facebook page, I dared suggest that the new Exorcist: Believer film was, though not by any means great, not the unwatchable turd that conformist-minded critics would have you believe. I was immediately told that the film "ignored everything that made the original great" or some such nonsense.

And I use the term "nonsense" on purpose. That kind of approach to art reception is, I'm sorry to say, infantile and narcissistic. It is, if you wish, a shitty take. And it's structurally no different than the stale opinions of the old farts on the Universal Monsters Fanboy Page.

These evaluations are based on the same assumptions that drive conformist clickbait movie reviews:

“I have a Platonic ideal, a criteria that I expect everything to conform to. And when a work of art doesn’t, I will make poopy-face.”

This self-important dismissiveness is not one conducive to art appreciation. It’s closer to sports fandom, the closest pre-online discourse model to the kind normalized by social media. "I hate a thing because it falls outside the reach of my narrow imagination."

I met the actor Richard Mazur at Steel City Con earlier this year and had the chance to chat with him for a few minutes and he put the problem in the clearest terms I've heard: "People can't just accept a movie on its own terms. They only want to complain that they would have done it differently."

What Mazur was describing tracks with my complaint about the small imaginations of movie-watchers. But it also points to a bigger problem: a critical lack of basic human hospitality.

I'm not exactly sure why we should treat art differently than we treat people. (Perhaps there is a good reason that you can explain to me in the comments). Almost no one I meet lives exactly as I would if I were them. Yet I try to accept them as they are, their flaws along with everything else about them. The differences make things more interesting, which is a cliché by now. Still, we somehow cannot experience art like this.

Of course, the problem is that we can't really do it with each other either, can we? This is what the online world of social media has brought us to, which was, if I remember correctly, my original point.

Towards a Criticism of Hospitality

I don't expect every movie to be good and I don't expect every book to be worth my time. But what I'm striving to do when I experience a work is to bring a spirit of hospitable empathy to it. Yes, I very well might wish that Rian Johnson had been far more mature and reflective in Glass Onion. And yes I was frustrated with the movie for its intellectual smugness. But evaluation should not be my first action and it certainly shouldn't be the only thing I bring from an experience. Otherwise, I might as well resign myself to making "everything wrong with..." YouTube videos and quote-tweeting the artists for the clicks.

I wish that people that prized their opinions so highly would understand how much they sound like the college boy who smirks through Casablanca and proudly announces it to be "boring," as if that was an of brave honesty and not a glaring self-indictment of his own lack of imagination, taste, and human generosity.

Every critique is based on a criteria. And it is hubris to assume the artist was working from the same Platonic ideal as the smug, self-satisfied consumer of their art.

Let me have it in the comments, I guess.