The kind of strange, wonky criticism Rosenberg wrote about
[READER]( Last week, Atlantic contributing writer Yair Rosenberg [published a convoluted newsletter]( ostensibly about critics projecting their tastes onto the public. The world of criticism is vast and ungainly. I have enough trouble keeping up with all the criticism just about Chicago musicâand that's even with the dwindling resources available to people covering local scenesâto consider the character of criticism about other modes of expression and in other locales. And yet, Rosenberg is certain of a trend in criticism in which writers misinterpret their personal taste (and the tastes of people in their respective bubbles) as those held by the general public. To assert this claim, he quoted and hyperlinked to a handful of cherry-picked examples of pieces that mostly show his vision of criticism is lopsided and shallow. Criticism is a moving target in Rosenberg's newsletter. He consistently separates the act of criticism from journalism, which he defines as something he does. It appears that the major difference between "criticism" and "journalism" in Rosenberg's view is that he doesn't consider writing about movies or pop culture or art as important as the lofty subjects at the heart of his own work. Which could explain why he contradicts himself while attempting to evaluate the work of contemporary criticism. Several of the pieces he rests his argument on are standard news stories that just happen to be about celebrities or film instead politics or conspiracy theories or anything that meets Rosenberg's criteria of importance. One hyperlink he employed to demonstrate a pattern of "critics" citing Twitter to (mis)inform their understanding of how the public perceives a pop culture phenomenon led me to [a Yahoo! Finance news story](. It's a brief report about one of the newest things to go viral on Twitter: an interview in which Jon Stewart asserts that the Harry Potter series employs anti-Semitic tropes. I don't quite understand why Rosenberg thought this validates his point since it's a pretty cut-and-dry news story that merely describes a celebrity's criticism of a popular entertainment property and how it went viral on Twitter; there's no assertion that Stewart's opinion is that of anyone else's but his own, nor that it's an opinion shared by the writer of the article, Maanya Sachdeva. It follows all the rules of news reporting anyone who attends journalism schools know, right down to the tip of the inverted pyramid. I do think there's something interesting to be said about Sachdeva's report on viral Twitter content, but not for the reasons Rosenberg suggestsâafter all, it is a story about something that went viral on Twitter, and not an individual evaluation of a piece of pop culture based on that piece of viral content. Yahoo! Finance republished the story from The Independent, the UK publication that actually employs Sachdeva, a culture reporter [who lives and works in India](. If Rosenberg wasn't so busy attempting to retrofit Sachdeva's story to his backasswards argument, he might have seen a far more interesting phenomenon. And I am curious; when a writer in India is responsible for a pop-culture story published in two different continents as journalism jobs here remain scarce, what does that say about the state of culture criticism and reporting? Rosenberg offers up something of a definition of criticism towards the end of his newsletter: "The role of a reviewer is not merely to follow and explain the crowd, but to evaluate art regardless of public opinion and hold it to the highest standard." Again, here I have trouble not just because this definition contradicts the inclusion of some of the material Rosenberg has selectively focused on for his newsletter, but because his understanding of criticism is suffocatingly small. Criticism is not just about evaluating art to a specific standard, but bringing readers into the writer's thought process and showing them what a painting or play says about the world right now. And there are a lot of tools critics can employ that go beyond the tried-and-true review formula: there are trend stories, brief news bulletins, profiles, non-traditional essays, business stories, and deep-tissue investigations. Rosenberg holds Roger Ebert up as a virtuous figure for his ability to rate movies "as a conventional moviegoer," but I admire Ebert for more than his rating system. I often think of Ebert's [1995 story about Hoop Dreams getting snubbed by the Oscars]( it's a reported piece, a critique of awards, a brief lesson on documentaries, and a diaristic essay about watching unfamiliar movies. It's definitely a work of journalism and criticism, and yet it feels unbound by the basic structures of both. The criticism I am drawn to forces me to think about more than the film or album, but larger forces at play; the institutional structures that helped an artist reach a level that I became aware of them, or the commercial machinery that prioritizes vacuous fluff over the unknown. That's missing from Rosenberg's newsletter. Too often he conflates "consumption" with "fandom," relying on metrics to make claims about the public's opinion of popular propertiesâwhich, again, he suggests critics actually do too often. Rosenberg uses a handful of examples to show the disconnect between critics and the public, including Red Notice, a recent action-comedy film he hasn't seen and strangely suggests you haven't read much about it. (I read film coverage sporadically, but even so before coming across Rosenberg's newsletter I read a bunch about Red Notice. I'm sure Rosenberg would suggest I am not a good example since I'm a "critic," so... whatever.) As Rosenberg suggests, Red Notice is a "hit"âit went number one in 93 countries!âand [yet his main source for the information supporting]( his notion that the public might love this movie openly questions the movie's popularity. [Polygon's story mentions]( that critics (yes, critics!) have pointed out that Netflix's metrics have no independent verification, and that Red Notice made less than $200,000 during its international theatrical run. Red Notice is Netflix's most expensive production, allegedly costing the streaming service [$200 million](. But I didn't need to know how much money the service spent on the movie to feel like it was getting shoved down my throat; before it took over my home screen, I felt bombarded by ads. Sure, Netflix users streamed a total 277.9 million hours of Red Notice the first two weeks it was available, but I'm incredulous that those numbers are a meaningful marker of the public's adoration. At the end of July 2021, [Netflix had 209 million subscribers](. How many of those users started Red Notice, which slogs through its hour and 56-minute runtime? How many finished it? How many liked it? How many people just put it on in the background as a slight distraction to get them through another cold, dark day during the pandemic and thought nothing of it as soon as the end credits appeared? (That is my experience, anyway.) Streaming consumption habits of people around the world fascinate me; the more I consider it, the more it feels impossible to make any sort of qualitative statement about the public's reception of a piece of heavily promoted streaming media. The more I thought about Rosenberg's newsletter, the more I thought of a far better, more concise piece about the state of criticism: ["All of It Matters"]( by Sam Sanders. Much of Rosenberg's piece is colored, and undermined, by the fact that he considers criticism beneath himâit is "soft news," if he considers it "news." But criticism is an act of journalism meant to inform the general public as much as any other news story, and Sanders points out the separation between "hard news" and "soft news" has historically kept marginalized voices out of the newsmaking process; it also leaves the public less informed. In the end, the thing that matters is how writers and news organizations approach these beats; if a political story is worthless crap, it's still worthless crap. I think Rosenberg would have benefitted from experiencing the kind of substantial criticism I find myself delighted with, and overwhelmed by, and excited to read. To be fair, I also sometimes see the kind of strange, wonky criticism Rosenberg wrote about. I mean, it's in his own newsletter. Or, borrow a meme well-known by people who spend entirely too much time on Twitter: his story resembled [Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man](. Sincerely,
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