Critique and the Power of Personal Expression: Embracing Subjectivity in Art and Criticism

Growing up there was always some form of entertainment playing at my house: Music, movies, and television, my home was rarely a silent place; whether this was because we were a two-child household, eighteen months apart, in a family of four in central California in the early nineties, or if my parents, and my mom in particular, nurtured an appreciation for the arts, I may never know. My sister and I grew up with an aesthetic appreciation for music, movies, and television—although I never enjoyed television nearly as much as music and movies. A childhood like this makes for a terrible pop culture critic. I was exposed to so many artistic tastes that I like most of what I listen to and watch. I have a good ear for crap, but I won’t waste my time on it, or focusing on the good tends to cancel out the bad.

A critic's audience more or less demands that the critic’s general purview be cynical. Perhaps the benefit is that if this critic does review something favorably it’s noteworthy, something worth paying attention to. Critics are full of themselves; for a person to build a career by telling anyone what to like requires a degree of arrogance. Eventually, that degree of authority will go to the head, and many critics sooner or later start taking themselves too seriously. Art is personal, and it’s subjective; who’s to say why a person reacts the way they do in response to a painting, a song, or a movie, it’s subconscious and requires deliberate thought to understand. Creating art is a process and an expression and reviewing that process for the intrigue of others is bizarre.

Besides, people have biases, most people don’t consciously know when or why a bias developed; we merely suffer our biases. For example, I can’t understand it, but I get the impression, based on the fact that he’s still making movies, that Adam DeVine is a fairly popular actor. DeVine’s presence in anything, really, immediately ruins that thing. I can’t stand him. Moreover, when I hear that John Hamburg is directing another movie, I get frustrated because I know that said movie could have been great if anyone else directed it. Hamburg is one of the most overrated directors in cinema history, but his films tend to be well received and I don’t know why. I have a bias, evidently (or just better taste than sixty percent of America, it’s difficult to weigh). Art is too subjective to rely on a critic to critique.

Our moods alone affect us dramatically and, because many Americans rarely heed their moods and our mood's responsibility for our behaviors and reactions, we can be affected by a song or a movie in different ways at different times because we feel differently. It’s such a weird, arbitrary process and funny that films, music, food, and books all rely on some form of peremptory critique for us to acknowledge it and for it to move up in the ranks of what matters. The algorithms that more or less contribute to the information we see in front of us have been based on our concept of critical review. This means that most of us don’t, effectively, like what we like, but rather we like what we think we’re supposed to like or what we’re told to like.

I’m writing this essay today because I will publish essays and reviews expressing my thoughts and feelings about music, movies, books, television, food, travel, and other things, I’m not sharing them expressly as a critique, even if I use phrases like, “you should check this out,” or “…must-[see]-[visit]-[try] etc.” I’m sharing my thoughts because I think it’s important—more important than ever—to highlight our reasons or intentions for doing something, it’s important to apply critical thought and to express ourselves consciously. For one reason, the older I get the less I share my reasons or thoughts about things and people tend to come up with reasons of their own, even if the reasons don’t belong to them, if you don’t offer yours. Critical thought in the form of pop culture expression is good practice and habit-forming. I write about these things because I enjoy writing, and I enjoy experiencing life and sharing those experiences, it is not at all because I want to influence a perspective, and I think that is an important distinction to make and to share.