In Defense of Critics

And the Need to Keep the Conversation Going

Of all my antithetical qualities (and there are many), the most glaring one is probably that I’m a critic who hates receiving criticism. But then again, who genuinely enjoys receiving criticism? “I enjoy receiving criticism,” is something you say in a job interview. “Oh, I just love feedback,” you tell the interviewer, perspiration gleaning above your lip. “I appreciate being told what I need to improve upon and coming up with a plan to improve upon it. I’m very open to criticism.” In reality, you, me, the interviewer, our neighbors, our loved ones - none of us actually desire to receive criticism, I refuse to believe it. We do often desire to know what people think of us, even if those thoughts are more unsavory. We want to be the types of people that are receptive to hard truths - to tough love. To words that are meant to build us up in the long run, even if they knock us down in the short term. We want to be open to change. We at least want to appear that way.

In high school English class, the worst day of the week for me was the day we conducted peer review. We would swap our printed essays - 12-point Times New Roman font, double-spaced - and scratch them up with red ink. I remember peering at my classmates reading my pages, growing increasingly nauseous as the page grew redder - annotations lacerating the margins like a sharp knife to skin. I’m not the type of person who writes drafts. I write in slow, painstaking increments, choosing each word and constructing each sentence like I’m conducting brain surgery. The end result is more or less the essay that gets submitted for evaluation or, nowadays, published to the internet, save a few minor tweaks to word choice and syntax. When it came time for my peers to explain their feedback to me, my brain turned to TV static.

In ballet class, I had this quite incessant tick when dancing while stressed - my right shoulder would hike up to my ear. During my turns, my leaps, my kicks - all of it. Over time, I became so aware of the habit that my instructor would just say “Shoulder” and I knew that I was doing it again. It happened so frequently that I swear my right trapezius muscle grew more swollen than my left. Evening out my shoulders was my personal Everest - my own, special boulder to heave up the mountain. As was focusing on my hip rotation and extension height and a whole host of items that I was made quite aware of through constant reminders from my instructor and glances in the mirror.

I’ve always been quite resistant to criticism for that reason - it’s not that I don’t want to improve, it’s just that I dumbly think I already know everything I need to improve upon. Becoming aware of these new deficiencies is shocking, like submerging my head in ice. I already have so much I’m focused on fixing, adding more items to the list feels like kicking me while I’m down. Like putting rocks in my backpack while I’m already pushing my special boulder up the mountain.

Then again, not everything needs to be taken so seriously. But then, what should be taken seriously? Who is qualified to give criticism? And who is vulnerable to critique?

Everyone has personal relationships in which criticism is somewhat expected. My parents, my siblings, my boyfriend, my grandparents - these are among the relationships I hold dearest to me, and thus, where I often expect the most feedback. These are the people that I feel most comfortable bringing a personal challenge to and asking “What do you think?” or “Am I really off base?” They are also the people I expect to call me out if I am inadvertently behaving in some way that is harming them. “Hey, I didn’t really like the way you said this to me” I expect them to tell me, at which point we discuss the dilemma, exchange and accept apologies, and move on with as little friction as we can.

Critique takes another form when considering how one can and should critique art, as well as artists, who are often inexplicably attached to the work they produce, both in terms of how they perceive themselves and are perceived by the public. I’ve often assumed that any artists with notoriety - who make themselves subject to fame and perception by the masses - are necessarily subject to public criticism. I’ve always thought, a bit cruelly, that ascending to celebrity status requires the scale to be evened out by becoming fodder for discourse, volleyed back and forth across pop culture publications and social media. For that reason, I’ve rarely taken pity on popular singers, actors, and internet personalities who are making a living off their creative work. Or I’ve at least tried to quiet that pity internally. It comes with the job, as they say. Becoming more visible means becoming more vulnerable.

When Charli XCX released her fifth studio album Crash in March 2022, she celebrated the occasion by taking a paparazzi walk in a baby pink crop top with the words “They don’t build statues of critics” written across it in fine red calligraphy. Charli’s career has been an interesting one to trace over the last decade or so. She broke into the zeitgeist with radio hits like “Fancy” and “Boom Clap” in the early 2010s. Her following became increasingly devoted and niche as she inched towards a more experimental, hyperpop sound, particularly across Pop 2 (2017) and Charli (2019). With this experimentation naturally came a decline in radio playability and fewer commercial accolades, spurring anxieties that she’s explored musically on Brat tracks like “Rewind” and “I think about it all the time.” While I have a feeling she’ll be rightfully sweeping the Grammys next year for Brat (2024), the paparazzi walk in the wake of Crash’s release made an effective statement about the types of work that are rewarded for artistic “merit.” Mainstream art is often less adroit, by necessity, to appease the masses. How does one even measure artistic merit, particularly in our current popular media landscape? A landscape in which conventional genres and forms are constantly being bent, blurred, and born again. In which “awards” are more often a means of positioning - of satiating the larger public and larger stakeholders. For such reasons, many fans have opted to disregard the validity of awards like Grammys altogether.

Fast forward to 2024, and you can imagine the irony of Katy Perry sharing a photo of her wearing the same “They don’t build statues of critics” shirt while in the midst of what many are considering an artistic backstep of epic proportions. “WOMAN’S WORLD,” the lead single off her newest album 143, was met with almost universally poor reception, with many calling it a shallow, white feminist, “Fight Song”-esque anthem, with lyrics belonging on a TJ Maxx graphic tee and a message that’s about ten years too late to the party. The irony is that Perry is an artist who pushed boundaries upon her debut, acting out the character of a candy-sweet Christian girl gone bad, interweaving her songs with a kind of wild, hedonistic spirit that simultaneously captivated the masses and remained uniquely her own. Her 2010 album Teenage Dream is tied with Michael Jackson’s Bad for most No. 1 singles. She cemented herself as a game-changing pop legend and then backslid dramatically, opting for a lead single that’s as sonically and lyrically inventive as a fast food chain jingle.

Charli XCX and Katy Perry in their respective “They don’t build statues of critics” T-shirts

Perry’s response (via T-shirt) reminds me of an interview with Saltburn (2023) director Emerald Fennell for Indiewire last year. Saltburn was met with mixed reviews critically - largely absent from last year’s awards cycle - but became quite the cultural spectacle on social media. On her thoughts about criticism, Fennell says:

“Yes, of course, there are moments where I think, ‘Oh, I hope you die’…‘Oh cool, you didn’t like it? Great. I hope you f*cking die … and your whole family … slowly.’ …‘Oh, you just profoundly didn’t understand what I was trying to do. Whatever.’ You’re always gonna have to try not to be a pissy little bitch about it, even when you really want to be. Especially if you get the sense occasionally [that] there’s a whiff of misogyny.”

Emerald Fennell with her 2021 Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Promising Young Woman

It’s quite an aggressive response - an honest one too, I guess. Engaging in any creative work requires one to try to translate the abstract impulses and concepts in their mind into a form that is discernible for others - or at the very least, capable of being perceived by others. We aren’t able to download our minds, and allow others to upload them - so we create. And creating requires sharing some kind of response to the world around you. A response that begins as a thought or a feeling that you believe is, in some way, particular to you. Taking your experiences - and the thoughts that have been elicited from your experiences - and composing some kind of reflection. Which in turn compels others to reflect.

The process of creating, in that sense, is like a river - an ever-flowing cycle of thinking, reflecting, and envisioning, passed between artists and thinkers like rocks knocking together at the bed of a stream. But, of course, there is natural variation in our experiences and reflections, spurring others to critique - to express their particular thoughts or feelings about a piece of work. This, too, I’d argue, is a natural and important part of an artist’s process - for work without criticism creates a dam in the river - a clot in the bloodstream. If the cycle of creation is to continue, creators must naturally answer the call to create based on their thoughts and feelings, including thoughts and feelings elicited by a piece of work they didn’t enjoy.

This is, of course, still an uncomfortable process. The work that we create is like a baby - an entity that sparks and develops solely inside ourselves - that is a part of us - until it eventually exits our mind and body as its own separate thing, which others can engage with apart from us. We are not our work, but our work was once a part of us, in a sense, even when it sits and stands firmly on its own. It is a reflection of us, but not a transcription.

Humans have quite a ceaseless desire to be understood, which in turn, evokes feelings of belonging. When people don’t understand our work, it can feel like a threat (albeit, a very low-level threat) to our nervous system. But no one - not even the people we feel closest to in this world - will understand us fully. Art can get us closer, but it will never be enough. There will inevitably be people who don’t understand our craft - it’s not always a symptom of poor work (though, debatable in the cases of “WOMAN’S WORLD” and Saltburn) but a symptom (a reminder, even) of being a human.

I’m on a perpetual journey to become more comfortable with criticism - in the personal and artistic sense. My work is shared with a decently sized readership on the internet, making it a potential subject for discourse that’s out of my hands. The threat of being misunderstood looms, but the threat of growing stagnant as an artist looms larger. For that reason, I’d rather make myself uncomfortable - make myself vulnerable to good- and bad-faith critique, knowing that I’m ultimately the captain of my craft.

They might not build as many statues of critics as they do of artists, but many artists are “critics” in their own, more abstract right - pushing back on dominant notions of what “good” art is, bending genre and form to their whim. An artist without a critic is like day without night, or rather, dawn without dusk. Each are necessary to balance the other out, blending and blurring in some cases. Keeping the cycle of creativity flowing, continuing a neverending conversation.

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