Saturday, July 13, 2024

Enlightened critics and the unwashed masses

I continue to be a big fan of The Free Press because it is invariably interesting, tolerant of diverse political and cultural opinion, and intolerant of intolerance. Inevitably I sometimes disagree, but only sometimes. Kat Rosenfield has joined them as a regular "columnist on all things culture." Her first column in that capacity, "How Culture Got Stupid," published today:
Critics used to agree that the purpose of art is to explore what is true, not to model what is proper. But...a new breed of cultural commentator was gestating—one for whom art was understood less as a truth-seeking enterprise than as a vehicle for moral instruction. ....

The tenets of the new cultural criticism were as follows:
  • All art was political, and always had been;
  • Art with the wrong politics caused harm, especially to women and people of color;
  • And all art must be analyzed through the lens of power, privilege, and progressive pieties.
The whole thing had a frantically performative vibe that bordered on the evangelical—with journalists in the role of the youth pastor palpably desperate to keep you going to church. ....

It was inevitable that a rift would emerge between the enlightened critics and the unwashed masses who, as it turned out, would rather not undergo mandatory DEI training every time they turn on the television. The one-two punches of #MeToo followed by BLM only widened it.

Today, there’s often a hilarious mismatch between how normie audiences receive a film versus how it’s reviewed by critics, one most clearly visible on the site Rotten Tomatoes. ....

...[T]he media’s offense-takers enjoy outsize influence—so Hollywood, always a liberal bastion, has increasingly come to see itself as a moral authority. The result is observable, as the complex and provocative stories of the peak TV era have given way to something far more pious, dutiful, dull, and shrill. ....

But don’t we want more? To laugh, to cry, to be thrilled, to be moved? To lose ourselves in a story we haven’t heard before, and to decide for ourselves what it means? .... Despite the strange takeover of my chosen field by tasteless scolds, I still believe there’s nothing better than a story that grabs you and won’t let go. So from now on, you’ll find me writing about all things culture regularly here at The Free Press. ....

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated. I will gladly approve any comment that responds directly and politely to what has been posted.