The American Scene: Critics and the Masses: Ron Charles’ essay in the Washington Post today, “Harry Potter and the Death of Reading.”... He rattles off the usual depressing stats about how half of adults won’t pick up a single novel this year, and bemoans the state of fiction-reading in high school....
[T]here’s also something rather narcissistic and pushy about the whole profession of criticism and the its continual insistence that the world’s aesthetics are headed straight for the dumpster, or at least Wal-Mart. Charles ends with a gripe about the lack of sales for his personal favorite book—-a book that I’ve never heard of and, from his description, looks like something that pretty obviously won’t have much commercial appeal. And is anyone really surprised that various critics and their professional organizations are upset about the declining number of book review pages? There’s something great about the critical mindset—-the drive to share one’s enthusiasms with the world, to gift others with the joys of reading, watching, listening, helping others to expand their range of experience and the ways in which they can appreciate all of man’s wondrous creations. But too often, it descends into petty, narrow taste-mongering, a refusal to accept the validity of any aesthetic that doesn’t meet one’s own highly developed criteria—complaining that the world doesn’t recognize the greatness of my favorite book, my favorite song, my favorite movie.
It becomes more about the critic than the medium he’s supposedly writing about.
But highly developed critical standards just aren't useful for everyone, and while our age of increased leisure time and economic success has spread elite tastes to the middle class--witness our growing foodie culture--there always have been and always will be a gap between those whose professional business it is to analyze and rate art and entertainment and the rest of the world who simply experience it as leisure. The study Charles cites was, after all, released in the 70s. So this is nothing new...
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