Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth

by A.O. Scott

The New York Times film critic shows why we need criticism now more than ever

Few could explain, let alone seek out, a career in criticism. Yet what A.O. Scott shows in Better Living Through Criticism is that we are, in fact, all critics: because critical thinking informs almost every aspect of artistic creation, of civil action, of interpersonal life. With penetrating insight and warm humor, Scott shows that while individual critics--himself included--can make mistakes and find flaws where they shouldn't, criticism as a discipline is one of the noblest, most creative, and urgent activities of modern existence.

Using his own film criticism as a starting point--everything from his infamous dismissal of the international blockbuster The Avengers to his intense affection for Pixar's animated Ratatouille--Scott expands outward, easily guiding readers through the complexities of Rilke and Shelley, the origins of Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones, the power of Marina Abramovich and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.' Drawing on the long tradition of criticism from Aristotle to Susan Sontag, Scott shows that real criticism was and always will be the breath of fresh air that allows true creativity to thrive. "The time for criticism is always now," Scott explains, "because the imperative to think clearly, to insist on the necessary balance of reason and passion, never goes away."

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Art, Criticism, Film, Essays, Writing

304 pages, Paperback

First published February 9, 2016

About the author

A. O. Scott joined The New York Times as a film critic in January 2000. Previously, Mr. Scott was a Sunday book reviewer for Newsday and a frequent contributor to Slate, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications. He has served on the editorial staffs of Lingua Franca and The New York Review of Books. In addition to his film-reviewing duties, Mr. Scott often writes for the Times Magazine and the Book Review. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this for some hours until I toppled sideways slowly and crumpled to the floor, where they found me still breathing, but only just. I write this from a private room, tubes going into various parts. They say I will make a full recovery. They say it was a good thing I didn’t make it past page 215. There’s a woman in the next room been there for three weeks now, she read the whole thing. She hasn't said a word yet. Her family say they will be consulting their lawyers.

But I don’t think A O Scott can be prosecuted. He meant well. And what would the charge be? For me it would be : severe frustration. His book asks a series of really great questions :

How do we know something is good?
What’s the best way to be wrong?
Who needs critics nowadays anyhow? Hasn’t the Tomatometer taken over?
Is art drowning in itself?

And others too. He then smothers and crushes the life out of these interesting things by sucking all the oxygen from every dry paragraph. Here is an example :

But even as we drift into a state of antiscientific mock scepticism, we also worship idols of vulgar pseudoscientific empiricism. The opiate of the half-enlightened masses in the digital era is information., data, “the math” – impersonal, unarguable, but nonetheless mysterious numbers that promise to turn our messiest and most intractable problems into sudoku puzzles. The burgeoning industries of TED-talk idea-flogging pop-science publishing, and slick “explanatory” journalism offers the steady seduction of cool, counterintuitive insights and frictionless solutions.

And blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

There was a moment when this brainy white noise suddenly focussed and sharpened and the book came alive, this was when he started discussing the specific examples of the movies Bringing Up Baby and The Searchers, and how critics had dissed them to begin with, and how their reps had risen – I was interested in that – but it didn’t last long, and the generalities, the high-minded abstractions, the yellow clouds of poison gas cultural rambling and fumbling and concaternating blathered me into my life-threatening coma.

I may join in a class action suit with the woman in the next room. We won’t be the only victims.



This guy got to page 109.

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading Better Living Through Criticism gave me exactly the same cramped and unpleasant feeling that I got from reading Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion: I wanted serious inquiry and instead felt pummeled and bullied into a corner by poorly argued dogma.

At times Scott begins his argument about the uses of criticism with a false axiomatic principle--usually a belief that I don't ascribe to, but that Scott says I do ("everyone knows that critics are failed artists, and let me tell you why you're wrong to think so").

And sometimes he does the opposite, taking his own beliefs as universally accepted, because he thinks they're true, and not even bothering to tell me why I should also believe the same way.

So I as a reader end up feeling pushed around, not convinced.

I also resented the folksy/apologetic tone Scott adopts. As I read, I kept thinking: "if you want me to think about your ideas seriously then you need to take your ideas seriously, yourself." A critic who tries to sound dumb and average not only demeans himself but also demeans me as a reader.

The decision to write this book as a faux Socratic dialogue also failed, for me, because the questions asked in the dialogue are somewhat dopy and disingenuous. They reminded me of the questions you might find in a marketing brochure that are there to lead customers to buy your product and reject competing products.

Hence the dreaded 2 star review from me (2 stars being my least favorite read)--there is not enough meaty argument here even to hate this book to a one-star level; there is just enough to bore and to annoy.

[Stephanie Sun · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am predisposed to like any book that references Teju Cole's Open City, Philip Larkin, All About Eve, and the snark vs. smarm debate with intelligence and insight, but the delight of this book is that Scott takes both his voice and argument to places that I didn't expect. Even while retreading, a gleefulness animates his prose and rhetoric and makes his general enterprise feel novel.

I laughed out loud dozens of times, sometimes out of surprise (the self-interviews are hilarious), sometimes out of recognition. I gained new perspectives on things that I thought I'd covered in full several times over (form vs. content, for instance). Scott's passionate digressions on Marina Abramovic's The Artist is Present and Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" were especially charming, and could, with light editing, stand alone as art and poetry reviews in The New York Review of Books.

Scott early on grounds the discussion in classical aesthetics philosophy as well as Kant's work on aesthetics, bringing up the tension between the objective judgments and subjective feelings that make up our responses to art. This had me thinking about how similar art is, in this way, to love and sex long before Scott tackles this connection himself.

In addition to reporting the theory that many people who went to see The Artist is Present fell in love with Abramovic, Scott teases out a beguiling and ironic interpretation from my least favorite Larkin poem, "Talking in Bed." Scott believes that the narrator of "Talking in Bed" finds it difficult to make pillow talk because he is suppressing his natural critical response to what he has just experienced:

"Art is not sex carried out by other means, but it seems to be subject to similar anxieties and taboos...

The origin of criticism lies in an innocent, heartfelt kind of question, one that is far from simple and that carries enormous risk: Did you feel that? Was it good for you? Tell the truth."

I think the book doesn't quite fit the title, and I'd be very surprised if the title did not come before the manuscript. Better Living Through Criticism is less instructive and evangelizing in its wisdoms than the title would suggest. In fact, it is often inquisitively self-erasing.

Finally, the book might have carried more emotional punch if I self-identified as a critic. I am instead the happy amateur, a path that, among other things, keeps me off of Twitter, where this book was apparently born.

Samuel Jackson, we know you can't take it, but can you dish it out? Better living awaits you if you do...

[Kimberly Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much of this book has resonated with me, of which I have highlighted so much. This is one I want to purchase and own for reference, as I’m sure I will return to it often!

[Sketchbook · Rating 1 out of 5]

Better Living Through Criticism and a Strawberry Enema. ~~ NYTs AO Scott is the worst writer and most unbearable film critic squirting his juvenile "thoughts" on the market today. The ultimate in b.s. and boring pretention. Sniff his title ! Why not Better Homes & Gardens ? In sum, he is unreadable.

[Allen Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://www.themaineedge.com/style/for...

The nature of the critic is to unpack the underpinnings of artistic endeavor. Love them or hate them, critics perform a vital service in the creative continuum, deconstructing movies/albums/books/plays down to their requisite pieces and casting the bones in an effort to call forth larger cultural themes and ideas.

Some choose to do this by way of unrelenting pessimism, focusing on the negative aspects of a piece of work in order to exert a kind of creative enforcement. Others choose to shine a light on the positive, juxtaposing the good against the outline of the shadow being cast.

Either way, A.O. Scott makes clear the inherent value of criticism in his new book “Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth”. Scott, longtime film critic for The New York Times, offers up his thoughts about the nature and necessity of criticism and the vital role it plays in shaping the cultural landscape.

(It should be noted that the inspiration for this book seems to have been a brief Twitter beef with actor Samuel L. Jackson, who didn’t care for Scott’s reception of “The Avengers” and implied that the critic should perhaps seek out a new line of work.)

In many ways, “Better Living Through Criticism” comes off as a defense of the job. While Scott himself is a professional critic – a gig that is gradually being supplanted by the ever-growing hive mind of the Internet – the book is about A.O. Scott’s ideas, yes, but it is also a celebration of all manner of criticism. Scott isn’t necessarily a fan of the blogosphere or online aggregation, but he also recognizes that the art of critical writing must evolve to better fit the online age in which we live.

As you might expect, there are more than a few highbrow references peppering the proceedings – Immanuel Kant, Rainer Maria Rilke and Susan Sontag feature prominently – but Scott doesn’t restrict himself to elitist expression; he gives a lot of love to movies like Howard Hawks’s screwball masterpiece “Bringing Up Baby” and Pixar’s delightful “Ratatouille.” He’s someone who sees value in work up and down the creative cultural spectrum. Through it all, his constant touchstone is the partnership he perceives between artist and critic.

A noteworthy device that Scott uses throughout is a sort of imaginary dialogue with himself. Four times, he interrupts the proceedings with a question-and-answer session in which he is both interviewer and interviewee, continuing the almost-tradition of the self-interview. Scott cites David Foster Wallace’s “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men” as his inspiration, but it vibes more old-fashioned, like the one-man Q&As that gained prominence in the ’50s and ’60s. Its presence is a touch baffling, but it does help introduce more of Scott’s own identity into the proceedings - something that is somewhat lacking in the rest of the book.

Scott’s many ideas about the value of criticism basically boil down to the notion that it is a key component to the creative process. Generally, art is intended to evoke some sort of reaction from an audience; criticism serves as an “official” take, if you will, quantifying the impact made by an artistic work.

It warrants mentioning that Scott’s choices regarding depth of exploration vary from concept to concept; sometimes, he spends more time with an idea than might seem necessary, while other times, he skims the surface of a thought that could have merited a more layered take. However, even the lightest touch offers a truthful and measured perspective.

There’s something wonderfully meta about reviewing a book about the value of reviewing. “Better Living Through Criticism” offers some broad and engaging insights into the art and craft of creative commentary. However you might view the merits of criticism, there’s no denying that this book is engaging, well-wrought and thought-provoking.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

A.O. Scott is kind of a big deal. He's a film critic for the New York Times and has been at it long enough to be a recognizable name in the business. And so I assumed something along the lines of Stephen King's On Writing, a practical guide of sorts framed by personal anecdotes and a lifetime of experience. Instead it feels like a Philosophy of Criticism 101 class.

Freed from the shackles of having to review Tyler Perry's latest, or yet another Jurassic movie, he throws on the smoking jacket and settles in to mine the likes of Rilke, Shaw, Kant, Sontag and Baudelaire to ask the question, is criticism necessary?

And the answer for this and almost every other question posed in the book is yes and no. It's not looking for answers but instead content to excavate past philosophies. And here it veers back and forth from being incredibly smart and erudite, to sounding like the worst dinner guest imaginable - rambling in self important obliviousness.

I'm no philosophy buff so it was exciting to listen to Scott drop some knowledge, pulled from history's great thinkers, and consider the philosophy of art and criticism. He's my kind of wordy and it's just approachable enough that I could follow along, but tends to overstay its welcome. If nothing else I suppose he did just manage to write a mandatory textbook for the Film Studies Class he currently teaches.

[Fredrik deBoer · Rating 2 out of 5]

As someone who is not quite a critic, I’m going to invoke my prerogative to write something that’s not quite a review, inspired by A.O. Scott’s recent book Better Living Through Criticism. And maybe I can suss out my issue with A.O. Scott.

Scott’s brief book is, I guess, a long conversation between Scott and himself about what it all means. That self-interviewing quality is literalized only in a few brief sections, though these have captured the majority of the attention of reviews of the book when it was released. But the rest of the text shares that same spirit of inner dialogue, a constant back-and-forth between competing ideas. At its best, it’s a useful instrument, a way for Scott to try and give fair time to ideas that he clearly has little patience for. But too often, it exemplifies the thing that frustrates me as a reader of his reviews: not the fierce inner battles of real dialectic, but resignation towards the idea that one’s own commitments come pre-rejected.

Scott’s style, in his reviews for The New York Times, is to oscillate between being futsy and proud, to make the kind of grand pronouncements on the state of cinema that his forum makes possible, while always letting you know that he is well aware of how uncool and out of touch he is. He’s like a guy who wears socks and sandals but constantly keeps pointing out to everyone he meets that socks and sandals is hopelessly bad style. Scott seems to feel that there’s something ridiculous about his station, and to a degree I admire that. He bakes an understanding of the absurdities of prestige in the culture industries into his reviews in a way that’s frequently funny. But he seems never to know how to resolve that tension, or how to enact his obviously grand critical ambitions with his relentlessly-expressed understanding that he is an old fart. If you’re into this, you’re sure to get a lot of enjoyment out of the 265 pages of Better Living. If you’re not… less.

Laura Miller describes Scott’s dialectical quality as “maddeningly hard to map,” thanks to Scott’s conviction that “the ideal condition of a culture is to be in a state of churn or flux, in which the push in one direction… meets robust challenge on behalf of the opposite.” That’s the flattering version. A less charitable way to put it is that Scott is always trying to have it both ways at once. He wants to be both the scolding old uncle of American letters, willing to stick his neck out and oppose the populism of the times, while always, always declaring surrender before the battle is even waged. When he reviews CGI-heavy blockbusters, there’s often a moment where he acknowledges in advance that such films are critic-proof, that he’s on the wrong side of history, that he’s powerless against the economic forces that drive the industry…. Some people like this kind of lampshade hanging. I myself tend to find it frustrating: review the thing or don’t. Stand against artistic populism or don’t. Say something.

That’s what I hated so much about Scott’s 2014 essay, absurdly titled “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture“: it represents itself as a provocation while it sold its audience exactly what it wanted to hear. Its purported defense of adulthood is so half-assed and uncommitted that I doubt anyone could get worked up about it at all. It’s entirely pro forma; it exists to be inevitably discarded just paragraphs later. The argument that Scott goes on to make draws an unconvincing and not-entirely-coherent connection between the decline of television patriarchs, the frontier spirit of American literature, and the rise of Beyonce feminism.

That argument — a kind of unfocused ramble around the various signposts of cultural feminism and a claim that the rise of the female slacker speaks to some deeper equality — could hardly be less challenging to the assumed readership of Scott’s essay. It’s hundreds of words of “women are on the rise, y’all,” represented as if this narrative is somehow unpopular, even while so much of his evidence is symbolic and thus unthreatening to the institutions of patriarchy. I could imagine a genuinely challenging essay that points out that a society can be filled with people shouting “yas queen” and also with sexism, that Beyonce standing in front of a giant sign reading “FEMINISM” at an award show simply tightens the stranglehold that affluent women have over a political movement that was once defined by the masses rising from below. Or I can imagine a more straightforward essay that simply points out that Don Draper is on the decline and Leslie Knope is on the rise. Instead we get an essay that purports to be an act of old man complaining but which has no courage to actually go through with the complaint. This is what bothers me: cloaking an argument in the language of provocation only to declare preemptive surrender on the parts that are ostensibly challenging, leaving you with nothing but a guy telling people what they want to hear but acting kind of wounded about it. Scott does it all the time.

There are many fine moments in Better Living that I enjoyed, and Scott’s perceptive, measured discussion of the practice of criticism is often lovely. Reading yet another critic wax poetic about going through stacks of Pauline Kael would make my eyes roll back into my head, but Scott is judiciously restrained in his appreciation for the old masters, a move that so often amounts to transitive self-flattery. I do have more patience for some of the pushback critics receive than he does. I don’t think people mind negative criticism so much as dismissive criticism, of which there is far too much currently. I also find that he needs to think more clearly about the fact that, if criticism is itself an art form as his book convincingly argues, it is therefore more likely, not less, that some criticism is motivated by personal resentments. What could be more central to the artist’s temperament, after all, than jealously rejecting another artist’s work? If critics are artists too, then we should expect them to be filled with the kind of petty envy and anger at other people getting attention that are so common to the profession. Still, Scott navigates these ideas intelligently, and I appreciate the effort, even as others have dinged him for defending a practice that they don’t feel needs defending. I in fact do think criticism needs defending, in part because I think attacks on contemporary criticism are often correct.

There is certainly something to be said for a critic who is able to hold contrasting ideas in his mind at once, and usually I’m the one crying out for more negative capability in the world. I just want less declaring surrender; it’s a classic case of forfeiting because you are afraid to lose. The sections in which he literally dialogues with himself merely make explicit that which has been implicit in his work for some time, and not generally to his benefit.

Provocation is good. So is restraint. Inner dialogue can be fun; so can forceful polemic. What each of them requires, though, is genuine commitment to the work at hand, a willingness to actually stake a claim that you don’t immediately announce as obsolete. I found some of that in Better Living Through Criticism, but it was always undercut by the sense in which Scott is unwilling to simply look old and out of touch if that’s where his argument leaves him. If you’re going to be uncool, then make the most of it. What else is the function of legacy publications like The New York Times? Scott is too possessive of his right to let everybody else know that he knows he’s unhip; it makes him seem dishonest in a way that I don’t think he deserves. I would prefer he just advance one public face and accept however it may be interpreted.

It’s one of the first things you hear about him, after all: his professional name is A.O. Scott, but everybody knows him as Tony.

[Jana Light · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here I am, writing a critical review about a book about criticism. And someone could (if so inclined and so bored) write a critical review about my critical review about a book about criticism. This Sisyphean effort to find the final word on any piece of human ingenuity or creativity is why Scott writes this book in the first place -- criticism, he argues, is the second-born twin of our inherent human condition, entering the world mere minutes after the first-born of the creative act. It is both art and not-art. Critical analysis is as fallible as any other human endeavor, of course, but it provides a deeper look into and understanding of not only art but the quality of our lives, as well. Good criticism is even more important in the information age as a helpmate in parsing of the wheat from the glut of informational or artistically-produced chaff.

I enjoyed this book and the celebration of the act of criticism, even if it didn't contain anything particularly enlightening. (The title promises a bit more than Scott delivers.) Happily, Scott doesn't shy away from admitting paradoxes, nor does he try to manufacture solutions to ultimately unanswerable questions. He emphasizes -- and even celebrates -- the dichotomy between a critic's entrenchment in the subjectivity of artistic enjoyment (passions) and the objectivity of analysis (reason), as well as the critic's delicate balancing act of individual and universal values. The Socratic, somewhat-schizophrenic passages bring to life the self-doubt and uncertainty that Scott claims plagues any good critic, the fact that a critic may have more of a mind divided (or mind complicated) on a piece of art than we would suspect from their writings. Writing good criticism is one of the most basic and yet difficult intellectual activities we can engage in, and Scott provides a nice case for why we should embrace it in our own lives.

[Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two weeks ago, I read until page 117. I haven't picked up the book since, and I haven't been tempted to. I'm left with two main impressions: first, there are occasional moments of real insight. Some come at the end of meandering paragraphs, and they feel like asides. A very few feel like deliberate arguments Scott makes. Here's a good one:

It may seem as if I am enclosing art (along with criticism) in a familiar corral of self-reference, an airless theoretical space in which poets write to, about, and through other poets, movies make obsessive allusion to other movies, and every song is the echo of another song. But what I am really trying to do is zero in on the existential paradox of art itself, which springs out of an urge to master and add something to reality and finds itself immediately confronted with obstacles that are also its available tools.

I like that a lot. (And yet this "existential paradox of art itself" is something Scott has been dancing around for the last 20 pages. Apparently he needs to be confined to essay form to write concisely.)

Second - possibly meant as an extension of the idea of art in conversation with itself - here is the critic in conversation with himself. I found the first exchange incredibly gimmicky, but the second exchange almost works. That's the point where I began to think that, in this book on criticism, Scott is really criticizing himself:

Q: ...It takes no effort at all to peg you, my friend, as a Gen-X baby boomer in the throes of middle age... You grew up in the backwash of the baby boom, with educated parents who subscribed to the New Yorker and bought the well-reviewed novels of the day...

Punk rock saved you from feeling late for everything, and then a little after that hip-hop freed you from the nagging sense that you inhabited a stale, small world of provincial whiteness... Your life is college radio, literary snobbery, a conspiracy of the high and the low against the middlebrow; HBO and Adult Swim and the Criterion Collection; graphic novels and alt-country and Seinfeld - the narcissism of small differences elevated to an aesthetic principle.

A: Well, when you put it that way... I can't say you're wrong. [Paragraphs later, Q calls A out for abstraction, deservedly so. Part of me wishes this book had been written entirely in Q's tone. At least it's direct.] [If you have to call yourself out for abstraction, maybe rethink those few pages?]

Q: Frankly it sounds very superficial to me, like a kind of tourism, with some of the same ethical problems. You hop around the world grazing on things other people have made, using their hard realities for your amusement. And you seem blind to the privilege that underwrites your adventures - the available leisure, the disposable income, the educational advantages, the assumption that you are entitled to all this cool stuff without really working for it. You're talking about taking ownership of - or at least borrowing - experiences that don't belong to you and making them your own. Isn't what you call empathy really a kind of imperialism?

A: Well, it's not as if I'm stealing anything. I take it that all these works - books, films, songs, and so on - are acts of communication, and that I have as much right as anyone to listen to what they're saying.

Q: But don't you ever think that maybe they weren't meant for you?

A: What are you suggesting? That I should have stayed within the boundaries of my identity? Sought out pleasures closer to home? ...Who's to say where the boundaries are? Who gets to draw them? And I suspect that if it was the other way around, if I was describing a paleface pantheon of dudes with daddy issues and girl trouble as my major sources of selfhood, you would accuse me of being too narrow, too provincial and exclusive, unable to appreciate difference, confined to my own cultural comfort zone.

Q: Of course, I would. And I'd be right either way.

A: I just can't win then.

Q: Poor you.

And that's where I lost interest. Oh, I read on - but once the book shifted (at least in my head!) from "what does the NY Times movie critic think about criticism as an idea?" to "memoir of a white dude working in media", I got bored.

That sounds harsh, I know. It is harsh. But with that exchange, the book goes from a potentially intriguing beast to a giant cliche. Something which becomes less specific and interesting. Something which throws up its hands instead of digging in and examining difficult ideas.

(That I'm dropping this and moving on to more Chalet School books is hilarious to me.)

[Jason Pettus · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book of philosophical essays by New York Times movie critic AO Scott was hugely disappointing, and not even worth a full write-up at my main arts center's blog. For while I'm a big fan of Scott's insightful essays for the newspaper, and was hoping that in this book he was going to go into more detail about how he goes about the business of actually writing them, it's instead one of those books where he traipses across the entire human history of critical thought and then says, "Look at this famous project from the past. Doesn't it ask some interesting questions? Now look at this famous project from the past. Doesn't it ask some interesting questions?" That's true, they do indeed ask interesting questions; but in the meanwhile, Scott barely shares even one opinion of his own about the craft and art of being a good critic, turning this more into a survey about the history of people being critical and sort of proving that he has nothing of original interest to actually say about it. Based on the book's title and Scott's populist history, I thought this was going to be more of a practical guide on how to be a better critic of the arts yourself, but it's certainly not that, so stay far away if you were expecting something similar yourself.

[Shannakathleene · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really a 2.5. A survey of the philosophy of criticism. But I was left cold deciphering what he thinks about his profession. Criticism is thinking? Criticism is art? Is it? Yes? No? So many???? So abstract. To be fair, I don't mind abstraction, but I felt the argument (ironically enough) was weak. Hedge, duck, etc.

[Alissa Wilkinson]

YES!!

[Dewey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the pre-release of this book with great interest; given the nature of this blog. An absolution, designed to simultaneously prove his "bona fides" to criticize shitty movies like the Avengers as corporate schlock, while also demonstrating that criticism is a worthy and worthwhile endeavor, Scott's book largely succeeds. [Author's Note:This review is nerdy]

AO, you shall find no argument here with this critic (seeking better living). Scott's philosophical treatise on the nature and necessity of criticism asks the reader, "is [criticism] a parasitic growth on the mighty trunk of human creativity" or instead the defense of art itself.

Early in the book, Scott discusses Kant's paradigm for judgement which includes three levels---1) the agreeable; 2) the enjoyable; and 3) the good.

Many tired or lazy consumers contend that taste is subjective and relative---and perhaps by definition with 1) and 2) that is the case.

Buttttttttttttt, the goal of art should be number 3. Scott's contention is that while the interpretation of the "good" in art can reflect the times in which the art itself is created; good music, movies, literature is intrinsic and irreducible. That is to say, The Avengers can be 1 and 2, but never 3. My grandparents might not find Kendrick Lemar's To Pimp A Butterfly to be 1 or 2; but it is definitively 3 irrespective of their preference; an artistic statement that builds upon decades (centuries) of previous art while trying to successfully say something new and contextualizes the human condition e.g. struggle to find meaning.

This book is essentially the philosophy of criticism, and thus is not for most people, but for anyone with an interest in the philosophy of criticism, understanding what drives criticism, or who wants to develop a firmer leg from which to argue their criticisms, this book is an important and relatively light read.


Find more of reviews at: timeisrhythm.wix.com/home

[Stephanie · Rating 1 out of 5]

To be fair I didn't finish it so I'm not sure how I'm allowed to rate it. But it's due back at the library (today!) and quite frankly I haven't picked it up for close to a week. I was going along okay with it. It made me think a bit and I liked that. But I did do that "hmmm, how many pages have I got to go?" thing a little too often. I kept going onto the other book I've got going and I kept "meaning" to finish up A.O.'s tome. Soon. Yeah right.

It's not that I didn't find the ideas interesting. Some of them anyway. But sometimes I felt a meandering going on and I couldn't always find the CENTER of what was going on. And well, he just didn't seem to be citing many interesting examples of things. Here's how you (smartly) tear apart this movie...here's what you should really be looking for in this book, etc. The whole thing (or I should say, the 2/3rds that I've read) left me feeling kind of wan.

[Alex Greenberger · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of my favorite things about A.O. Scott's film reviews is that they're so unpretentious. You can read his thoughts on some obscure Romanian film, and it'll still make sense, whether you even knew the Romanian New Wave was a thing before you started the review or not. This book is sadly not quite that. There's a lot of long-winded explanations of Plato, Henry James, Immanuel Kant, and other tired literary sources. This is a very short book (just 270 pages), but, because of Scott's detours, it's kind of a slog sometimes. He makes a lot of good points about criticism—for example, that it's okay (and even optimal, in a way) for writers to be wrong. Props to Scott for not writing yet another how-to guide for criticism, but I wish he had gone about doing it in a more accessible way.

[CM · Rating 3 out of 5]

(2.5 stars, rounded-up)

...Or it could be called "Everything I know about criticism from my study, research, and my experience as a critic". This alternative title suggests a wider scope, and the book does feel more wide-ranging and disjointed than its format suggests, covering the history (both intellectual and personal), the present, philosophy, and significance but sometimes it's not clear what the central idea of a rambling chapter is. Several brief chapters are structured as a dialogue between Scott and a opinionated reader to give a personal touch to the subject. With extensive references to Rilke, Kant, Abramovic, Teju Cole, and Ratatouille, it's relatively easy to enjoy his discussion.

The writing is exactly what you can expect from the chief critic of the New York Times, journalistic stylish, erudite with key references, but, now without the word limit of an article, sometimes labored. You will see I have noted more than a few brilliant quotes below. However, this book can be a textbook case for under-editing: the loose, almost jumpy structure, particularly in the 2nd half of the book; his underdeveloped arguments that read like declaration than earned positions, from a writer constantly reminding you that his voice is not meant to be authoritative; pages flying by without making a point, or repeating an old one, which can get annoying when the point is a platitude.

A missed opportunity, it is still a worthwhile reading for those into criticism or reviews.
-------------------------------------------------------
Quotes:

"We can congratulate ourselves for living in an era in which narrow, authoritarian canons of taste have been overthrown in favour of eclecticism and diversity. Or[...]we can bemoan the loss of clear and self evident standards, which have been muddied by relativism and cheap pleasure."

"The narcissism of small differences elevated to an aesthetic principle."

"Both sides made the mistake of supposing that the canon was an age-old , immutable register of worldly wisdom rather than a perpetually renegotiated, frequently improvised list ,a barometer of fluctuating tastes, ramified prejudices,and unexamined habits."

"How are you supposed to choose ,in the face of this abundance? What will guide your choices? There are really only two options : marketers,whose job is to sell -that is to spin ,to hype ,to *lie*- and critics, whose job is to tell the truth."

" To call something "pretentious" means you are worried that you didn't understand it. To dis-miss it as "silly" discloses your suspicion that you have no sense of humor. To resort to the supremely empty word "compelling' :Whom does the thing compel? To do what? Why is this praiseworthy?—is to confess that you have nothing to say. "

"a criticism of deep and esoteric knowledge, which is to say a criticism of tunnel vision and myopia"

[on temptation faced by all critics]"to stand either as a tribune of the common mind—expositor of the democratic public, mouthpiece of the vox populi—or as its stubborn and principled antagonist, sidestepping the whims of the crowd in favor of eternal standards or her own idiosyncrasies."

[Mina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why do we still need critics?

That is the question. Well, because we will need to try something new, and we won't know where to start.

We live with relativism, pluralism, Yelp, IMDb and you, darling Goodreads. Some will make the argument that critics are obsolete since no one can know what will actually work for you. They say some other things, too. Here's the answer I got:

If you want more of what you like, the argument holds: you can choose yourself, try recommendation engines, ask your friends, look at the marketing, look at the ratings and read critic reviews. (Especially when I'm taking someone with me to see a movie)

If you want something different, you can't Google 'something different' and you can't ask your friends - you likely got them the same place you got yourself. Recommendation engines work with similarities, marketers are motivated by the product at hand, not by the client at hand and enough has already been said about rating sites. However, a critic studied that genre, and what he or she is motivated by is being right, recognizing quality.

And what if you disagree? Find another critic to guide you.

And what if they completely trash the movie that rocked your world...? (Strange Magic, for me)

This is how this story starts. A.O. Scott wrote a less-than-flattering review of the Avengers.

A couple of interesting ideas:
1) The three aspects of appreciating something (Kant) the purely individual state of pleasure he calls “the agreeable,”... “the beautiful.” Beauty satisfies an impulse higher than mere sensuous appetite. And beyond the beautiful lies “the good,” which inspires admiration and respect.

2) The critic can bury and uncover a piece of work. That, beyond his or her reviewing function, is an increasingly pertinent necessity in this deluge of sources of entertainment. Most people can't market themselves efficiently or their backers don't find them marketable, but they can be found.

3) The critic ought to be trusted not to be a marketer. His choices might still be unpopular, but they reflect a human preference, whereas a marketer will be guided by a need to sell it regardless of preference.

4) Anyone who is afraid of ever being wrong will never say anything, but a critic can be wrong correctly. He thought, he compared, he analyzed, he came to a conclusion. A good critic is not lazy, a serious critic will not throw words at a book or a movie for the pleasure of it. (Below, there's a link to a notorious Giraldi review which has been decried as excessively mean. Maybe it is, but it's nowhere near House or Cox levels)

5) There is a discussion on meaning, content and representative art, further identifyiable by a discussion on music and mathematics. I'm pretty sure he was drunk, so some might enjoy it, but it's utter nonsense. Joking aside, do read it, it's a brain teaser, it's fun - but only when I reached home did I realize I'd been continuously arguing at the book for half an hour. Loudly.

Discussed here:
A.O. Scott's review of The Avengers
Kant's The Critique of Judgement
Rainer Maria Rilke's Archaic Bust of Apollo (in New Poems)
Henry James's The American
The Louvre and Mona Lisa
Philip Larkin
Teju Cole's Open City
William Giraldi's review of Alix Ohlin's ‘Inside’ and ‘Signs and Wonders’
John Keats's death and Percy Bysshe Shelley's retort
Herman Melville
Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism
Matthew Arnold's The Function of Criticism at the Present Time
Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation
Addison DeWitt in All About Eve and Anton Ego in Ratatouille
Walter Pater's review of the Mona Lisa

Finally, A.O. Scott's criticism pieces are the strongest, the ones he employs to showcase his opinions. Scott has a gift for mixing story and examination, one which likely suits him well in his job as a critic. His arguments, however, are his weaker point. Such narration appears an unfamiliar instrument and the result is clumsy in comparison. He flows easily from Rilke to the Louvre to the Mona Lisa, commenting history, anecdotes, cultural impact and meaning. The plodding beginning and contemplations are saved by the ludic of the interspersed dialogues. Spooked bystanders might have noticed a striding student arguing at her reader throughout a 30-minute walk in defense of music as a representative art and mathematics as something which you misrepresent utterly. Well, A-hah! Even Wilde agrees that music is a representative art (the Complete Letters, p.460)! I was in such a hurry to let you know how wrong you are, I didn't read the reasoning. Oh, well, I'm sure he knew what he was talking about.

Why do we still need critics?

That is the question (I hate the question) Excuse me? I'm still reading. Keep 'em coming.

[Kate Laws · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love criticism. Honestly I picked this book up because I'm so bone-deep tired of the “let people like things” crowd of uncritical art/entertainment consumers. A robust defense of thoughtful criticism is what I was looking for and Better Living Through Criticism provided just that. Scott enumerated the many important functions of art criticism, went through some of the history of the form and talked about public opinion of criticism over the years, and he made a solid case that criticism is an art itself. I am disappointed that I chose to do this one as an audio book because there were so many ideas that I could have used more time to chew on before they passed me by, so I feel like I didn't quite internalize everything the way I could have had I read a physical copy. Overall this was a great read and a subject that I intend to read more about. Art without context is only half the story. Bless the critics, even when they get it wrong.

“You are guaranteed to be wrong — to insult good taste, to antagonize public opinion, the judgment of history, or your own uneasy conscience. And there is no beautiful synthesis, no mode or method of criticism that can resolve these contradictions. They cannot be logically reconciled, any more than a safe, sensible middle path can be charted between them. Still less is it possible to declare a decisive allegiance, to cast one’s lot with the party of form or the party of content, the armies of tradition or the rebel forces of modernity, the clique of skeptics or the company of enthusiasts. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom and the wisest criticism will be that which tacks toward the extremes, risking hyperbole and outrageousness in its pursuit of truth. It should go without saying that every good critic, every interesting critic, will have committed some of the crimes enumerated above, whether brazenly or unwittingly. A great critic will be guilty of all of them.”

[Gabriela Ventura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Um conjunto de ensaios simpático que parte de uma premissa inusitada: o autor teve a ideia de escrevê-lo a partir do backlash que sofreu quando publicou sua resenha do primeiro Vingadores no New York Times. Nick Fury himself - ou Samuel L Jackson, eu quis dar uma romanceada na anedota - colocou uma legião de fãs contra o cara.

Talvez eu estivesse esperando uma perspectiva mais acadêmica e tenha acabado me decepcionando um pouco com o tom geral dos textos mas, ainda assim, achei um exercício válido de defender a crítica como modo de pensamento (e de conversa com obras de arte) diante de um cenário cultural que exalta o anti-intelectualismo.

[Jodi]

I quit this one because he mentioned like 24 male artists in the first chapters and never mentioned any women. I don't trust his critical thinking if he cannot see his own bias.

[B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and fun discussion of questions that I didn't even know I had: What is art? How do you know when it's good? What is taste? Do artists need critics? Are critics artists?
Really fun and interesting.

[Matt Zar-Lieberman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Critics have it rough right now. Those at major old media institutions are seeing their employers scrambling for revenue, aggregators are diluting their individual influence, and artists of all mediums continue to skewer them, especially when they get lambasted by the critical establishment. As a blogger with a Lilliputian viewer count (especially when you take away the Russian referral spambots) who generally just doesn't review books I dislike, I'm largely shielded from/oblivious to such problems. That said, I'm still interested in A.O. Scott's Better Living Through Criticism, which details what "criticism" actually means and the purpose and societal value of such a thing.

Scott is currently the chief film critic at The New York Times and one of the most-respected and blurbed critics in film today. His book covers major topics of criticism: is there an objective standard for quality or is enjoyment subjective to individual preferences, what makes someone a "good" critic, should everything be subject to intellectual incrustation, and so on. Scott examines all of these with an abundance of support from essays, works, and thought experiments. It should be noted that Better Living Through Criticism is concerned with criticism as a whole, not film criticism specifically. Scott has a literature degree from Harvard and started out at The New York Review of Books practicing the honorable craft of book reviewing. He's clearly a very well-read guy. Besides drawing examples from Ratatouille in his concluding chapter, Scott's sources rely less on Pauline Kael and her ilk and more on thinkers such as Kant and Aristophanes. Many of his cultural examples are from plays, poems, and literature. There are of course a few mentions of films and an interesting fictional dialogue (one of several throughout the book) of what initially got Scott interested in film criticism specifically) but this is by no means a book about film criticism specifically. If you're only interested in learning what it's like to review movies and Scott's criteria for what makes a good movie and so on you will not really find that here.

I found Scott's strongest argument on the role and value of the critic to be the critic serving as a guide to what works are worth a busy person's time. When I was younger I had tons of time but non-tons of money, and as an adult these factors have been (relatively) reversed. In both cases, professional reviewers ranging from Electronic Gaming Monthly as a kid to The Quietus (and yes, Pitchfork too) as an adult were vital to identifying what cultural works I might like to consume with my allowance/hard-earned money. The best reviewers are able to articulate what makes a book/album/movie/video game etc. unique, what the consumer can expect, and the quality of such works, and Scott additionally notes how some of his favorite reviews imbued the reader with a vicarious sense of actually experiencing the content through prose. Critics never/rarely serve as the be-all and end-all to such decisions, but I consult them on a regular basis to see whether they can turn me onto some new media I'll probably like, and given the fact that sites like Rotten Tomatoes draw tons of traffic and Pitchfork effectively launched bands like the Arcade Fire through laudatory reviews I'm not alone in this sentiment. That is the same function I'm trying to serve on this ad-less blog (not driving tons of sales for authors or web traffic but that whole "I'm going to read a ton of books so you don't have to/because my subway commute is terribly long and let you know about the really good ones and some stuff I don't like as much").

Getting back to that aforementioned function on the non-ad-supported blog, Better Living Through Criticism is a heady read and will likely appear in quite a few college syllabuses in the future. This is both a testament to the fact that the book is thoughtful and well-articulated and also that it's a a pretty heady tome. The book is not an easy read, and I had some flashbacks to college lit classes and there were some parts that I struggled with. However, if you are a huge fan of dense and deep discussions on the nature of criticism and have a huge pre-existing knowledge of and interest in art of all kinds then there is a lot to like in Better Living Through Criticism. It's well-written and smartly constructed that will likely leave you with more respect for critics (thanks A.O.).

6.5 / 10

[Taylor P · Rating 3 out of 5]

Erudite and meticulous, Better Living Through Criticism would make an excellent textbook for the opening weeks of an undergraduate course on the history of criticism. Scott's work succeeds as a primer on the views on the art and science of criticism expounded by Pope and Arnold and Wordsworth that is eventually drawn forward to the present day and the role the critic can play in the age of digital media. But where it falters is as a general interest nonfiction text in its own right. It's dry, it's unapproachable, it smacks of elitism (which it both defends and derides). Its best moments from the perspective of reaching a broad audience are the witty interludes where Scott interviews himself, but those are too few and far between. I wanted more of Scott himself, more of his personal views, more of his own struggles with the challenges of criticism, more of his actual criticism itself; I wanted to see the practice, not just the theory. The thought here is unimpeachable if a bit superficial, and the prose is sophisticated and polished. It's just that Scott does better with shorter forms and didn't seem to settle on exactly what kind of book he wanted to write before writing it. Simply put, Better Living is more than adequate but could have been stronger with a bit more personality and a different, less academic structure.

[Haley · Rating 2 out of 5]

For all his commentary on how essential argument is to criticism, the point of each essay is not communicated well (this could be a byproduct of the abstraction of most of the essays or a byproduct of the author's inherent unwillingness to make definitive statements). This became especially obvious to me in the dialogue chapters (in which the author imagines a dialogue with a critical version of himself) where he would make an assertion (e.g., that his theory of taste is "grounded in spontaneous encounters, in the erotic bliss that erupts... when beauty catches you unawares") that I had not gleaned at all from his discussion in the preceding chapter. The dialogues themselves were similarly not great at communicating his argument, as he rarely actually answered the questions he posed at himself.

There were a lot of interesting thoughts and worthwhile tidbits in this work ("Eye of the Beholder" was my favorite chapter by far), they just weren't compiled into anything that managed to convey or support a point. Despite the title (and sub-title), this book is just a collection of essays on criticism (and never really relates criticism to your life in a substantive way), and I would really only recommend it to someone who was already reading about criticism (and even then I'm sure there are books on the subject more worth your time).

[Heidi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Of two minds

If the author's only aim was to illuminate the duality inherent in critique he has almost succeeded by books end. However, the premise laid for the book was to discuss why critics are vital to art. I was exceptionally excited to read this book and quite disappointed. The organization of paragraphs within each chapter of focus was poor & though a large and varied amount of scholarly examples were provided they were rarely in service of the hypothesis laid out by the author. Often he would contradict himself before a sentence was half through. I found very little information within the pages of examples, historical reference, and conjecture. *Super sad face.

[Jason · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really more like 1.5 stars, rounded up for its very rare pearls of insight and its even rarer longish passages that feel lucid, sustained, interesting. The book, on the whole, is aggressively unfocused, uncharacteristically pretentious, irritatingly self-contradictory, smug but insecure, etc. It feels like an editor never once laid a pair of eyes on it. Scott had been my favorite film critic for more than a decade, whose taste and sensibility most closely aligned with my own. This book makes clear he should stick to the short form, as he seems entirely incapable, over hundreds of pages, of structuring an argument or supporting a thesis.

[Carol · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't make sense of this, certainly not by starting at the beginning! Too many big words for the sake of big words. I have an excellent vocabulary, but sometimes a simpler word will get the meaning across. Because I hate to give up on a book (and my husband had purchased it for me as a gift) I determined to get the gist of it. I started in the middle, and worked my way around, back to the beginning; so now have done with it! Not my cup of tea!

[Stephen · Rating 1 out of 5]

For the man who mistook Marie Antoinette for the French Revolution I give him the pitchfork and then the axe.

[Andrea Lakly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much of this book is unfocused and largely directed by professional fears buried in Scott's ego. He's at his best in the dialogues, where he introduces enough humor to seem less angry and fearful.