These are almost always just random people with typical (or at best, idiosyncratic) opinions, they aren’t highly-educated professionals who saw the role of the critic as something worthy in itself. YouTuber critics are basically just product reviewers. It’s not the same thing as the critic culture of yesteryear.
The latter. I don’t think any YouTube movie reviewer is remotely close to someone like Gore Vidal’s level of erudition. (And even he had plenty of faults.) Maybe Every Frame a Painting is the closest thing?
But not every "professional" critic was worth paying any amount of time to eiter. Just because your brother worked at the paper you got to be "the critic" back then.
I think that what people demand of criticism has evolved, and the supply has evolved with it.
Scholarly critics were much more interested in understanding how a work fits into the cultural canvas, and how it innovates and advances culture. Identifying patterns and making sense of distinct movements that would otherwise look like chaotic cultural dynamics. They also cared about criticism as a legitimate literary form and a craft to master in itself.
I believe that's what you are missing, that makes a lot of sense, that is an important social service, but I'm not sure we associate that with the purpose of a critic anymore. It has become much more pragmatic now, it's much more about guiding a purchase decision, as well as, sometimes more importantly, to entertain with humour and snark. That is quite different.
I believe that actually most readers always read criticism mostly to make purchasing decisions and had to reluctantly go through the rest of the "erudition". The more cynically entertaining critics were always the most popular too. We've cut the cruft and made it more like what the audience wants, which is a shame, but we have to be realistic.
That being said, YouTube is much deeper than it seems and looks very different to different users, for better or worse the recommendation engine is amazing. Seek out good critics and you will find more, there are strong niche communities of full-time critics like you describe that have been doing it for over a decade and are masters of their craft. They might not be in the newspapers everyone reads, but there are more of them, and even if they might not sound as scholarly, I believe they are more substantive and they are just better at it than those hiding behind flowery language.
I think you’re right that criticism as an exercise in well-written insight is harder to find. However, criticism as a filter is abundant. Those YouTubers might not be producing erudition, but as long as they have watched a ton of content and decided what the good stuff is, and as long as their tastes seem to align to mine, then their opinion is still very useful.
What is this “great use?” It seems like the purpose of critics isn’t to entertain people with an opinion about a record, but instead bolster the feelings of the insecure who aren’t sure what to think and need someone else pointing the way to an ideal of what cool is.
Critics feed ideas to those that attend parties so those can have an opinion to express when they feel no confidence in their own taste. Critics are Cyrano de Bergerac.
Like always, one needs to engage with a critic over time to get an idea of how they view the world and to be able to project it onto your own preferences. YouTube greatly facilitates this.
And every decent reviewer makes an effort to lay out the facts in front of you and try to be somewhat objective, or at least account for diverse tastes, for a portion of the criticism, so you can reach your own conclusions.
There are tons of excellent full-time critics that know what they are doing. They might not sound as scholarly as in the past, but that was mostly a stylistic choice and I'm skeptical about there being much more substance behind the flowery language.
Yeah this highlights an idea that seems increasingly rare today: you should go see a movie/piece of art because it's important to see and not merely because it aligns with your preferences. A good critic can make you understand that.
Sure, they’re still useful as information for consumers. But that’s what makes them product reviewers and not critics. Someone like John Simon saw himself as upholding artistic standards in theatre, writing, and other art forms, not writing product reviews for consumers.
> Those YouTubers might not be producing erudition, but as long as they have watched a ton of content and decided what the good stuff is, and as long as their tastes seem to align to mine, then their opinion is still very useful.
In most of the (big) YouTuber movies and TV shows critics, I have a very hard time knowing what is their taste and what is a piece of art.
I think in the future the role of a critic will be more to the technical aspect of the piece, and how it fits in their lore than something related to the taste specifically.
In my case, I cannot watch most of the modern TV shows 'cause most of them lack good cinematography, character development, and sound which are important aspects for me in terms of immersion and engagement. Most of the shows today with CGI, only closed camera takes, and lack of external shooting look like sitcoms of the 90s.
That's I think most of the Youtube Critics channels lack, that kind of nuance around those technical aspects.
If that were the case, then we would pick surgeons by randomly grabbing a person off the street, and not use surgeons that have been trained for years in their profession.
But then you might say, "Medicine is a science, and art isn't. All art is relative and no one's opinion is better than another."
With that, I don't agree. I think someone who has spent more time studying a topic probably, not always, but probably has more insightful things to say about it. A Shakespeare scholar probably has more insights about Hamlet than a guy who read it in high school twenty years ago. In short, I reject the idea that expertise doesn't exist in evaluating the arts.
You didn't get it. The surgeon is by necessity a random person before he learns his trade. Just like a reviewer. You're not born into it. Expertise in evaluating art is usually self-made expertise (the academic expertise in this field has zero value), meaning they're all "random people".
Not formal education but definitely needs a lot of training on listening critically to music to ponder about how it relates to the overall body of works.
That's much more needed in any non-mainstream analysis/critique of music. How do you expect someone who never listened, for example, to noise music to be able to judge the quality of a new artist in that field/genre?
And how do you do with education? And what education? How exactly do you educate yourself in preparation to be a critic? I firmly believe that's nonsense and nothing but gatekeeping.
