
The Art of the Pan - signor_bosco
https://www.theringer.com/pop-culture/2019/1/10/18176366/bad-reviews-jeff-weiss-a-o-scott-greta-van-fleet-post-malone-bohemian-rhapsody
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komali2
>“The secret of the bad review is that you can get a lot of pleasure out of
it,” A.O. Scott tells me, chatting via phone in late December. “It is a kind
of a dopamine rush. First of all, editors—especially editors at The New York
Times—love it. They love bad reviews. And they’re fun to do because they give
you access to a lot of writerly tools that are fun to use. You can be funny.
You can be clever. What you’re doing is, you’re demonstrating your superiority
to a thing that you’re writing about.”

This is my least favorite thing about negative reviews - writers start to
really "feel their oats." It almost always goes _way_ too far. Reminds me of
the occasions back in my creative writing program when a fellow student would
start using "he/she proceeded to..." a bit too liberally in their writing.
Calm down and tell the story.

It's also getting a rise from your readers on the misfortune of someone else
(in the case of a movie, many hundreds of people), which, as A.O. Scott says,
can go straight to the writer's head.

>But “you can get too hooked on that feeling” of writing slam after slam, he
warns. “They’re definitely more fun. But positive reviews—where you can make a
case for something that you really feel enthusiastic about, and still write as
well as you can—that’s a lot harder, and a lot more valuable.”

Agree all the way through, here. Saying "it's bad" is easy, and then you go
ahead and play with all the turns of phrase you've been thinking about in the
shower every morning. It just feels, I dunno, unnecessary, or maybe even a
moment of weakness - as if the new programmer on our team did one bad PR too
many and I really just let off on them. Makes me feel good, maybe? But in
doing so I've lifted my restraint, abandoned my values, let the floodgates out
to the detriment of someone else.

I guess critics will exist no matter what, but it really doesn't jive with my
philosophy of "be good to eachother."

~~~
adjkant
> I guess critics will exist no matter what, but it really doesn't jive with
> my philosophy of "be good to eachother."

I think it can be both - a finer art not mentioned here is the strong negative
review that acknowledges what the creator was attempting and maybe includes a
silver lining. Showing humanity while criticizing is maybe even more
important.

Sometimes negative aspects come from deeper macro level societal problems
though, manifesting at the individual level of the creator who then puts them
into a piece of mass media thus fueling the macro problem. Criticism focusing
on this is incredibly important and IMO is in exact support of "be good to
eachother".

Again though, that doesn't mean hang the creator out to try and show your own
writing chops doing it. It means show your ability to deeply understand the
context and the piece by drilling down into the nuance of what made it bad,
and maybe even adding some suggestions of how to improve it for future pieces
of the same type or genre or even the exact piece.

