Form: Short Note

SECRETS TO SUCCESS

Don’t publish reviews unless:

1 – Laudatory for those few books that fulfill the author’s promise to the reader – meaning ‘buy this’

2 – Purely descriptive and without judgement or opinion or recommendation, and if necessary for forgiveness.

3 – Scathing for failing to fulfill the promise to the reader, for wasting the reader’s time with incompetence, error, self service, or some other nonsense. meaning ‘don’t buy this’.

SCHOOLS OF CRITICISM

1 – Roger ebert school of criticism.

(And any good art student’s) Any work of art must only fulfill the promise it makes to the audience It makes three promises:

… a) craftsmanship (writing, production, camera, directing, acting, editing, )

… b) materials ( medium(quality of it), subject, context, characters,)

… c) content (narrative, plot, novelty, emotional, intellectual, experience),

2 – Thumper’s school of criticism:

If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.

3 – Civic Duty Criticism:

There are works of incompetence that are a waste of people’s time and money and authors should be punished for producing them.

Why?

Authors (artists of all kinds) work and produce.

Authors (artists of all kinds) compete with one another in a market.

The competitors produce.

Critics.

At any given time there are three to five living critics worth reading. They fall into:

a) postmodern decivilizing(siskel,most),

b) audience-contractualist (Roger Ebert / Chris Stuckman),

c) high-art re-civilizing (David Thomson certainly)

Right now, I’m not sure there is much film worth criticizing as High Art, or even the equivalent of literature. There is good mythology (horror always is myt), there is spectacle, but there is no art (meaning). And holllywood has built an economic box that prohibits it from making ‘art’. And it’s only going to continue.