Friday, February 5, 2010
Food Chain / Food & Drink Thus Spake Robert Sietsema . . .
Posted by Mike Sula on 02.05.10 at 02:11 PM
The Village Voice food critic weighs in on the amateur-pro debate in the Columbia Journalism Review.
I’m all for everyone having his or her say, but when it comes to cultural criticism there is a strong case to be made for professionalism and expertise. As the eminent film critic Richard Schickel wrote in 2007, in response to a New York Times article on the decline of professional book-reviewing and the rise of review-bloggers: “Criticism Âand its humble cousin, reviewingÂ, is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions. . . . It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.”
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In another part of my no-doubt split personality, I run a chat board devoted to silent and classic sound films, NitrateVille.
Where the amateurs, or at least pro-am film buffs, were just talking about how completely verkokte Richard Schickel's estimate of the gross of The Birth of a Nation in his biography of D.W. Griffith is:
http://www.nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?…
Schickel is often a very fine critic (his monograph in the BFI Classics series on Double Indemnity is superb) but the notion that there's some hard and fast distinction between pros and amateurs is quickly rendered false at a place like NitrateVille, where there are plenty of published writers interacting— and often refuting the historical errors or fuzzy thinking of other published writers.
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