Critique and the Power of Personal Expression: Embracing Subjectivity in Art and Criticism

Growing up, there was always some form of entertainment playing in my house—music, movies, television, etc. Silence was rare. Whether that was because we were a two-child household, eighteen months apart, in a family of four in central California in the early ‘90s, or because my parents, and my mom in particular, nurtured an appreciation for the arts, I may never know. My sister and I grew up with an aesthetic appreciation for music, movies/television, art, and beauty—though I never enjoyed television nearly as much as music and film.

A childhood like mine makes for a terrible pop culture critic. I was exposed to a considerable amount of artistic interests, and thoroughly enough to enjoy most of what I listen to and watch. I have a good ear for crap, but I won’t waste my time on it—and focusing on the good tends to cancel out the bad. A critic’s audience more or less demands cynicism. The benefit, perhaps, is that if a critic reviews something favorably, it feels noteworthy, something worth paying attention to. But critics are full of themselves. To build a career by telling people what to like requires a degree of arrogance. Eventually, that authority goes to your head, and many critics start taking themselves too seriously. Art is personal. And it’s subjective. Who’s to say why someone reacts the way they do to a painting, a song, a movie? It’s subconscious. It requires deliberate thought to understand. Creating art is a process and a form of expression; trying to review that process for the intrigue of others is, frankly, bizarre.

And people have biases. Most don’t consciously know when or why a bias developed; they merely suffer from it. For example, I can’t explain it, but I get the impression, based on the fact that he’s still making movies, that Adam DeVine is a fairly popular actor. His presence in anything immediately ruins that movie for me. I can’t stand him. And when I hear that John Hamburg directed a movie, I get frustrated, because I know the film could have been great if anyone else had directed it. Hamburg is one of the most overrated directors in cinema history, but his movies tend to be well-received, and I don’t understand why. I have a bias, evidently. Or maybe just better taste than sixty percent of America—it’s hard to weigh.

The point is that art is too subjective to rely on criticism. Our moods affect us dramatically. And because many Americans rarely heed their moods—or take responsibility for how those moods shape behavior—we can be affected by a song or a movie in different ways at different times. It’s a weird, arbitrary process. And it’s funny that films, music, food, and books all rely on some form of peremptory critique to be acknowledged, to move up in the ranks of what matters. The algorithms that shape the information we see are built on our concept of critical review. Which means most of us don’t actually like what we like; we like what we think we’re supposed to like. Or what we’re told to like.

I’m writing this essay because I publish essays and reviews, sharing my thoughts and feelings about music, movies, books, television, food, travel, and more. I’m not sharing them as critique, even if I use phrases like “you should check this out” or “must-see, must-visit, must-try.” I’m sharing my thoughts because I think it’s important—more important than ever to highlight our reasons and intentions for doing something. It’s important to apply critical thought. To express ourselves consciously. The older I get, the less I share my reasons or thoughts about things. And when you don’t offer yours, people tend to come up with reasons of their own—even if those reasons don’t belong to them.

Critical thought, in the form of pop culture, is a good practice. It’s habit-forming. I will write about these things because I enjoy writing. I enjoy experiencing life and sharing those experiences; it’s not because I want to influence a perspective. And I think that’s an important distinction to make—and to share.