The popular understanding of what a critic does is that a critic tells you whether something is good or bad. But that is the least interesting part of a critic’s job, when all is said and done, because two critics can see the same movie, agree largely on its strengths and flaws, then weight them very differently in their heads.
No, the role of a critic is to pull apart the work, to delve into the marrow of it, to figure out what it is trying to say about our society and ourselves. You can love a work and think its politics are deeply problematic; you can believe something is terrible yet offers some accidentally acute insights about the way the world works."—Todd VanDerWerff
From "Why cultural criticism matters"
Vox, December 31, 2018
Here's another impactful passage from the same essay:
"If I were in charge of a major publication, I would probably be hiring political reporters, too. But on the other hand, cultural criticism is important — vitally so. Sure, it’s how I earn a paycheck, but long before I got into this line of work, great cultural journalism gave me other ways of looking at and understanding the world, which is core to journalism’s mission statement. We need cultural criticism not just to tell us which movies to go see and which ones to avoid, but to tell us things we already knew but didn’t know how to express. If reporting can explain the world to us, cultural criticism can explain us to us."
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