Critics of the Arts

A case can be made for Groucho as Ivan, Harpo as Aloysha, and Chico as Dmitri.
--Andrew Sarris, comparing the Marx brothers to The Brothers Karamozov.

I'm hoping English Department curriculums have changed since I was in college. I couldn't make it through Spenser's The Faerie Queen or Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.
--Michiko Kakutani in "The New York Times Book Review" (July 15, 2018).

I was thinking about the current state of movie reviewing while recently watching Paul Thomas Anderson's The Phantom Thread.  Since Andrew Sarris died in 2012 I have not paid attention to most film critics, who seem to find good things in any film that has a large advertising budget.  I can only guess that Anderson's film was praised because it is a personal film (he was writer and cinematographer as well as director).  I have never cared for the aloof and condescending Daniel Day-Lewis and it was unclear what he was supposed to represent in Anderson's film.  If he was supposed to be a great artist of couture and therefore forgiven for his offensive behavior, then why were his dresses so ugly?  Or were they not meant to be ugly by 50's standards (though it was murky as to exactly when the film was taking place)? Day-Lewis's behavior was so unpleasant that his wife, who also worked for him, poisoned him.  This worked well for a time and then he started being rude and nasty again and this time he knew he was being poisoned again and felt he deserved it.  Then they forgave each other and lived unhappily ever after.  I worked at Fairchild (then home to "Women's Wear Daily") for several years and found fashion to be a dubious and useless industry; was Anderson mocking it or celebrating its "artists" who made fancy, ostentatious  dresses for the wealthy?  Do critics these days see so many terrible movies that anything that has a glimmer of intelligence is celebrated?  Incidentally, some key plot points in The Phantom Thread remind one of Truffaut's La Sirene du Mississippi (1969), from a Cornell Woolrich novel.

Book, dance, music and art critics are not much better these days.  Michiko Kakutani retired as daily book critic at The New York Times and I cannot remember a single review that interested me in the book.  She, too, probably is subject to so many bad books that a slight glimmer of intelligent writing wins her praise.  I do not believe that she was assigned Spenser and Richardson at Yale is the 70's but, if so, good for the English Department.  Clarissa is a favorite novel of mine and I highly recommend it (see my post of April 25, 2014) and I just bought a copy of The Faerie Queen, since I had never read it.  I find the National Book Awards and the Booker prizes useful guides for what books to avoid; though one can find useful reviews in both "The New York Review of Books" and the "London Review" one has to do a great deal of reading between the lines.  Where is Edmund Wilson when we really need him?