The best Pixar movies as chosen by children – Slate Magazine. Know your audience. On a related note, the last Pixar movie I saw was WALL·E; the last Pixar movie I saw in a theater… Toy Story. No real reason. Just a slacker with no children to drag me there.
A critic who thought the Frick Collection “sucked” would not have a job. Yelp’s reviews are infinitely more democratic, written by anyone who cares to write them. That includes not a few masochists who hate museums and go anyway. There might be something to that. If a certain percentage of Yelpers find LACMA or the Frick boorrriinnnnggg, it might be worth knowing—to others who are thinking of going and worry they might be bored stiff. Serious critics almost never address that audience or that concern.
Cf. The Onion: Whole Museum Visit Spent Feeling Guilty About Moving On From Paintings
Yelp Hates on Museums | Los Angeles County Museum on Fire | ARTINFO.com
KNOWLEDGE + TASTE = MEANINGFUL JUDGMENT.
I dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes — all the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.
Michel Foucault (via viafrank). See also Clive James:
Whatever the subject, a real critic is a cultural critic, always: if your judgment doesn’t bring in more of the world than it shuts out, you shouldn’t start.
and Anthony Lane:
Of all the duties required of the professional critic, the least important—certainly the least enduring—is the verdict.
Bad poets just bore us, but bad critics mislead us.
AllHipHop.com: With “Shooters,” did you hear the original version by Robin Thicke and just wanted to redo it?
Lil’ Wayne: Yeah, hell yeah. I heard it years ago, on his album.
AllHipHop.com: Do you think that would surprise people, like, “Weezy listens to Thicke?”
Lil’ Wayne: Fuck people.(via Leon)
There are three kinds of critics: those who have importance; those who have less importance; those who have no importance at all. The last two kinds do not exist: all critics have IMPORTANCE.
[…]
How could one imitate a Critic? I ask myself that. Well, at any rate, the interest in doing so would be rather thin–very thin: we have the original–HE IS SUFFICIENT.
Mark Larson 