Because nothing persuades quite so effectively as picking on a beloved icon recently debilitated by cancer, New York Press film critic Armond White took advantage of Roger Ebert’s depleted immune system by calling the former thumbs-upper on the carpet vis-à-vis his roll in devolving American cinema. Wrote White (who, by the way, is NOT white):
“Ebert’s way of talking about movies as disconnected from social and moral issues, simply as entertainment, seemed to normalize film discourse—you didn’t have to strive toward it, any Average Joe American could do it. But criticism actually dumbed down. Ebert also made his method a road to celebrity—which destroyed any possibility for a heroic era of film criticism.”
Then, between crank calls to Easter Seals and the Dana Farber Institute, White (who, I might remind you, is quite the opposite of white) wrote the following:
“In the Ebert age of criticism, the Aesthetic of the Hit dominates everything. Behind those panicky articles about critics losing their jobs (what about autoworkers and schoolteachers?), lurks the writers’ own fear of falling victim to the same draconian industry rule: Most publishers and editors are only interested in supporting hits in order to reach Hollywood’s deep-pocket advertisers. This is what makes traditional criticism seem indefinable and obsolete, leaving web criticism as a ready (but dubious) alternative.”
He then went on to write a bunch of bla-bla-bla about internet bloggers because they bla-bla-bla sarcasm irony Quentin Tarantino something-something. I only half-read the rest because a blinky light had me distracted.
But I will give the devil his due by agreeing with 22.5% of what White had to say, namely the impossible to refute parts. TRUE people no longer talk about cinema the way they used to (intellectually, passionately, seriously); TRUE cinema circa today is divided between the populist, devoid-of-meaning ‘splosion-fests that take in the lion’s share of studio dirty lucre – and the nihilistic, amoral, faux-meaningful art-house pap that critics reward themselves for having the stomach to sit through by writing pithy po-mo reviews with the same detached irony that made said films suck in the first place. However if White thinks the devolution of art, criticism and the soul-suck brought on by corporate uber-commercialism is limited to the FILM WORLD, he is seriously high on the crack (and I write this not because he is African-American and thus might have a taste for crack, but because his myopic worldview is analogous to someone both delusional from the drug’s narcotic effect and fiendishly one-minded due to the drug’s addictive properties). Have you listened to a CD lately, buddy? Have you turned on the radio? Been to an art gallery? Read a book? IT ALL SUCKS.
Art – in general – expelled its last dying gasp in the late 1960’s, when there was still a shred of honesty left in the act of creating. Now artists are left to fight for the ever-increasingly diminishing attention-spans of consumers preoccupied with shiny lights and blinky things, who are hateful of and threatened by anything that even remotely smacks of intellectualism, and who thought Fergie’s “My Humps” was ‘teh BOM DIGGITY Yo!” It’s not that people are getting stupider – though, well yeah, they probably are. But they are also getting less complex, and easier to please, and have a great many things at their disposal with which to please themselves (cough-FLESHLIGHT-cough).
Also, I might add — thanks in no small part to all those teachers you mentioned getting laid off — the arts, and the industries exploiting said arts, have become pretty much the exclusive domain of the privileged class, whose parents can afford the $10 billion/semester tuition at private schools like CalArts, or insider networking breeding grounds like USC. Music, visual arts, and especially film – these things are now created by the same trust-fund douche-hoses who 30 years ago would’ve become bankers or lawyers or presidents or pill-head charity ball housewives. Thus the tell-tale smugness, apathy, high regard for superficial style over anything meaningful, and pre-occupation with commerce. Art today is a Prada bag — a knock-off one at that.
And Roger Ebert has 0% to do with that. At least Ebert and his TV posse serve to remind people that them thar movin’ picters up on the big screen thar’s something worthy of analysis, worthy of criticism, and not just one of the many commodities we are served up to distract ourselves with – for a price – until the zombie-robots come to enslave us in their salt mines.
(Editor’s note: Armond White is NOT white)
