Farewell to criticism: an ongoing series

In the nineties Owen Gleiberman and Lisa Schwarzbaum represented the peaks of glossy mag film writing. I took their opinions more seriously than the late Roger Ebert’s, despite my disagreeing often and muttering that their enthusiasms led them to strange places. But strange enthusiasms are what I want from critics. Sometimes our enthusiasms coincided: in 1994 I also thought Pulp Fiction the “most exhilarating piece of filmmaking to come along in the nearly five years I’ve been writing for this magazine.” As Entertainment Weekly shrunk and mutated into unrecognizable contortions, Gleiberman remained a totem of another time. Now he’s gone. It’s our fault. As consumers we got used to free internet content in the late nineties; as reporters and critics we live on this razed landscape. Matt Zoller Seitz agrees:

There are, I’m sure, many complex, overlapping and perhaps contradictory reasons why media companies have no interest in publishing properly compensated criticism by informed and seasoned writers. I don’t pretend to understand all of them, although I suspect the die was cast in the late ’90s, when newspapers and magazines bowed to tech gurus and prognosticators and started giving away their content. This made everyone—but particularly the younger generation—get used to thinking that writing was something they were entitled to have, like air or water; that it was not really valuable, indeed that it was not really work; that it was not really something that was “made”; that was not creative, and that for all these reasons it was not supposed to be compensated by anyone, not in any real sense—that it was, instead, a combination of entertainment and personal indulgence, something along the lines of an open mic night in print form, with people trying out “material,” basking in the applause (“exposure”), and maybe picking up a little walking-around money. Like a violin player at a bus stop.