06-18-2023, 05:17 AM
Even if people with taste are rare, mostly everyone has to pretend one. Everyone needs to have an opinion of something, everyone has to both dislike and like things and do so on a defining way. The appearance of taste is, also, relatively easy to pretend on any social setting, as it only requires a repeat of commonly accepted statements with an affected attitude. All in all, this has lead to more and more people "liking" things (or, we could put it, "being fans" of things) in a purely destructive way: and as a result, I think everyone knows of some autor they like degrading themselves into a meme due to the audience that latched upon them, or of some "classic" being appreciated for reasons that are just projections of their small-minde readers, or conversation about some cultural topic being diluted by the same few statements to the point nobody can take the thing seriously anymore. This kind of "wrong appreciation" worse than any negative and unfair criticism: I consider it leeching. It unfairly takes out the life of something in order to engross the "fan".
I would wish to use this thread to comment on this trend and offer examples of it, hopefully with the intent to avoid them ourselves. I will start with some obvious ones, because I am more interested on what other people have to say.
I would wish to use this thread to comment on this trend and offer examples of it, hopefully with the intent to avoid them ourselves. I will start with some obvious ones, because I am more interested on what other people have to say.
- So Bad... it's Good: This was specially common a few years back, when everyone seemed to be a fan of MST3K, but perhaps not that much anymore. In many cases it's just simply bad things, so bad it's bad, but it's most insidious when used for ahead of times things with some apparent shortcomings (I talked about Deadly Premonition suffering because of this) , or otherwise very personal kind of films with value because of it (Tommy Wisseau's The Room). The fundamental idea behind is that you shouldn't take any of this seriously, and every appreciation you have of something comes from the critic as a sort of last-minute pity after he saw through all its badness.
- It's Bad... on Purpose: Related to the last one. Imagine saying, and probably someone has, that El Greco painting figures with such odd-proportions was "bad on purpose". It removes the artistic intention a particular choice of style may have, and instead gets the tag of "bad" from the get-go and only through critical appreciation it can be redeemed. This then was taken as one of the holy secrets of auteurship by people that, by heart, create as if they were in the fanbase of their own work, and begin seeing things that are, indeed, bad on purpose. But that only achieves the goal they set up to do: creating something that's "bad".
- It's a Satire! Once you said that something is satire, any sympathy that the author had for its subject, or if not sympathy, deeper appreciation for it, vanishes. Satire, born once of seeing something from a position of superiority towards a subject matter, caters then to a lower instinct: people sneering from below at something they will never reach. A complete inversion.
- It's good because it has the ideas of another, unrelated author in them: Clearly seen with "vulgar" authors suddenly attached "deleuzean", "bataillean" analysis and how some Anime is nice because it, actually, is based on the ideas based on... All in all, it's again erasing the author, erasing all depth, in order to submit it to something the fan already knew beforehand, and once again, he's the one who allows meaning to exist in this piece of work.