‘Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth’, by AO Scott

In 2012, the critic AO Scott reviewed Joss Whedon’s film The Avengers for the New York Times. Scott, who has been writing for that newspaper since 2000, described the movie as “a snappy little dialogue comedy dressed up as something else, that something else being a giant ATM for Marvel and its new studio overlords, the Walt Disney Company.”

Shortly after the review appeared, one of the film’s stars, Samuel L Jackson, posted the following message on Twitter: “AO Scott needs a new job! Let’s help him find one! One he can ACTUALLY do!” Jackson’s fans retweeted his exhortation in their thousands, and some of them added their own assessments of Scott’s talents: “hater”, “square” and “snob” were among the milder epithets thrown his way.

One of the interlocutors in the mock-Socratic dialogue with which Better Living Through Criticism begins asks if it “would it be accurate to say that you wrote this whole book to settle a score with Samuel L Jackson?” “Not exactly,” Scott, or his dialogic alter-ego, replies. Not exactly because the book is much more than a mere settling of scores. As the title suggests, it’s nothing less than a defence of the vocation of criticism itself. (And he is talking about cultural criticism in general rather than film criticism in particular — there is more here about Rilke than about Ridley Scott.)

This is not to say that the book is at all defensive. On the contrary, Scott’s attractively breezy tone is far removed from the kind of portentous jeremiad in which the beleaguered professional critic conjures visions of the barbarians (or bloggers and Twitter trolls) at the gate. He wears his considerable learning lightly — although not apologetically: Scott knows that the arguments he is exploring have a long pedigree.

For example, he acknowledges the significance of Matthew Arnold’s 1864 essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”, which laid down an enduring template for discussions of this sort. Arnold complained that the “bane of criticism” was that it was made to serve “practical” (and, one assumes, commercial) interests that were alien to it. The critic’s real job, he insisted, is to understand the “best that is known and thought in the world”. But too often criticism strays from the “pure intellectual sphere” into the mundane realm of the “polemical and controversial”.

As his Twitter spat with Jackson shows, Scott is no stranger to the polemical and controversial. Indeed, he relishes it. And he believes that “Whiggish traditionalism” of the kind Arnold defended is much harder to sustain in an age of cultural and informational abundance like ours. The “aesthetic consensus” that Arnold and his predecessors — Scott mentions the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, among others — took for granted has, he says, “come irrevocably undone”.

Asked to describe his job, Scott says: ‘[I] go see a lot of movies and then write down what I think about them’

If he’s right about that, where does it leave the latter-day critic, or the jobbing reviewer for that matter? Scott recalls being asked by the 13-year-old son of some friends of his what it is he does exactly. He replied: “[I] go see a lot of movies and then write down what I think about them.” This deceptively bland self-description is actually as good a way as any of getting at what makes Scott’s criticism such a pleasure to read.

He takes very seriously the job of explaining why it is that a particular work of art — a film or a novel, a poem or a piece of music — has or hasn’t moved him. For him, the critical impulse lies not in finger-wagging prescriptions of what constitutes good taste, but in something altogether more expansive: “Our desire . . . to think about, recapture, and communicate our delights.” Scott plausibly suggests that this almost invariably accompanies aesthetic pleasure. Most of us will have felt that irrepressible urge to buttonhole our friends and say: Listen to (or read or watch) this!

The interesting thing is that in attempting to account for this phenomenon, Scott discovers that the “high philosophical confidence of the Enlightenment” about which he’d earlier been sceptical — Kant’s notion of the “subjective universality” of aesthetic judgments is a good example of this — in fact dies hard. For if the judgments we make about works of art were merely personal, then, he says, “the class of things we call art would have no reason to exist”. And nor would the activity that we call criticism.

But for all the residues of enlightened optimism here, there is a shadow hanging over this book: the age of criticism is more or less coterminous with the age of print, and the latter, we are told, is coming to an end. If that is true, then the critic’s authority (often unearned, as Scott concedes) will disappear with it. Yet there is nothing new about such predictions — similarly blood-curdling prophecies accompanied the arrival of the telegraph in Arnold’s time. And whatever form the digital future takes, Scott says, “there will be no shortage of words” — and we will probably still need critics to sift and weigh them, to act as “gatekeepers to our besieged sensoria”.

Jonathan Derbyshire is the FT’s executive comment editor

Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth, by AO Scott, Jonathan Cape, RRP£14.99 / Penguin Press, RRP$28, 288 pages