A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of the word,” wrote Oscar Wilde in his great essay “The Critic as Artist.” “It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless.”
A.O. Scott would agree. Indeed, Scott’s new book, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth, frequently employs Wilde’s dialogue form, i.e., a skeptic questioning everything, from the battle between art and commerce to how Anton Ego in the movie Ratatouille serves as the perfect emblem of the modern critic. And while Scott writes primarily about film for the New York Times, his book discusses poetry by Rilke and Larkin and Keats, the novels of Elena Ferrante, the work of Victorian-era critics such as Arnold, Pater, and Wilde — and just about anything else he finds worthy of extended analysis.
According to him, Better Living Through Criticism was written partly in response to the democratization of criticism and the now-dominant assumption that popular culture is a worthy subject of serious study. Yet Scott, who argues that “being ranked and sorted is an intrinsic part of every public and worthwhile endeavor,” can’t help but feel a longing for a time when the critic was “able to assume an audience, a tradition, a canon of works and standards.” Yet in the very next sentence, he acknowledges, “Such a world has never existed, of course, but a great deal of criticism — and the criticism of criticism — seems predicated on the belief that it does, or the wish that it would.”