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    Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth
    Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth
    Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth
    Audiobook7 hours

    Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth

    Written by A O Scott

    Narrated by Jonathan Todd Ross

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Few could explain, let alone seek out, a career in criticism. Yet what A.O. Scott shows in Better Living Through Criticism is that we are, in fact, all critics: because critical thinking informs almost every aspect of artistic creation, of civil action, of interpersonal life. With penetrating insight and warm humor, Scott shows that while individual critics--himself included--can make mistakes and find flaws where they shouldn't, criticism as a discipline is one of the noblest, most creative, and urgent activities of modern existence. Using his own film criticism as a starting point--everything from his infamous dismissal of the international blockbuster The Avengers to his intense affection for Pixar's animinated Ratatouille--Scott expands outward, easily guiding readers through the complexities of Rilke and Shelley, the origins of Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones, the power of Marina Abramovich and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.' Drawing on the long tradition of criticism from Aristotle to Susan Sontag, Scott shows that real criticism was and always will be the breath of fresh air that allows true creativity to thrive. "The time for criticism is always now," Scott explains, "because the imperative to think clearly, to insist on the necessary balance of reason and passion, never goes away."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateFeb 9, 2016
    ISBN9781501919008
    Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth

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    Reviews for Better Living Through Criticism

    3/5

    34 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      ramblings + thesaurus = this book. Hella intellectual. not bad though.
    • 3/5
      I don’t know. I took notes on it, but a few days later it doesn’t leave me with a strong passion or memory; he said some smart things but ultimately I think you need a manifesto-strength thesis to make a book on criticism really work. It seemed like these were his collected thoughts from a career of criticisms, which while interesting, is not really five star book material, you know? The dialogues were the most interesting part; those seemed like the places where the author took his ideas furthest.
    • 4/5
      While maddeningly all over the place at times, one of the best books I've ever read about why critics do what they do and the function they serve, and how criticism is a process we all engage in all the time. A.O. Scott's argument is far from a straight line and you'll wonder who the hell he is talking to at times or if he's pasted together four other books he was working on to make this one. But overall, I tried writing without a pen and after two chapters, I was already mentally underlining every 5 seconds anyway. Worthy of multiple re-reads, 10% to straighten out the crooked lines, 90% to savor and think about them.
    • 3/5
      A.O. Scott makes his living through criticism as chief film critic at the New York Times. So it’s entirely possible that the better living spoken of in the title is the one he hopes to achieve through the publication of this thoughtful and wide-ranging book on the practice and purpose of criticism. Everyone, says Scott, is a critic. That’s how we engage with the works of artistic creation that are presented before us. Some people are also journalists — writers paid by the word or hired to be on staff by periodicals. A critic, in the sense Scott is primarily interested, is a journalist who engages with works of artistic creation. When he or she does this very well (yes, criticism can also be done poorly), the prose that the critic produces attains the level of art itself. Which raises the question of whether this book reaches those lofty heights.Scott offers six chapters considering aspects of criticism and the role of the critic. These read like chatty public lectures, with sufficient nods to the long tradition of criticism (and of artistic creations) to present as erudite, but enough asides and digressions to never be mistaken for deep thought. He regularly deploys full paragraphs of rhetorical questions, but presumably only as a rhetorical flourish. And to further deflate any grandiose posturing, Scott intersperses his lecture chapters with dialogues, question and answer sessions between himself and himself in which he takes himself to task on various points and also tries to defend himself. These might be considered light relief though in fact their tone and tenor is very much in keeping with the rest of the book. Scott is well-read and well-educated (though not a scholar), and he writes with great facility and verve. (He’s rather like an American James Wood.) So all of this is diverting reading even if it doesn’t really get beyond the superficial.A case in point is his second chapter, “The Eye of the Beholder.” Here he approaches the heart of the problem. If everyone’s opinion is just a matter of taste (and there’s no accounting for taste), then all we can ever have is the cacophony of competing opinions. But the critic must maintain that there is more to art than his or her own prejudices. The critic says that the object under discussion (poem, play, film, painting, etc.) has features in which its beauty (if it has beauty) inheres. In drawing attention to these, the critic is pointing to something that can be discerned by anyone (perhaps with sufficient training) and, moreover, each of us ought to reach the corresponding judgment. Scott is drawing explicitly on Kant’s Critique of Judgment here. It is, I think, the starting point for any serious exploration of the validity or potential significance for criticism. Yet, having acknowledged Kant as the clearest characterizer of the problem, a few pages later Scott declares “that philosophy and science are of limited use in addressing these questions.” I don’t know why. Perhaps he felt he had delved as deep as he was capable. But that’s not a reason to think that philosophy is of limited use; it’s a reason to clear the field so that philosophers can get on with the hard work to be done.But perhaps I’m hoping for more than what Scott set out to achieve with book, despite its aspirational sub-title. It remains an amiable book which deserves to be gently recommended, especially if you’ve never seriously considered these issues before. Besides, you can’t help but like someone who is so enamoured of the Pixar film Ratatouille!