CULTure
Many times, when someone points to a truth that goes against common perception people see the person making the point as saying something negative, insulting, or just plain false. When in reality that person is just stating facts.
Is it really an insult to say that by definition Roger Ebert* is a movie reviewer and not a movie critic?
Public opinion definitely labels Ebert as a critic. The public consciousness perceives the work of critics to be a higher status pursuit reviewing. So people see calling him a reviewer as taking away his status as critic. I think this is where the perceived insult comes from.
Criticism is more abstract and more objectively useful. On the other hand, reviews are subjectively useful (they help me decide what to buy) and more economically impactful. This is similar to the perceptions surrounding psychologists that are doing research and those that are counseling sick people.
What’s the difference? One is theoretic and concerns the state of the art; it mostly concerns experts. And the other is concerned with helping people who aren’t experts. Thus our society sees the researcher as having higher status than the practitioner, even though both are working with the same ideas and materials.
Unthinking acceptance of the culturally endorsed group of thoughts bugs me a lot. I think people are slaves to their reality and the collective reality of their culture. I really wish more people could see their way to perceiving their world from multiple perspectives, so they can see reality more clearly than the reality that is fed to them.
Do me, and everyone else, a favor and call a reviewer a reviewer an attack an attack**.
* At least in the context most of us know of Roger Ebert in, he is very much a reviewer. He very well could be a known critic, but I don’t know much about the world of film criticism.
** “To divert by the way, it is an utterly unfair critique, and ignores Cooper’s manifold literary virtues; one may point out that in Samuel Clemens’s era, Cooper was widely considered America’s greatest novelist to date, a position Mark Twain later supplanted. The essay can also be read–as it rarely is–as a calculated, and highly effective, attack on a literary rival, and as such, should be treated with far less respect, and far more skepticism, than it normally is. There: In the space of a paragraph, I’ve written an effective critique of a work of criticism.” — costik
