A critic’s taste is actually not very different from an average person’s, said A.O. Scott, a film critic for The New York Times for more than 16 years.

Scott described taste as one of the most confusing and contradicting human qualities, and said that it is always developing.

“I don’t think that critics are people with better taste,” Scott said, “… but are people that can explain our taste in a way that is clear and useful and that other people can relate to their own taste.”

Scott spoke to a nearly full audience at the Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications on Tuesday night, discussing his new book “Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth.” He discussed the art of criticism in conversation with the Goldring Arts Journalism Program Director Eric Grode, and answered questions from the audience.

Scott, who graduated from Harvard University in 1988 with a degree in literature, has been a film critic for The New York Times since January 2000, according to his New York Times biography.

“(Criticism) is a good thing for culture and it’s also just a fact of human life. Just as we make things, and create representations and stories and works of art, we also judge those,” Scott said. “… Everyone is a critic because criticism is a really primal and primordial human activity.”

The purpose of his book, Scott said, was to connect the idea of criticism as a job with the primal instincts to criticize. He said the book is about the practice of criticism, but also about what it means when we say something is “good.”

Scott said there are different kinds of critics: some who come in with a formulated or programmed set of ideas about what they hope to see, and others who work in a more intuitive way. Scott is the latter.

“I find (it) very risky and very limiting to kind of come at it, to come at a movie with an established set of expectations or values. … You are almost guaranteed to miss what is new and challenging,” Scott said.

Because Scott likes to view things without preconceived notions, he is in resistance of the algorithms that websites like Netflix and Amazon use to recommend films. But, he said, there is pleasure in viewing familiar forms of entertainment, of knowing where you are and where the film is going to go.

The majority of the work he views is in the gray area between terrible and amazing, above or below average, Scott said. It is the job and responsibility of a film critic to write about something worth reading, even if the film critic doesn’t have a great memory about the piece, Scott added.

The nuances of critiquing something involve finding what it is interesting about it, Scott said. Even when movies aren’t interesting, he said he tries to find something to hold his attention.

In response to a question from the audience, Scott said the most important aspect of a good film is its connection to human reality.

“It has to touch something true and be in some way — it’s hard to sort of pin down and describe it — but it in some way has to be honest,” he said. “And … I have a strong reaction against that if I feel like it is dishonest or untruthful.”

Published on April 26, 2016 at 11:11 pm

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