Tampa Calling

Here’s what Carl Wilson, an editor and critic at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, Canada, and the author of Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, had to say about my July 27 Ann Powers/American Idol post. He opined on his blog Zoilus:

At Creative Loafing’s Tampa Calling blog, Wade Tatangelo intelligently speculates that the trend may be economically based: With the crisis of critical authority brought on by the Internet and the (also ‘net-related) decline of newspaper sales, he says, critics are losing their jobs and those still employed are in more vulnerable positions: Maybe they take an interest in American Idol because they can’t afford not to? There’s something to that – I remarked in my book that unlike, say, an academic specialist, a working critic has to address a broad audience, and one who wrote only about the ultra-weird and never about the popular eventually would be out of a job. In the book I add “(rightly)”, but it’s debatable.

Certainly I know people who’ve been required professionally to review shows they wouldn’t have volunteered to watch. Tatangelo says that a couple of years ago he quit a job rather than cover Idol – and that he’s not sure he would feel emboldened to make a similar move today.

But wait, imagine a film critic who proudly resigns his job rather than write about a popular movie or genre of movies – say, movies based on comic books. Would we think that guy was a hero, or kind of an asshole? Wouldn’t we point to great film critics who have written favorably or unfavorably about blockbuster popcorn flicks and found insightful aesthetic and social analyses there? If you’re being told what to say by your editors, that is cause to make a stand; if you’re being asked to cover a major phenomenon in your field, that’s the job, bucko. Granted, in the more flush past of newspapering, you’d probably have been able to slough off lower-status assignments to the junior critic, and today there usually is no junior critic. And nothing against Tatangelo making life choices that make him happier. But there’s a boon to critics being pushed out of their aesthetic habits to observe what’s happening out in what remains of the mainstream – it gives us the function of conducting that cross-conversation about common cultural objects that those lamenters of the semi-mythical, semi-extinct monoculture say they miss.

Click here to read Wilson’s entire post.

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