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I don't need to defend them. I just find it strange how much of an allergic reaction some people have to opinions of others the moment those people get paid for it. I care for some critics/reviewers because I can either use their work as a shortcut to finding stuff I might like or because their writing interests me and offers me interesting perspectives that I might otherwise not consider (that's always neat), kinda like it's with reading non-fiction articles in general. Otherwise one might as well stop reading/consuming that type of work altogether. I mean why care what anybody writes? Why even watch movies when you could just imagine stuff in your mind?

Using critics like that is essentially a fallacy (appeal to authority), and those are as strange as the other side that distrusts critics due to the job title. And both seem to think that critics have more influence/power than critics actually have. If I remember correctly one of the reasons why Disney actually considered buying Twitter a long time ago (around the time after Twitter got "new and interesting" for the mainstream media) was that people were trusting their friends more than ads, critics, or any other official PR stuff when it came new movie releases. And you could trace that quite well through Twitter's API (at the time) and Disney thought that was valuable information (maybe even useful for manipulating your potential audience). In the end they backed off because… well, it's twitter and we know now in what situation they are as a company.

And yet here you are defending them?? You care for them - I do not care for their parastical nature - why is that an issue for you?

What has the existance or non existance of critics to do with the media or whatever else they spout off about, it would certainly exist without them. Feth them.

I saw some people talking about art as intent by the artist and Death of the author and want to chime in.

Art is what is created by the Artist with the intent of evoking an emotional response.

That doesn't mean that a work that is not art (the creator had no intention when making it) cannot evoke an emotional response from some consumer of the medium. It just means the creator had no such reaction as intent for the creation.

Which fits perfectly with Death of the author. Ultimately what you do or do not respond to and to what extent has nothing to do with the creator. feth their intentions. The viewer gets out of it what they get out of it and the creator has no say in the matter.


So we basically have 3 levels of binary choices here.

1) The creator make a thing and they either intend for it to evoke an emotion response or they don't, making it art or not. The degree of skill used to make it can be from juvenile to master and their success at evoking their intended response can be nigh universal to abysmal and non-existent. Some art being bad art doesn't make it not art.

2) The work itself either carries forward the creators intent or it doesn't. This make the work "good" or "bad". A work made to be upsetting and unsettling is successful art if that is the intent even if basically everyone hates it for what it does.

3) The consumer of the work has their own response to the work. Sometimes this matches the authors intent and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's a powerful emotional response when none was intended. What does the viewer care what the author actually intended if you subscribe to the death of the author?