Photo: Twentieth Century Fox

In a now-infamous interview with Dave Eggers from 2000, the author entreated people to avoid becoming critics. Criticism, he claimed, “is done, by and large, by impatient people who have axes to grind.” Earlier this week, Ottessa Moshfegh used her paid Substack to respond to a nearly three-year-old piece — a part profile, part review of her book Lapvona, written by Andrea Long Chu — to make a not-dissimilar argument. Negative reviews were “not a good look” and “a waste of everybody’s time,” she wrote. 

So goes the cycle: Every few years, an artist claims that only those who can’t themselves make would turn to criticism. What could possibly motivate someone to tear down a monument to Beauty other than their own creative frustration? I asked some of New York’s critics how they think about negative reviews — and why they might actually be good for us. For Andrea, whose criticism (in-depth, career-spanning, and Pulitzer Prize–winning) demands intimate knowledge of her subjects, it’s partially about the pleasure of finding something sturdy enough to withstand her sustained examination. “I feel like a ronin walking around the countryside looking for someone who can kill me,” she says. “I want something that is worth thinking against, whether I like it or not.” It made me think of The Princess Bride scene where Inigo Montoya, a studied fighter, finds his match in Westley, and each is surprised and delighted by the other’s skill with a blade. “That's a perfectly good way to describe my feeling about Ottessa,” Andrea says. “What does he say? ‘I would sooner destroy a stained-glass window than an artist like yourself.’”

I have gone hard on certain beloved movies because I have very specific tastes and beliefs about film and art in general. People tend to read me from the lens of contrarian, and I always clarify: I'm not a hater, I'm a born lover. The best haters are lovers at heart who are just disappointed in the world.

We exist in this artistic media ecosystem where even criticism has taken on the sort of aesthetics of fandom. You either love something or you hate something, and there’s no middle ground. If you can only publish positive or fawning criticism, then it’s not criticism anymore, it's marketing. If everybody's doing fan-oriented writing, then positive reviews don't matter. I think of criticism at its best as its own art form. It's a mark on the historical record. With negative criticism, I like to think of it as cathartic and clarifying. Even if I don't agree with a negative review of a film I love, it can be useful to step into other people's perspectives.

We're in a really weird, anti-intellectual space. People are not reading in this country. Literacy rates are down, and it feels like this argument against negative criticism is weirdly in support of that, a more liberal version of the same thing we’re critiquing Republicans of — that you don't want to hear things you disagree with. In the ’70s, artists and critics would have these really intense intellectual disagreements in public forums. I would love to have an intellectual rival! It's a way of sharpening your blade. —Angelica Jade Bastién

➽ Read Angelica on Renaissance: A Film and Poor Things

A couple of years ago I went to a dinner party hosted by a critic and academic who I had met at a film festival. When I got there his wife said to him, "Is this the guy who you said likes everything?” He totally saved his ass and said “No, that was someone else!,” but I know he was talking about me. Do I now have this stupid reputation of liking everything? Because I see shit I hate all the time, often acclaimed films. I’m sort of in a privileged position, in part because there are several of us reviewing movies, so we're able to gravitate toward stuff we're inclined to like.

I will say this — and it's unfortunate to some extent because people do love to read pans of higher-profile movies — I don't enjoy writing them at all. And not because I don't like being mean to it, but more because I want to make sure I get everything right. If I'm going to be panning something, I will watch it more than once just so I can make sure that my argument is solid. 

That's the other thing with negative reviews — I don't begrudge people for liking these films. If I don't like a movie, even if I hate it, I do not think less of you for liking that movie. Stanley Kubrick said that it was watching the bad movies at MoMA that made him realize he could direct because he was just like, “I can do better than this.” You have to be able to see the bad stuff because that'll make you realize why the good stuff is good. With every review, positive or negative, I try to give enough of a sense of the film that somebody can get a sense of what the movie is like and decide for themselves whether it's something they might like. If you’re panning a movie, you have to be careful not to pan the audience. —Bilge Ebiri

➽ Read Bilge on The Apprentice and Wicked.

I don't think it's worth thinking about something unless you're being led by negativity. I don't mean necessarily that you have to be a hater, but if I'm supposed to be forming a judgment of some kind then I need to be capable of negating things. When I am being negative about something it's because I'm trying to actually just understand it. 

If I'm really going to like or dislike something, I need to be able to see it as something other than myself. Yelling about my impression of a book is just yelling at myself. I have my naïve impression of the thing when it first touches me, but I need to negate that so that I can move the thing out of myself. And then, if I want to say mean things about it, I should. I think of it as, I don't know, respect. I often feel tender toward the people that I have written about because I do actually think I know what they’re doing and not a lot of people do. When I go in for my line-level judgments, a lot of it is just criticisms and complaints, but it's not because I think I could do it better. It’s because I know that it can take it. 

My feeling is that you don't write for the writer of the book and you also don't write for the reader of the book: You write for the reader of the book review. Because I don't know anything else about them except that they're not reading that book right now — they're reading this. —Andrea Long Chu

➽ Read Andrea on Rachel Cusk and Zadie Smith

You cannot discount the baseline reality that bad reviews can be thrilling and fun to read. They are often a pleasurable experience for people who are wrestling with what they think about something. It's especially clarifying when I read somebody else's reaction to something and I'm like, “That's exactly what I did not feel." That’s also why you would never want to stop creating bad reviews — they will be just as helpful for the people who loved something.

There are many excellent reasons to write and read bad reviews. I think very seriously about when and when not to. Writing a truly devastating comedy review for somebody who's early in their career is a very different prospect for me than going after CBS's Tracker. (I haven't written that one yet, but one day I will.) It’s particularly pleasurable when the subject has plenty of their own cultural-socioeconomic insulation and the thing that you're doing is not going to be harmful to their career. My goal is never to trash somebody who is just doing their best to make any kind of dent in a challenging end-days capitalist society. 

I have this thing. I truly believe it's like a curse that I have that I don't know how to fix. When I start posting something online, my terrible reaction to something has this inevitable effect of making people want to watch it. I've pushed more people toward shows I’ve written bad reviews of than might have otherwise watched them. —Kathryn VanArendonk

➽ Read Kathryn on With Love, Meghan and The Baldwins

Plus: Paul W.S. Anderson talks about getting lost in George R.R. martin’s world.

Join us for a lively evening newsletter about everything that just happened. Sign up to get it every weeknight.