hating things

“With each pass­ing week it be­comes more ob­vi­ous to me that the ma­jor­i­ty of read­ers have lost the abil­i­ty to com­pre­hend a mixed re­view, where I am en­thu­si­as­tic about some as­pects but with­er­ing about oth­ers. I’ve spent the last few days ex­plain­ing that I do, in fact, like many as­pects of the HBO se­ries THE NIGHT OF, but thought oth­er as­pects were bad. I do not un­der­stand why so many read­ers seem not to un­der­stand how such a thing could be pos­si­ble. It’s gone be­yond puz­zling and into trou­bling. ‘You don’t like it.’ ‘I like PARTS OF IT.’ ‘But you write all this neg­a­tive stuff!’” —Matt Zoller Seitz
 

And this right here is the prob­lem with pop­ti­mist ‘hater’ cul­ture, mixed of course with the ever pop­u­lar me­dia il­lit­er­a­cy and the poor read­ing com­pre­hen­sion that is the mod­ern In­ter­net user’s trademark: 

You’ve had ten plus years of every­one pre­tend­ing (Christ I hope they’re pre­tend­ing) that every­thing is ei­ther ‘amaz­ing’ or ‘the worst’ to the point that any crit­i­cal nu­ance is im­me­di­ate­ly tamped down as ‘hat­ing’ –

mean­while,
we bend over back­wards to pro­mote flim­sy pop cul­ture items into po­si­tions in the cul­tur­al di­a­logue well above their weight and class out of some mis­placed need to be part of that same dialogue. 

The re­sult be­ing that most now not only don’t know how to crit­i­cal­ly dis­sect good and bad art (and me­dia) but are con­fused by it when they see it done.
 
 

—ja­son malmberg

Flom­mist Ja­son Malm­berg is a sim­ple man who be­lieves in brown liquor and small dogs. He also makes art some­times. Copy­right © 2016 Ja­son Malmberg.

MOR D’ARTÍCULOS  MOR FLOMM !

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