Proving the Critics Wrong

What a victory. You'd have been crazy to predict it a year ago, but in the face of many doubters, this day has arrived. Paul Blart: Mall Cop is the number one movie in the land.

Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily, required reading in these parts, put it this way: "WHO NEEDS FILM CRITICS? Moviegoers make 'Mall Cop' #1..."

The headline has it a little wrong. The commercial success of Mall Cop is unexpected relative to the expectations of movie executives, not of critics. And not to bite off too much - art versus commerce doesn't fit too neatly into a blog post - but the conflation of those two kinds of successes is a common mistake in show business. Consider the often-heard argument that Two and a Half Men is 'good' because it has the highest viewership of any comedy program. This boils down to the idea that so many people liking it is constitutive of it being 'good.' While gaining the approval of so many people is certainly an achievement of some kind, and though the factors leading to its popularity may ultimately render it a thing of artistic value, those are independent things. And it has long been held that a claim that something is of artistic worth must be more than a the simple claim of "I like it."

This all seems like a little-to-no-brainer, but in the fog of war it's a real muddle. Entertainments generally aren't expressly commercial nor are they expressly artistic, and most entertainment practioners/producers won't pander (all the way) down to the lowest common denominator, nor will they (totally) screw the audience. But when companies are trying to do commerce by way of art, you can lose track of where you're located on the art-commerce continuum, as I routinely did earlier in my career.

The muddle is exacerbated by awards like the Oscars and Golden Globes. It would be one thing if all the grotesque self-congratulation were at least focused on the arts side of the spectrum (which I concede Lady Oscar mostly does), but when you are the Emmys and you nominate Two and Half Men for a series award many times but The Wire never, it's a joke, and you couldn't possibly be valuing the arts side over the commerce side. And The Wire is obviously good because lots of people say so.