For starters, age brings freedom. At a certain point you get to set your own standards, like substituting donuts for protein.
January is the month for birthdays in my family. Everyone seems to have one. And all have followed convention by becoming just a bit older. Yearly trips around the sun carry the price of some wear and tear on the body, with the compensation of expanding in to a little more compassion and empathy for others. No guarantees, of course. We’ve all known people who wear their accumulating years with little grace. We have the bite marks on our lips to prove it.
But aging still has clear advantages; those of us who are old enough to remember the telephone as a complete nuisance are likely to see added years more clearly. For starters, age brings freedom. At a certain point you get to set your own standards, like substituting donuts for protein, or including wine and ketchup in the food hierarchy of fruits and vegetables. In that improved guide, a Mediterranean diet of pizza and pasta go to the very top.
Men who have been freed from the strictures of a daily job also get to revert to the kinds of outfits they liked when they were eight years old. And retirement brings more freedom to chase after balls of various sizes around courts and weeds. Women have the tougher road to aging; they must suffer through a shameless juggernaut of media content pushing clothes, diet and skin products that promise too much. With these changes, most of us who have circumnavigated the sun more times than some asteroids have lost interest in mirrors and selfies. After every house remodel my bathroom mirror grows smaller. It’s turns out to be better all around to finally look outward.
Another advantage of passing into older age is the fact that most people assume that you can’t hear very well. That’s true for some. But this stereotype is an opportunity to finally have a reason to ignore unpleasant comments from fools who deserve to be unnoticed. There are few things I liked about the Reagan Presidency. But Reagan mastered the blank smile of a person who hasn’t a clue of what you are saying. I like to think that his bad hearing might have even saved lives.
Age also takes away some of the endless concerns shared by most of the young that they are meeting the standards of others. In most cases parents counterbalanced their love with expectations that outstripped the numerous jeremiads of the Puritans. Many of us have spent years trying to fulfill what was anticipated for us. We were usually not neglected, but also not allowed to forget the well-intended but incessant reminders related to schooling, possible careers, romantic partners, saving money, and finding useful interests. Many of us became temporary Reagans, learning to nod in agreement while keeping our own counsel. For everyone else, adulthood and a real income makes psychotherapy an option for putting frayed egos back together.
Informed criticism is clearly diminished as a cultural mainstay, in part because we have made it so much easier to produce and distribute simulations of cultural products.
This is an era in American life where the young seem as interested in becoming content creators than content appreciators. To be sure, this is a broad and inexact distinction. But it is clear that a large segment of younger Americans today are ready to self-identify as musicians, songwriters, filmmakers, writers or audio producers, without much experience or training. The results are usually predictably modest: unplanned videos, under-edited and “published” books, magazine-inspired blogs, or derivative music produced in front of a computer. Without doubt, serendipity has always had a place in producing wonderful new talent. But it is also true that more of us want to count ourselves as being a part of the broad media mix made possible with nearly universal internet access. It’s now hardly surprising to meet a middle schooler who edits their own videos or, after a fashion, curates their own web presence. As You Tube demonstrates, self-produced media content is unmistakably popular.
If this first quarter of the new century is the age of the content producer, it seems that—broadly speaking—the last half of the previous century was an era for witnessing and reflecting on breathtaking talent. The decline of this impulse is a loss. An appreciator is more than a consumer. These are folks with an understanding of the history and conventions of a form, with an equal interest in exploring how new works can build on and stretch the most stale of cultural ideas. The best work of appreciators can be cautionary, encouraging, or fire us with the enthusiasm that comes with new insights. Productive analysis can help us fathom what we do not yet understand.
Pauline Kael
In the previous century, critics and essayists of all kinds of art were ubiquitous. Periodicals and big city newspapers routinely published considered assessments of trend-setters in popular culture, fiction, television, theater and film. Some combined their pieces in book-length studies of the period that are still worth reading. Michael Arlen and Neil Postman wrote insightful analyses of news and entertainment television. Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert were among many popular reviewers producing novel assessments of films and the film industry. They were matched by music critics like Michael Kennedy, Dave Marsh, Gene Lees and Donal Hanahan, who provided appraisals of performers and performances. Their counterparts in the visual arts included writers like Robert Hughes, Walter Benjamin, and Jerry Saltz: all exploring the vagaries of talent and caché in that enigmatic world.
Among countless publications, readers poured over this criticism in the pages of The Dial, The New Yorker, Gramophone, Paris Review, Harpers, The Atlantic, New York Review of Books and Rolling Stone. And no self-respecting daily newspaper considered itself complete without its own music and film critics. Bigger city papers also added performance reviews of dance, along with the assessments from urbanists of a city’s newest additions to its skyline.
Even beyond obvious and daily samples of book and theater reviews in many Twentieth Century news outlets, there was an entire world of appreciators with appetites for reconsidering the rivers of culture that came from distant headwaters. For example, Gramophone was founded in 1923 by the Scottish author Compton Mackenzie, who understood that there was an appetite for essays about the composers and performers captured in the new electrical recordings of the time. He proved the unlikely proposition that many wanted to read about music almost as much as they wanted to hear it.
Criticism has Diminished as a Cultural Mainstay
Susan Sontag
With video and digital media still mostly in the future, Americans in the first half of the century, had the time and the will to know the backstories of the cultural products of the day. Indeed, some writers like Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Janet Malcom became intellectual thought leaders. They helped to explain what artistic mastery should look like. And they had the counterparts in a range of academic thinkers—T.W. Adorno, David Riesman, Marshall McLuhan and Kenneth Burke, for example—whose deeper cultural probes would soak into the fabric of the nation’s undergraduate curriculum. Sampling the output of so many professional appreciators would keep liberal arts students preoccupied for years, and sometimes forever.
Toland Image From Scene from Citizen Kane
To be sure, our interest in the understandings the nation’s cultural output has not vanished. But criticism is clearly diminished as a cultural mainstay, in part because we have made it so much easier to produce and distribute simulations of cultural products. I use the word “simulations” because the impulse to be a content producer often bypasses the intellectual labor that comes in value-added art. So many today proceed without a grounding in the canons of a particular form: its histories, possibilities, and innovators. I suspect the desire to be an immediate practitioner in a realm that is barely understood is usually fed by the promise of fame. The result, as my colleagues in film sometimes lament, is that students want to be producers of video stories before the have considered the durable conventions of narrative: for example, the norms of a written screenplay, or how this first written map is converted into the visual “language” and grammar of film. To cite a specific case, it would be useful for a young filmmaker to know how cinematographer Greg Toland used light and shadow to create the unmistakable visual palette of Citizen Kane (1941), or how Steven Spielberg and John Williams exploited the tricky business of musical underscoring to leave audiences suitably terrified by Jaws (1975).
In our schools and colleges, the equipment to make art is frequently made available to students who have only rudimentary understandings of how they might be used. The youthful conceit that progress is made by setting aside what has come before is mostly an excuse to avoid the work of contemplation that creates competence and a lasting passion for an art form.
Another advantage of passing into older age is the fact that most people assume that you can’t hear very well. That’s true for some. But this stereotype is an opportunity to finally have a reason to ignore unpleasant comments from fools who deserve to be unnoticed. There are few things I liked about the Reagan Presidency. But Reagan mastered the blank smile of a person who hasn’t a clue of what you are saying. I like to think that his bad hearing might have even saved lives.
Informed criticism is clearly diminished as a cultural mainstay, in part because we have made it so much easier to produce and distribute simulations of cultural products. 
