A Quote by Pauline Kael
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
Advertising has always been a huge unrecognised source of outdoor relief for the arts.
Virgil Thomson, the great classical music critic, who was also a composer, but said that criticism was the only antidote he knew to pay publicity. Critics at their best are independent voices people take seriously their responsibility to see as many things as they can see, put them in the widest possible perspective, educate their readers, I really do think of myself as a teacher. Newspapers that don't carry arts criticism at all while not fulfill this function. And probably their arts journalism will be deprived as a result.
For me archaeology is not a source of illustrations for written texts, but an independent source of historical information, with no less value and importance, sometimes more importance, that the written sources.
It is true that advertising often gives information and is valuable for doing so, but some forms of advertising give precious little information, and even that little is wrong.
The effectiveness of advertising depends on the amount and kind of product information available to consumers... advertising will be more successful the more impoverished the consumer's information environment.
One of my purposes is to use the television show as a voice to not only entertain people, as I did in the beginning, but as a source of information, as a source of enlightenment, wherever we can, and also as a source of lifting people up wherever you can.
I mean, you can't have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.
Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each of the members of the group holds privately. It's the combination of all those pieces of independent information, some of them right, some of the wrong, that keeps the group wise.
You find very few critics who approach their job with a combination of information and enthusiasm and humility that makes for a good critic. But there is nothing wrong with critics as long as people don't pay any attention to them. I mean, nobody wants to put them out of a job and a good critic is not necessarily a dead critic. It's just that people take what a critic says as a fact rather than an opinion, and you have to know whether the opinion of the critic is informed or uninformed, intelligent of stupid -- but most people don't take the trouble.
I should say that being independent in the modern model means independent in a very interdependent world. An independent Scotland is not apart from the rest of the United Kingdom.
The problem for independent filmmakers is that huge companies control all the promotion, all the advertising. Hollywood films' advertising budgets are as large as their shooting budgets.
The problem is that Americans would like to be independent of the rest of the world ... Except the world ain't that way. Trying to be independent of the rest of the world is to commit suicide.
Traditionally, diplomacy was done in an environment of information scarcity. Ambassadors would send back telegrams to foreign ministries, comfortable in the knowledge that their views of a country would be the only source of information the minister would see.
Criticism will need an injection of humility that is, a recognition of its role as ancillary to the arts, needed only occasionally in a temporary capacity. Since the critic exists only for introducing and explaining, he must be readily intelligible; he has no special vocabulary: criticism is in no way a science or a system.
The forced influence of advertising has given us completely useless TV. You don't want that on the Net. But most on-line information providers need to attract advertising - which slows download times and clutters the screen with windows.
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