Critiquing the Art of the Critique
We are a society of criticism. We've created an industry for it; there isn't any form of entertainment or art it doesn't touch. Music, literature, food, movies, sport politics, it's all included. Each of us has had a personal brush with it every time we had a paper graded in school or played a wrong note on an instrument. Given how much we're surrounded by it, is it really that surprising that we have a tendency to be a little critical ourselves? We've all done it, even if only to mentally sketch out an alternate ending to that movie or bewail the less-than-stellar season of a favorite team. The irony is that the one thing we haven't bothered to critique is criticism itself. So to add irony to irony, that's exactly what I'm going to do. It all started with 8th grade English. We had just finished reading Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian novel depicting a dire future of information repression where books are systematically sought o