Reviews and Reviewing

Why write reviews?

I suppose that this endeavor is as egotistical as they come. Why are my thoughts and reactions worth saving, let alone sharing? There are a few things that motivate me.

  1. Very flatteringly, a number of people have heard that I'm going to the New York Film Festival and they want to know what I saw and what I recommend. When I mention that I do cardio in front of the TV, and so have seen a ton of what's streaming, I get similar questions.

  2. As I've had time I did not once have to think about what I've watched, I've been disappointed with the amount of thought I've put into what I've seen.

What makes a meaningful review?

I may be deeply unenlightened, but for me, art is something that produces an emotional reaction, and the purpose of writing about it is to memorialize and elucidate that reaction, and delve into why the viewer had that reaction.

That's what motivates me more than anything: a desire to record how something I experienced made me feel. There's something about the power of the memory of an emotion that reaches past the psyche and into a more primitive place, or maybe it's the child-brain we all bury. I feel (ha) that I can be more exact about what that feeling is, and where its power comes from, in the written word, and that will make for a better referral for friends or just a reminder of my own experience.

And once I have those feelings down, it seems like the writing would be incomplete without going into how the work did what it did to me. Why did I feel that way? Why was it that the thing it did that made me feel that way had that effect? Why to that? And so on with the five whys.

"Reviews" (if that's even the right word) are only meaningful if they start with that personal perspective.

A friend, who went on to become a muckity-muck in the art world, but at the time was a budding journalism student, once told me that "art is anything that makes you think." He loved to say outrageous things, and maybe this was one of them, but now, 30 years after he first said it to me, I am more accepting of his definition than I was at the time.