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Criticism is pretty intresting as a medium, lets talk about some of the aspects of criticism as a practice.

Preceding these arguments is a need to define criticism: Criticism is any piece of work that supports a mode of reading to allow for a referential comentary on another thing. Thing being any artistic, political, social event, movement, or work - that is all things in general can be subject to criticism. A painting can be criticized for its poor use of color, a government for its policy, a philosophy for its logic etc..

Criticism itself is divided into two kinds: which I will be calling textual and contextual critique. The textual critique is what we see in newspaper food reviews, review sites such as yelp or letterboxd, and in the "review" sections of any online retailer. The textual critique is what we typically think of as reviews, they are plentiful and exist everywhere in our day to day. These textual critiques are works that make their primary readings the explicit critique of their related work - there often is little value to a textual review without this relation. The Contextual critique is a critique embeded within the context of a work itself. Many creative works are often created in the context of artistic movements preceding them, and thus engage in a critique within the contextuality of the work.

There are various levels of abstraction in which an artist critiques - Rear Window constructs a critique on voyeurism and cinema in an allegorical way - that it allows and perhaps encourages us to draw a parralel between the voyeurism of the film's photographer protagonist, and our own voyeurism Afterall, when the people of the film look into binoculars, we too are looking with them. A film like Where Is The Friends House? constructs a critque on society in its implicit treatment of children and education. It does not create an allegorical critique, but rather a straightforward one in its employment of pacing and dialogue.

Note to self talk about Obayashi's scrapped ending of Beijing Watermelon, in how it is a work created at first with the implicit context of the democratic protests of china, but eventually becoming explicit after the Tianamen Square Massacre, maybe talk about Bound For the Fields, in how it uses acting and shooting styles to contextually create meaning - that these choices have no meaning without the context of silent film, and its implications on childhood innocence and facism. These being both works that operate contextually in intresting ways.

When a critic produces a work that criticizes another, it is inherently in discussion with the meta-contextual world surrounding the piece - that is, it is observing the work as a member of the world in relation to other pieces. This is inherent in criticism itself, as it attaches in some way to the messaging of its original work. Criticism is intresting in this regard, as this attachment to another is inherent

citations

Aronowitz, Stanley, and Henry A. Giroux. 1991. Postmodern Education : Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Borges, J.L. and E. Weinberger. 2000. Selected non-fictions. New York: Penguin Books.