Better Living Through Criticism

When was the last time you paused to ask yourself why you liked or disliked something—a film, a song, a meal, or even someone’s opinion? In Better Living Through Criticism, Anthony O. Scott, longtime film critic for The New York Times, argues that learning to think about our judgments—especially our aesthetic ones—is not an idle pastime but a vital human act. He contends that criticism isn't just the province of professionals with cultural authority; rather, it’s the everyday work of being awake and reflective in a world awash in art, opinions, and noise.

This book begins with a deceptively simple question: What good is a critic? Scott uses a real-life confrontation with actor Samuel L. Jackson to explore the hostility and misunderstanding critics face, especially in our age of social media backlash and instant reactions. When Jackson attacked Scott for reviewing The Avengers unfavorably, it sparked a global mini-drama that exposed a collective suspicion: aren’t critics just joyless haters? Scott’s retort is profound: everyone is a critic, because judgment is inseparable from consciousness itself.

Criticism as the Art of Thinking

Scott reframes criticism as a mode of engaged thinking—a process of examining how and why things move us. Drawing on philosophers from Immanuel Kant to Susan Sontag, he asserts that our responses to beauty and art aren’t passive pleasures but acts of intellectual and emotional participation. When you evaluate art, you’re also evaluating your own beliefs, taste, and capacity for meaning. The heart of the book lies in Scott’s conviction that criticism is creative. It adds new dimensions of insight to already created works and keeps art alive by provoking conversation and revision.

The Twin of Art

Scott insists that criticism is not a parasite on art but its sibling—its mirror, its late-born twin. Both spring from humankind’s urge to interpret and revise reality. Artists make things as they struggle with existence; critics make meaning from those things to understand that struggle. The critic becomes, in Scott’s romantic view, a dreamer who sees the dawn before others do (borrowing from Oscar Wilde’s notion that the critic as artist discovers what the original creator did not know they had made).

Criticism for Everyone—Not Just Experts

One of Scott’s most important ideas is that we all engage in criticism constantly, even outside art. From deciding which meal is delicious to judging what counts as truth in news or politics, we are always evaluating. Criticism therefore becomes the backbone of democratic and cultural participation. To think critically is to resist manipulation and lazy conformity. Scott laments that modern society prizes easy pleasure and group identity over reflection, creating a kind of intellectual passivity. Criticism, uniquely, teaches us to slow down, to wonder, and to defend art’s ambiguity in a climate of certainty and outrage.

Why It Matters Now

In a world overwhelmed by content, algorithms, and quick opinions, Scott argues that criticism is not dying—it’s exploding. Though professional critics have lost institutional authority in the Internet era, the instinct to interpret hasn’t vanished. Every tweet, review, and comment reflects criticism’s democratic spread. But without discipline, this explosion risks triviality. Hence, the better way to live—through criticism—demands thoughtfulness, sincerity, and self-awareness. For Scott, criticism is a celebration of freedom of mind. It’s the act of turning everyday judgment into artful inquiry, enabling us to live not just as consumers of experience but as conscious participants in culture’s ongoing conversation.

Through lively dialogues, history, and anecdotes—ranging from Marina Abramović’s performance art to Rilke’s encounter with a Greek statue—Scott demonstrates that criticism is the bridge between art and life. It’s how we translate experience into understanding, how we change our lives after being changed by something beautiful. Ultimately, Scott’s thesis invites you to think of every moment of delight, confusion, or indignation not as reaction but as opportunity: an invitation to discern meaning. In defending criticism, he defends your right to think deeply about what you love, what you reject, and why. That’s what makes criticism not just necessary—but life-enhancing.

Scott opens the book with a provocative chapter titled “The Critic as Artist and Vice Versa,” borrowing from Oscar Wilde’s playful paradox. His central claim: criticism isn’t secondary to creation—it's itself an act of artistic imagination. History, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to George Bernard Shaw, shows many creators who were also critics. Baudelaire wrote about painting, Berlioz wrote about music, and the French New Wave filmmakers began as film critics before reinventing cinema. Criticism, Scott argues, doesn’t merely judge art—it extends it.

Criticism Completes the Circle of Creation

If art is “autotelic”—self-contained, as T.S. Eliot and Kant described—then criticism is its necessary counterforce, translating and transforming art’s meaning through thought. Every artist, Scott points out, begins as a critic of their influences. Jean-Luc Godard, for example, worshiped Hollywood’s pulp directors and turned that admiration into new language in Breathless. Picasso critiqued Velázquez and Goya through paint, not prose. Even Shakespeare ransacked myths and histories to remake them as commentary on storytelling itself. For Scott, each creative act is also an act of judgment—a desire to correct, reinterpret, and renew what came before.

Imitation as the Engine of Originality

Scott elegantly traces how artists and critics form a perpetual ecosystem of imitation and invention. Hip-hop, for example, doesn’t destroy originality by sampling—it embodies it. The “mash-ups” of modern pop culture, from Quentin Tarantino’s film homages to Warhol’s ironic prints, show that novelty often emerges through revisiting the old. “Imitation is not erosion of originality,” Scott writes, “it is the condition of originality.” This idea reframes influence as creative criticism: when Springsteen reshapes Chuck Berry’s riffs, he’s critiquing rock tradition through sound.

The Eternal Tension Between Artist and Critic

Yet art and criticism maintain a competitive sibling rivalry. Echoing H.L. Mencken, Scott jokes that the artist supplies the raw material, while the critic reshapes it for expression. He calls this duel “a hearty strife” that keeps culture alive. A critic’s arrogance—claiming the power to remake meaning—is balanced by humility: great criticism, like great art, arises from uncertainty. The critic’s paradox is that in explaining art, they risk obscuring it. But that tension, Scott says, is fertile; it prevents art from ossifying into dogma.

In the end, Scott argues criticism is larger than any single art form because it encompasses them all. It’s “not parasitic but primary.” His examples—from Eliot’s theory of tradition to Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence—show that creativity depends on the critic's urge to question. Every masterpiece begins with criticism of the past. The critic, therefore, isn’t an outsider sneering at art’s failures, but the inner voice that keeps art—and human thought—restlessly alive.

Why do you like what you like? Scott’s second major section, “The Eye of the Beholder,” explores taste as the foundation of criticism. We often assume taste is personal and instinctive—“no accounting for taste”—but Scott argues that our likes and dislikes have philosophical depth. Borrowing from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, he explains that taste operates in the strange space between subjective feeling and universal claim. When you say “that’s beautiful,” you’re not simply expressing preference—you’re asking others to agree.

Subjective Universality

Kant suggested that judgments of beauty create an expectation of shared recognition—what he called “subjective universality.” Scott updates this idea for an era of digital fragmentation. We no longer presume shared taste; social media trains us to curate, not converse. Yet, as Scott shows, the longing for universality endures. When millions line up to see a Marvel movie or weep before an art installation, they echo that Enlightenment idea: beauty connects us beyond private whim. (Think of Edmund Burke’s crowd gathered around a beautiful bird—Scott’s riff on Kant’s example.)

The Case of Marina Abramović

Scott brings theory to life with Marina Abramović’s 2010 performance at MoMA, where she sat silently facing visitors for hours. Thousands waited to meet her gaze; some cried, others trembled. What were they responding to? Not spectacle, but pure presence—the uncanny recognition that art could look back at them. Scott compares these tears to Rilke’s experience before the Archaic Torso of Apollo: that powerful moment when the object of beauty seems to command, “You must change your life.”

From Rilke to Larkin: Art’s Shock of Recognition

By pairing Rilke’s ecstatic response with Philip Larkin’s plainspoken poem “Reasons for Attendance,” Scott shows that aesthetic experience can be exalted or everyday. Rilke’s statue transforms him; Larkin’s jazz trumpeter reminds him he’s alive. Both awaken the inner critic—the part of us that feels before thinking. Art moves us not by logic but by recognition, by the feeling that something outside us suddenly knows us. That recognition, Scott writes, is the beginning of criticism, because it demands we articulate what just happened.

Taste, then, is not passive preference but active engagement with the world. Scott reminds us that to refine taste is to deepen empathy. Every “I like this” contains a potential “why?”—and answering that question is where better living begins.

In “Lost in the Museum,” Scott leads you through the Louvre’s crowded hallways to explore how culture and history shape what we see. The museum, he writes, is a paradox: it promises transcendence but enforces social hierarchy. This chapter expands criticism beyond art objects into the structures that surround them—the institutions, economies, and ideologies that determine what counts as “culture.”

Culture’s Confusion

Scott opens with Raymond Williams’s observation that “culture” is one of the most complicated words in English. It means education, refinement, habit, civilization—all intertwined with power. At the Louvre, the tourist’s pilgrimage becomes a confrontation with Europe’s legacy of conquest and inequality: artifacts plundered by empires now serve as icons of universal beauty. Walter Benjamin’s eerie truth rings out: “Every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism.”

The Democratization—and Commodification—of Art

Scott revisits Henry James’s The American, where a bemused American capitalist wanders through the Louvre feeling “an aesthetic headache.” Like James’s character, modern museumgoers are overwhelmed by authority: art tells us what to feel, and we feel guilty for not feeling enough. The museum thus stages the tension between democracy and elitism: everyone can enter, but few feel at home. When culture becomes mass tourism, its egalitarian promise collapses into consumer spectacle. The Mona Lisa behind Plexiglas becomes less art than brand.

Criticism as Cultural Resistance

Scott connects this to the “culture wars” of academia—the endless debates about canons, diversity, and authority. For him, these wars weren’t failures; they were examples of criticism doing its job: questioning who decides what matters. True critics, he says, reject false binaries. Rather than choosing between “high” and “low” culture, we now live amid abundance—and abundance demands discernment. The critic’s task is not to worship the old or chase the new, but to keep art’s meanings in motion.

“Lost in the Museum” transforms cultural overwhelm into philosophical insight. When you feel dwarfed by the Louvre’s walls, Scott suggests, remember: that confusion is where criticism begins. The act of asking, “Who decided this was great?” is how you reclaim your freedom to see freshly.

Scott’s fourth major idea centers on the paradox that criticism both enlightens and provokes resentment. “Criticism is not nice,” he begins bluntly. To criticize is to find fault—to puncture illusions of perfection and expose insecurity. Yet, society depends on that discomfort to improve its taste and intelligence.

The Critic’s Bad Reputation

Scott surveys centuries of scorn for critics—from Aristophanes’ mockery of know-it-alls to modern Twitter outrage. Artists, he notes, have long accused critics of parasitism and jealousy. John Keats, rumored to have died of bad reviews; Herman Melville, ignored for Moby-Dick; and countless others illustrate how criticism can wound. But Scott insists that those wounds reveal criticism’s vitality: any culture that truly cares about art must allow arguments about it, even cruel ones.

What Good Critics Do

To defend the profession, Scott invokes historical models—from Matthew Arnold’s moral seriousness to Susan Sontag’s erotic attention. Both remind us that criticism’s goal isn’t destruction but deep appreciation. Arnold saw critics as keeping society from “retarding and vulgarizing itself”; Sontag saw criticism as restoring passion and sensuality to thought. Their task, Scott explains, is spiritual and sensual: to teach how to see more, hear more, feel more.

Criticism as a Public Service

When young readers ask how criticism can be a “real job,” Scott recalls his conversation with a thirteen-year-old boy who wondered how watching movies could count as work. His answer: critics do what everyone does—they think deeply about pleasure. Their labor gives structure to chaos, offering guidance without authority. On this point, Scott sides with R.P. Blackmur and Pauline Kael: a critic’s work is an art of the voice—a creative performance that communicates curiosity. The best criticism doesn’t dictate taste; it invites dialogue. To be a critic, therefore, is not simply to judge but to join a conversation that keeps culture honest and alive.

Scott’s fifth principle is his most radical: the critic’s duty is to be wrong. Every judgment, he insists, is provisional—a step toward truth that can never be final. “Being wrong,” Scott writes, “is the critic’s sacred duty.” Why? Because absolute certainty kills conversation. Criticism, like science, thrives on testing, revising, and disputing ideas.

The Value of Error

Scott compares criticism to scientific inquiry: hypotheses must be falsifiable. To claim perfect knowledge of art is not wisdom but arrogance. He cites film history’s reversals—how Bringing Up Baby was panned in 1938 and later hailed as genius. Critics, trapped in the present, misjudge constantly; that fallibility, he says, is not failure but function. Each mistaken review becomes raw material for later insight. The future revises the past because art itself evolves.

The Eternal Pendulum of Taste

Scott traces two opposing errors—the cult of the old and the cult of the new. Nostalgists idolize masterpieces as unassailable, while revolutionaries ditch tradition in favor of novelty. Both are wrong, and both are necessary. Art progresses through their tension. The critic’s challenge is to inhabit contradiction—to see both the beauty in tradition and the possibility in innovation. His historical tour, from Nicolas Boileau’s “Ancients vs. Moderns” dispute to Harold Bloom’s theory of influence, shows that wrongness is how culture breathes.

Seeing Two Things at Once

Scott explains one perennial source of critical confusion: the split between form and content. Are we judging the craft or the meaning? His playful answer: both, and neither. To analyze art only as technique misses its spirit; to treat it as pure message kills its mystery. Formalism and moralism both fail unless they argue. “Criticism,” he says, “is the art of thinking twice.” To be wrong, then, is to remain willing to change your mind—to keep seeing anew.

In every false start, every revision, Scott finds the critic’s freedom: the permission to doubt. In a polarized, algorithm-driven era where opinions calcify instantly, his reminder feels radical. Being wrong, in criticism, is another way of being truly alive.

In his final chapters, Scott examines criticism’s uncertain fate in the digital era. The Internet, he argues, has democratized criticism while also threatening its depth. Everyone now reviews books, films, restaurants, and each other online—but abundance often breeds mediocrity. Scott worries that the proliferation of commentary (on Amazon, Yelp, and Rotten Tomatoes) replaces thoughtful engagement with crowd-think and statistical consensus.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Scott echoes Henry James’s century-old complaint that criticism “flows through the periodical press like a river that has burst its dikes.” Today, it floods the Web. He contrasts the artistry of Edmund Wilson—who smuggled deep insight into magazine reviews—with the superficial algorithms that now distill opinions into scores. Yet, Scott resists despair. Digital criticism, he believes, continues humanity’s ancient impulse to interpret. The tools have changed; the need has not.

Criticism’s Professional Crisis

Examining academia and journalism, Scott shows how criticism has survived previous revolutions—from Gutenberg’s press to television. He revisits Yvor Winters’s and Lionel Trilling’s struggles to justify criticism as intellectual labor. Their dilemma mirrors ours: critics now must prove their value amid free content and dwindling paid work. Scott cites Gillian Welch’s lyric “Everything Is Free” to capture this moment: art endures even when money doesn’t. Critics, too, must adapt by reasserting the worth of conversation over consumption.

Criticism as Lifeline

Ultimately, Scott ends on cautious optimism. The online cacophony isn’t criticism’s death—it’s its rebirth. Every comment, blog, and tweet proves our irrepressible urge to make meaning. The problem isn’t quantity; it’s quality. “There will never be enough criticism,” Scott concludes, “and always too much.” The balance, he suggests, depends on readers taking up the critic’s mantle themselves—not to rate or rant, but to think. Better living through criticism doesn’t mean trusting experts—it means becoming one, every day, in how you perceive, question, and create.