"These forms of criticism are just as good as this one. And this form of criticism is inferior."
...*sigh*. Okay...
How about just this: It's better for criticism to be aware of its own biases.
I get really uncomfortable these days when someone suggests that a work of commentary or criticism is innately superior for being viewed through the lens of... I don't know, take your pick. Post-modern feminism? Working-class urban culture? Third-generation African American sensibilities? Post-reconstructionist Southern pride? Sheer academic deconstructionism?
Too often such labels seem to come with as much lingo and presupposition as they do actual enlightenment or consideration. "Of course you believe 'x', it's self-evident. And if you don't, you might as well leave, because everything from here on out stems from 'x'. And you better have brought your phrasebook, because we're using a set of terms that furthers those self-evident truths, and if you don't understand explicitly what those terms mean, you're not going to be able to keep up anyway."
There's nothing wrong with a critic being smart, and as I say, it's great when critics are aware of the lens through which they view media. It's far less of a good thing when their lens renders them arcane to anyone who isn't already in the know, or who stopped following after the first paragraph because the critic made an assumption that to them was capital-T Truth and to the audience was so much dogma. It's way too easy for the critic to stop "educating their audience" and become self-congratulatory for their own allegedly superior view, content to preach to their small choir and never actually reaching out to those who might benefit from a broader range of ideas. Too often such criticism becomes unimpeachable in the eye of the author, its polarized view making everyone who disagrees part of a vilified subclass whose intentions are equally self-evident and can be dismissed through scholarly analysis- analysis which often, perversely, imagines itself objective.
MB hits on the idea of "objectivity" as an unreachable ideal, but kind of fails to follow through with what that really means. While there will and should always be room for criticism that views things through particular cultural and ideological lenses, many- perhaps most- critics should strive for a degree of objectivity. That doesn't necessarily mean putting all biases or cultural touchstones aside (which is likely impossible anyway), but at least being aware when a particular piece of media is hitting a critic's sweet- or sore- spots that others might or not possess.
I can't help but remember an early review of the movie "The Handmaid's Tale" by Owen Gleiberman, of Entertainment Weekly, that in the very first sentence described the origin work as a "paranoid feminist 1984." All I could think for the rest of the review was, "Gleiberman, you worthless hack, you should have recused yourself."
