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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 9635610">What I am saying is one being an expert doesn't automatically make them right about things. I am not saying there isn't value in learning about the history of a given medium or being an expert in a given field. But just like anything else, there are bad experts. And good experts can be wrong (or use their expertise to make their opinion sound like a fact). People who have seen a lot of movies but aren't professionals can also be right sometimes. And people are always right about their own taste in a thing.I am not saying fan generated conversations are the same as academic ones or ones taking place in papers. But I also think they have tremendous value. I know I have gotten a lot out of what are essentially amateur reviews of niche genres by passionate fans (often much more than I get out of reviews that are better written and in published books). But I am not saying people shouldn't teach literature or that experts aren't important.Obviously a person who has never read much of anything saying they think Shakespeare is overrated is not something people should take very seriously. But I think when there are rifts between the tastes of professional critics or experts in the arts and audiences, then that is something worth looking at and talking about.At the end of the day though I do think how art makes people feel is the thing that truly matters and we shouldn't undervalue that (and I do think it is worth exploring)I think there are different kind of movie critics. Obviously someone getting paid to do film criticism should take their job and craft seriously. But there are different levels of criticism, and I think there is value in a lot of the amateur stuff available on line these days. There are academic critics, there are journalist critics and there are critics operating more in the fan-sphere of things. I wouldn't ever argue these aren't different. But I do think it is a mistake to undervalue the fan critics. This came up elsewhere in the thread but there are some genres with deeply passionate fans who who may not have the broader perspective of a professional critic (which is valuable) but bring obsessive fan dedication to the genre and in my experience they often spot things that professional critics miss (they can be wrong too because fan criticisms are a much more casual enterprise with less editorial oversight).I also think part of what happens is experts and professional critics can lose touch with regular audiences. So I don't think non-experts refraining from weighing in on the conversation is healthy. Art is something that we should all share culturally and be able to freely comment on. You just have to take someone with a grain of salt if they are 18, have only seen 30 movies and start telling you the history of gangster cinema.Sure but we aren't really talking about that. We are more talking about non-professionals who have seen a lot of movies and read a lot of books (they just might not have an editor or training). I will admit I sometimes also like watching reaction videos, which are usually people who haven't seen that many movies. But I find that helpful too because it can be useful to see what kind of reaction people have to a movie when they aren't as familiar with the genre or styleI doubt we can go here without getting into politics, but I intentionally drew a distinction between opinions about John Wick movies, and opinions about things like gravity. The stake's are just so much different (and I think the arts isn't something that should be cloistered away and only discussed publicly by professionals)</blockquote>

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