The Rankification of Art
How ratings demean art and artists.
We rate everything.
We rate former employers, teachers, drivers, dry cleaners, grocery stores, DMVs, restaurants, people’s looks, monuments, toilet seats, and national parks.
There’s even a Black Mirror episode in which social ratings dictate people’s opportunities in life.
And yes, we rate art. We rate film, literature, theater, music, and the visual arts. There are one-star reviews of some of the most celebrated works of art and literature. Some of them are quite funny. LitHub compiled 50 of the “best” one-star reviews of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Here’s one of my favorites:
“This Book was not my Choice. Book Club. I did not finish the book. I did not attend the book club that evening because had conflicting things to go to.”
But the core problem isn’t the casual takedowns of great works from Random Internet Person. Sometimes they’re amusing, reminding us that nothing is sacred on this silly spinning rock. It’s not even the one-star ratings that matter. I doubt Virginia Woolf cares that this version of To the Lighthouse only has a 3.8 rating on Amazon.
What matters most is that we rate art at all. Such rankification flattens art. It rounds out the sharp edges and fills in the crannies. It files away its buttes and crags, smoothing it out into one uniform integer. Art is reduced to a whole number. It becomes the number.
Putting a number on art oversimplifies it; by oversimplifying art, we divest it of its quiddity and miscalculate its vectors. It ceases to be itself or go anywhere, constrained and encapsulated by that number.
We’re ensorcelled by rankification, slave to its reductive force. We declare a work of art to be a 7 out of ten or 3 out of 4 stars, as if we have been endowed with the divine authority to determine its worth and its fate by unilateral decree. We decide what it is.
This makes us feel big. We fancy ourselves connoisseurs—arbiters of taste and skill, convinced of our dominion over the arts. But it’s an illusion. When we rank art, especially in retributive haste, we reveal more about ourselves than we do the works. Perhaps the work offended, saddened, or confused us. Perhaps it failed to meet our expectations. Perhaps it made us uncomfortable, forcing us to confront something we’ve long ignored. We retaliate by punishing it for its insolence. In doing so, we demean ourselves and the work.
The very act of rating and ranking art diminishes the quality of our appreciation because appreciating art is necessarily nuanced. Numbers aren’t nuanced. They’re precise. To confine a work of art to a number is to rub out the shades and contours that make it unique. One might argue that ranking doesn’t define the work, but art is meant to be perceived, and ranking influences that perception.
Who are we to judge?
There is also something more sinister afoot: Rankification grooms art for commoditization.
Stamping a number onto something assigns value. Therefore, assigning a work of art with a numerical rating establishes its viability within a marketplace. I want artists and writers to be paid fairly but determining their worth via an unvetted aggregate ratings paste ain’t it. This system demeans writers and artists, coaxing many into becoming ratings merchants.
Here’s an example of how broken this system is:
My sister’s third book was published a couple of years ago. Any author who isn’t rich and famous knows that those early ratings matter because the ratings score colors the perception of would-be buyers. Most of her early ratings were positive, but there was a one-star review that griped about the book being YA romance. The reviewer in question didn’t like YA romance. The title suggests romance, the book is marketed as such, and its cover clearly indicates romance. To ding the book for being what it clearly markets itself to be is tantamount to going to going to a steakhouse and complaining that the restaurant serves steak. That’s on you, chef.
I avoid ratings generators these days unless I’m there to support an independent author or artist. I avoid Goodreads, Rotten Tomatoes, and their ilk. I don’t want to contribute to the rankification of art. I still, however, appreciate thoughtful reviews or, better yet, what friend and filmmaker,
, does. He appreciates art, revels in it, analyzes it, contextualizes, and, when so moved, sings its praises.In April, it was announced that a new Thomas Pynchon novel was scheduled to be published in the fall. A longtime fan of Pynchon, Dane started posting a daily Note about Pynchon, which he eventually parlayed into what is, as of writing, a five-part Post series on his Substack,
, which I’m guessing spans thousands of words. This isn’t a review. It’s a work in and of itself—a meditation, a compendium, a paean. It’s rapturous rubbernecking.I’ve never read a Pynchon novel, but now I’m intrigued. What would move someone, whom I respect as a filmmaker and writer, to dedicate so much time and energy to one author? That means more to me than 10,000 ratings.
When Shadow Ticket drops, I won’t be swayed by ratings or where the book ranks within the author’s oeuvre. Instead, I’ll pay attention to people like Dane, who don’t take shortcuts and don’t hide behind tidy numbers, and who aren’t afraid to show great, big, unabashed enthusiasm. Too many cool-kid critics out there.
Ultimately, I’ll have to decide what Pynchon’s writing means to me, but however I feel, I won’t be assigning a number. I’d much rather talk to Dane.