"The reviewer is a singularly detested enemy because he is, unlike the hapless artist, invulnerable"
About this Quote
There’s a sitcom veteran’s knife twist in Carroll O’Connor’s line: the reviewer isn’t hated for being wrong, but for being safe. Coming from an actor who spent decades inside a business where your face, your voice, your choices are the product, “invulnerable” lands as the real indictment. Artists go onstage, go on camera, get tagged with failure in public, and then have to show up again tomorrow. Critics get to strike and withdraw, protected by distance, by institutions, by the tidy authority of the byline.
The phrasing “singularly detested enemy” is intentionally melodramatic, almost cartoonish, and that’s the point. O’Connor is dramatizing an asymmetry of risk. The artist is “hapless” not because they lack agency, but because the marketplace makes them porous: box office numbers, ratings, cancellations, typecasting, gossip. A review can become a career footnote. Meanwhile the reviewer’s consequences are mostly social, not material; a bad take rarely costs them their livelihood in the way a bad performance can.
Subtextually, it’s also a shot at the culture of judgment-as-entertainment. Criticism can be illuminating, but it can also function as sport: a performance of superiority with no reciprocal exposure. O’Connor isn’t arguing that artists should be immune from critique. He’s arguing that the critic’s power comes from a structural advantage, and that advantage breeds resentment because it feels like combat where only one side bleeds.
The phrasing “singularly detested enemy” is intentionally melodramatic, almost cartoonish, and that’s the point. O’Connor is dramatizing an asymmetry of risk. The artist is “hapless” not because they lack agency, but because the marketplace makes them porous: box office numbers, ratings, cancellations, typecasting, gossip. A review can become a career footnote. Meanwhile the reviewer’s consequences are mostly social, not material; a bad take rarely costs them their livelihood in the way a bad performance can.
Subtextually, it’s also a shot at the culture of judgment-as-entertainment. Criticism can be illuminating, but it can also function as sport: a performance of superiority with no reciprocal exposure. O’Connor isn’t arguing that artists should be immune from critique. He’s arguing that the critic’s power comes from a structural advantage, and that advantage breeds resentment because it feels like combat where only one side bleeds.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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