What's a critic worth in the age of the blogosphere?

As news outlets around the country reported Monday, Ryan Reynolds' superhero send-up, Deadpool, has made a staggering $235.4 million in its first two weeks.

Does that tell you it's a good film?

Or merely that lots of other people think so?

Of course, this theory - that popularity equals quality - is what studios bank on.

Not so for movie critics: When it comes to judging a movie, it's quality that matters.

Or so we hope.

So hopes A.O. Scott in his rousing defense of criticism, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth (Penguin Press, $28). A member of that oft-maligned species, the professional critic - he's been the film critic at the New York Times since 2000 - Scott will discuss the book with Inquirer editor John Timpane 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

An eminently readable, if sometimes rambling, dialogue that engages with the tradition of aesthetic theory, from Aristotle and Kant to Oscar Wilde and Susan Sontag, Better Living Through Criticism examines the role of the critic in the age of the blogosphere.

Scott raises fundamental questions: What is criticism? How do you do it? Why is it vital that everyone learns to do it?

But why should you spend valuable neural energy thinking critically about Deadpool? After all, we go to the movies to get away from it all, to turn off our overworked minds.

"If [studios] spend $200 million to make a movie and ask people to spend money on it, that's something that should be taken seriously," Scott said in a recent phone interview.

"The things we do for pleasure deserve not to be dismissed . . . or taken for granted."

Now, don't get him wrong: Scott is no killjoy.

He doesn't suggest you skip Deadpool in favor of something heavy, say A War, Danish auteur Tobias Lindholm's sublime existential meditation on social responsibility.

He wants you to see both.

"I think there is a lot of entertainment that is wonderful," he said, "that feeds our imagination, that can sustain and enrich our lives."

Scott agrees with Roland Barthes that the experience of art should include jouissance.

At the same time, he writes, there's no such thing as mindless pleasure: When it comes to the esthetic object, our sensibilities, our pleasure-centers are never divorced from our intellect.

There's ample proof of this whenever a movie lets out - people discuss and argue about the movie, they criticize or praise.

"It's something we all do. We think about the movies we see, the entertainment we consume, the art we look at. We discuss it afterward and argue about it because it's part of the way we experience and enjoy things," said Scott.

"For me, thinking is part of the fun, not despite it."

Part of the critic's job is to explore why we get pleasure out of certain works.

Surely, a post-movie chat over beer doesn't make you a critic. Scott concedes criticism takes work; it's a craft or an art that requires discipline and a certain kind of education.

Scott may not snub pop culture, but he's not exactly a populist: His list of top 10 movies from 2015 is topped by Timbuktu, a disturbing French-Mauritanian drama about the occupation of that West African city by jihadists.

Part of the critics's job, Scott explained, is to discriminate, to find fault, to place works in a hierarchy. In so doing, the critic provides a counterbalance to the movie industry's tendency to judge movies only by the bottom line.

In Better Living Through Criticism, Scott sets up a continuum between movies that provide escapist pleasure and those rare works that can inspire us to change our lives. He discusses a 1908 sonnet by Rainer Maria Rilke that describes the profound encounter the poet had at the Louvre with an ancient marble torso. What did that work of art say to Rilke?

"You must change your life," reads the poem's last line.

Scott said he hoped to develop a critical language that could account for the continuum between pop pleasure and earth-shattering esthetic encounters.

"Part of what the critic does is to help people be more discriminating consumers" of pop products, said Scott. "But it's also to discover those transformative works of art."

We're challenged by great works to see beyond our own limited perspectives, said Scott. Art transforms us by forcing us, often despite ourselves, to see the world in a new way. In doing so, it can awaken in us a new sense of moral responsibility.

"Ultimately, art exists in service to human dignity," said Scott. "It enriches us . . . by creating these extraordinary occasions for empathy."

tirdad@phillynews.com
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