The great unwashed

This is turning into a properly neglected site. While I had no great aspirations to blogging on a daily basis, leaving it this long is all manner of rubbish, so partly apologies, and partly well done for hanging in there. Although that's also made me lose just a tiny bit of respect for you.

This is barely topical, but I keep a file of things that may inspire me to write (and then, of course, don't actually write about them). This article caught my attention. Don't bother reading the whole thing - basically a UK music prize was given out last week, and a band went on a mini-rant about how it's never awarded to the fans' choice, but is normally someone fairly obscure.

Oh boo fucking hoo. Where did the idea ever come from that the majority opinion must be right? That's especially true of anything even remotely creative, like music, movies, and art. Just because something's popular doesn't make it good, and there are a lot of critics who are exceptionally well-educated in areas like this who know whether something's worth listening to or not. By all means disagree with them, but to imply that something should win an award just because it's more popular is ridiculous.

As I wrote a few weeks back, people are idiots. This covers a wide range of sins, and on occasion I'll gladly throw myself into that pile, especially when it comes to films. I saw Transformers 2 and enjoyed it, in an utterly mindless, don't think about it on any level sort of way. At the same time I'd never argue to anyone that it was a good movie. It was what I wanted to see at that point in time, which makes me mentally deficient.

However, it made an enormous amount of cash at the box office, critics tore it to shreds, and the internet lit up with claims comparing box office take to quality, and accusing critics of being out of touch with movie-goers' tastes. I can't be arsed to look up the precise quote, but Roger Ebert said something like critics shouldn't reflect popular opinion - it's their job to direct people towards good movies and away from bad ones.

I don't know if this semi-mob-mentality stems from mass insecurity at being thought of as stupid, or feeling threatened by having their taste questioned, or else just the belief that because we use democracy to vote, the public view must always be heard, but it's wrong.

That's not to say that critics are always right, of course, or that the majority is always wrong - the truth, as ever, lies somewhere in the middle. But why people insist on this blind delusion that any large group must somehow be closer to a "correct" opinion than an individual makes no sense to me. We should all accept that relatively often we'll know bugger all about a topic, regardless of our enjoyment or participation in it, and accept that those better-informed might just know more than we do. Or at least know enough that we should listen to them.