The bad review meets its match – welcome to the age of counter-criticism | Emma Brockes

From James Franco to Salman Rushdie, the internet is breathing new life into the battle of wits between celebrities and critics

The art of the bad review is a noble and well-established tradition, starting in 1662 with Samuel Pepys' hatchet job of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (“the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life”) and ending last year with AA Gill's take-down of Morrissey's memoir (“utterly devoid of insight, warmth, wisdom or likeability.”) Kicking around Jordan somewhere is probably a long lost tablet engraved with a two-star review of Genesis.

Less well-documented is the lively sub-category of retaliatory action: the 360 degree review of the reviewer by the reviewed. As a rule, dignified silence is thought to be the best way to shut down criticism. But those paid large sums to express themselves for a living sometimes can't bite their tongues and we, their audience, are the richer for it.

And so to James Franco, whose talents range across many disciplines, the latest of which falls into the Baldwin School of Ill-Advised Public Outburst.

Baldwin of course, established the form with variants of “I'm gonna fuck you up,” delivered free-style in the street to reporters and photographers. Franco favours a more formal approach, taking to Instagram after a poor review of his play Of Mice and Men by The New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley – or as the actor described him, very much in the Baldwin style, that little bitch. (A posting which, in line with modern tradition, he later deleted).

Thanks to the internet, we live in what is possibly the richest era of counter-criticism in history, and the genre is expanding. There is the high sarcasm of Gabourey Sidibe's Twitter response to critics after the Golden Globes: “To people making mean comments about my GG pics, I mos def cried about it on that private jet on my way to my dream job last night."

There are Rihanna's swift and linguistically inventive slap-downs, notably of MTV after its tweet, “Yikes Rihanna’s marijuana photos from Coachella spark controversy.” To which the singer responded, “Yikes...@rhianna ran out of fucks to give.”

And there is Richard Marx, the '80s soft rocker, who responded to a critical blog-post by a local TV reporter last year with the sort of breath-taking escalation only the filterless wonderland of social media permits: “Hey @TedMcClelland I’m running some errands. Should I stop and pick you up some tampons?”

It had all the zaniness and sub-textual misogyny we expect from the new art-form, and was, of course, shortly followed by a gratuitous reference to the 20th Century dictators: “to assume you can crawl inside my head and know what my motivation is for writing a song is arrogance reserved for the likes of Hitler and Stalin.” Boom!

Marx, and musicians in general, fall some way behind the field leaders, of course, which is to say bad-tempered chefs. Gordon Ramsay responded to Frank Bruni's two star review of his restaurant at the London a few years ago, with the admirably concise formulation that he didn't give “two fucks”.

Bruni, like Brantley, is a lightening rod for this kind of push-back, and at the extravagant end of the scale, Jeffrey Chodorow, in 2007, took out a full page ad in the New York Times after Bruni's zero star review of his restaurant, Kobe, at a reported cost of $83,000.

For the really expansive put-down, however, it is the novelists we must look to, whose fights take place mainly on the letters page of the New York Review of Books. (See what can only be described as the John Banville, Ian McEwan, John Sutherland cluster-fuck of many years back, when Banville wrote a bad review of McEwan's Saturday, to which Sutherland responded in McEwan's defense, pointing out several errors in the piece, to which Banville counter-counter responded with the magisterial opening, “Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the department of trivia.")

He was perhaps inspired by Vladimir Nabokov, who set the standard for lofty rebuttals with his response to a bad review by his friend Edmund Wilson of his translation of Pushkin's Onegin. Wilson, wrote Nabokov, was nothing but a “commonsensical, artless, average reader with a natural vocabulary of, say six hundred basic words.” (It is the “say” in this sentence that so devastates).

Jonathan Franzen, of course, studying a more casual style, responded to Michiko Kakutani's description of his book of essays as a “portrait of the artist as a young jackass” with the assessment that she is “the stupidest person in New York,” a view seconded by Salman Rushdie, who after receiving his own bad review from Kakutani, called her a “weird woman.”

Back to Baldwin, however, who paved the way for Franco's latest contribution to the art, by himself attacking Brantley last year after the critic called Orphans, Baldwin's Broadway play, a “limp revival.” Baldwin took to the Huffington Post to call Brantley “some odd, shriveled, bitter Dickensian clerk.” Not quite in the Tina Fey league of incisive put-down, but one appreciated the effort.

Personally, I think the greatest response to criticism of recent years came from Maurice Sendak. A few months before he died, I went up to his house in Connecticut to interview him, and over the course of two hours he expressed outrage about practically every facet of modern life, including Salman Rushdie, who had given him a bad review some years earlier in the New York Times. “That flaccid fuckhead,” said Sendak. “He was detestable. I called up the Ayatollah, nobody knows that.”

Rushdie, of course, responded on Twitter, and was grace itself. “I love you too, Maurice,” he wrote. Perhaps we could all learn a lesson from that.

Contributor

Emma Brockes

The GuardianTramp