’50 Shades’ another brick in the wall between fans and critics
While the erudite have derided the best-selling books as poorly written and unimaginative, fans of the soft porn/romance novels don’t care about sentence structure, believable dialogue or character development. Not everybody wants a daily dose of Dickens or the latest Robert Caro book on LBJ.
“This stuff we consider ‘bad’ is considered bad if we look at it in terms of the criteria set for old-fashioned art,” says pop culture expert Robert Thompson of Syracuse University. “We also have to recognize that some of this stuff that is ‘bad’ is really good at being ‘bad.’ Therefore the word ‘bad’ kind of ceases to have any kind of meaning.”
Twain
Or as Mark Twain said —
“My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water,”
Twain on “Shades of Grey”
But if Twain was talking about “Shades of Grey” he might say – “My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks dirty water”