The Hater B-Side

Haters can be bad.

Haters can be sad.

Haters can be funny.

Haters can be glad.

Everyone at the Arts desk hated this poem. But that’s part of the fun, isn’t it? Hating inspires many emotions — rage, disgust, glee. It can cathartically release our bottled-up feelings, inspire personal growth or bring people together. Think about a time when you hate-watched a movie with your friends (cough cough, “This Is Me… Now”), when your friend showed you the latest Arctic Monkeys song to laugh at it or, hell, the poem I just wrote! My friends and I had a good laugh over it. Hating is fun!

But there’s also the flipside: to hate for hate’s sake, to punch down and destroy works of art with callous disregard. Hating can act as a simple vessel of our mean-spirited repugnance, and where’s the fun in that? Art is to be critically engaged with, not thrown away like a crumpled piece of paper.

What does it mean to hate? Our wonderful Arts writers have taken it upon themselves to answer this question; they hate, they love and they hate again, producing a collection of diverse and contradictory attitudes toward hating. There may not be a unified answer but, again, where’s the fun in that? So break down those emotional walls and prepare for the onslaught of wild, crazy or thoughtful takes you’re about to experience.

Senior Arts Editor Thejas Varma can be reached at thejasv@umich.edu.