Ouch. Taika Waititi is on the warpath after the bad reviews for his film Klara and the Sun

I do appreciate the circular irony. Critics write negative reviews. Artist slags off critics. Critics respond by slagging off artist for slagging off critics. Artists slag off critics for slagging off …

You can see where this is going. The moral for creators is that, unless you have a factual error to correct, it is best not to go public with any objections to poor reviews. By all means wave arms at local critics if you meet them at a social event. No sacred bubble protects them (us?) from disagreement. But mouthing off on a more visible forum invariably leads to the sort of unhelpful cycle parodied above.

Anyway, about Taika Waititi’s Klara and the Sun. Following a tranche of dreadful reviews for that Kazuo Ishiguro adaptation, the New Zealand director launched a tirade on Instagram this week. “This Halloween, let’s spare a thought for those sad lost souls who couldn’t achieve their dreams of becoming artists, and thus settled, and became critics,” he wrote. Ouch, I guess.

Oddly, he also had words to say about an earlier Waititi release that got largely positive reviews (and won an Oscar). “The same people who also hated Jojo Rabbit. Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin.”

The image accompanying the post notes that Klara and the Sun, which stars Jenna Ortega as a manic pixie cyborg, secured a 74 per cent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Sadly, its critic score on the same review aggregator site was just 26 per cent.

“The audience will wonder if the sentimental pummeling will ever end,” Tim Grierson wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “It’s a hopeless film, slippery and mendacious, full of gross Hallmark sentiment,” Kevin Maher noted in The Times of London. “Unbearably mannered,” Peter Bradshaw added in The Guardian.

All this comes as Waititi celebrates the 10th anniversary of his delightful Hunt for the Wilderpeople. “Arguably the masterpiece of its writer-director,” Bradshaw wrote back then. “Bringing his distinctive irony, comedy and quirk, but wisely lets the story and performances do the real work.”

Were the critics who secured Wilderpeople 97 per cent on the Tomatometer then “out of touch”? Had they become so when, a year later, Waititi’s Thor Ragnarok clocked up 93 per cent on its way to becoming the Marvel film that even Marvel dissenters admire? Or did the critics’ obsolescence only set in when they turned against Klara and the Sun?

[ Klara and the Sun review: Aran Murphy is lovely. Otherwise, this film is best forgottenOpens in new window ]

It’s one thing to offer measured defence of your film (or play or book or album). It is another to rubbish the entire business of professional criticism. Too harsh a reading of Waititi’s post? Only if “those sad lost souls who couldn’t achieve their dreams of becoming artists, and thus settled, and became critics” refers to just those who gave poor reviews to Klara and the Sun.

Anyone reading such an argument is bound to recall that the complaining artist never remarked on the critics’ irrelevancy when they were praising their earlier work. To my imperfect knowledge, no film-maker has published a screed thanking critics for their kind words before going on to note the worthlessness of those remarks.

The argument that reviewers are all failed artists belongs in the same rubbish chute as the one – attributed to the composer Jean Sibelius – that claims nobody ever erected a statue to a critic. You will find one of Roger Ebert, thumb jauntily aloft, in that late cineaste’s home town of Champaign, Illinois.

The former sparring partner of Gene Siskel got into one of the most notorious disputes between film-maker and critic at the 2003 Cannes film festival.

At that year’s event, Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny landed with the most almighty of splats. Ebert later admitted he was dealing in hyperbole when he called it “the worst film in the history of the festival”, but his hatred for the initial cut was sincere enough.

The spat went on for weeks, culminating with Gallo calling Ebert a “fat pig” and the critic responding with a variation on one of Winston Churchill’s greatest hits. “Yes, I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and Vincent Gallo will still be the director of The Brown Bunny,” he quipped.

Petty? Fruitless? Maybe. But that dispute had the feel of a clash between playful giants. And not just because Ebert later gave three stars to a subsequent, tidier cut of The Brown Bunny.

There is a place for full-on battle between those on either side of cultural no-man’s-land. But creators should still take the greatest care when lashing out against those who dare to dislike their work. The ensuing cycle rarely deposits the complainant back to the top of the moral heap.

Practise the rictus grin. Pretend to be a good sport. Don’t give them (us?) the satisfaction of your visible ire.