http://www.theestablishment.
...
The fact is, criticism is not parasitic on art. Quite the reverse; art is parasitic on criticism. As scholar Carl Freedman points out, “The poems, essays, and some of the letters written by Wallace Stevens are literature, while the insurance policies and office memoranda also written by him are not.” For art to be art, someone has to make a critical determination that it is art, and not, say, a laundry list, or an advertisement, or an instruction manual.
The fact that a laundry list or an advertisement or an instruction manual displayed in an art gallery could be seen as art only underlines the point. Anything can be art if you view it as art—which means that it is the critical act which defines art, rather than art which defines criticism. [emphases added] “. . . [T]he foundational act of criticism . . . is the selection of an object, the willed decision to look,” A.O. Scott argues. But that’s surely also the foundational act of art. Art is where the critic looks for it.
Does the critical act happen apart from an institutional context, though? That's a question that he's probably addressed ... but in light of concerns about how guys on the internet have rejected The Last Jedi in ways that are considered, basically, illegitimate, the question as to how institutionally tethered "the critical act" has to be before it counts is its own can of worms. Does "the critical act" define the art if we imagine a world in which The Post is rejected as not art where Transformers: The Last Knight is decreed to be art? Or would someone in Berlatsky's position invoke a conflict between mainstream and indie or between "marketing" and "criticism"?
Let's see ... :
https://newrepublic.com/
...
Commercial art and commercial criticism form a perfect circle of niche attention and promotion. The fact that that niche is considered “mainstream” just serves to neatly erase the choices being made. People are used to thinking of sci-fi fandom, or romance fandom, as a particular audience and market, focused on a particular genre. But mainstream obsessions like “Mad Men” or “Game of Thrones” are seen as the important thing that needs to be covered, not for the particular group interested in “Mad Men” or “Game of Thrones,” but for the general interest of the general reader. The mainstream sees itself as covering the news that matters rather than functioning as part of a particular market. Which is perhaps why The Mary Sue, avowedly a fan site, is able to break out of the cycle and make a critical decision to dump a show they don’t want to support, while Rosenberg, at the mainstream Washington Post, is less able to see the way that marketing and criticism are, in our current moment, inseparable. [emphasis added]
If he thinks marketing and criticism were ever separable that would be the really big mistake. To even suggest that marketing and criticism could be separable can run aground on the question of whether or not criticism that is not connected to some form of monetization and revenue documentation can be "counted" as really being "legitimate" criticism. At the risk of using this blog as an example, you could potentially ready hundreds of thousands of words about the history of what used to be Mars Hill Church in Seattle at this blog, but compared to whatever a Mark Driscoll or a Matthew Paul Turner may decide to officially say in books vetted by publishing industries, everything at this blog simply doesn't exist. A writer once told me that the problem bloggers run into is they are not part of the conventionally institutional press, which at the end of the day only takes itself seriously. Berlatsky may have a point that without a critical perspective publishing a declaration that X isn't even art until declared so, but that would seem to be part of the trouble with "mainstream" that is not going to be evaded by "indie".
In this understanding of the arts, the critic is the gatekeeper and the "decider", who gets to decide whether or not something even "is" art. Berlatsky's way of putting it dovetails pretty readily with Jacques Ellul's description of the role critics play in technological societies. If in the lowbrow genres critics decide to not take those genres seriously, in the middle and highbrow genres, critics wield their power to decide what things belong, a role more or less overlapping with academic activity as well as journalistic activity.
As lofty as the role of the critic may be to writers like A. O. Scott or Noah Berlatsky, Ellul's description of the role of the critic is a bit more jaded.
THE EMPIRE OF NON-SENSE: ART IN THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY
Jacques Ellul
Copyright (c) 2014 by Papadakis Publisher
translated by Michael Johnson and David Lovekin
ISBN 978-1-906506-40-7
page 149
... IF so and so can write that, then I can write this. The imaginary museum counts for much lass than the interrelationship between members of this milieu, which has less to do with Rembrandt and Bach and more to do with this little pal I met at a cocktail party. ...
page 152
In this vast universe, the art critic finally achieves his principal role. The artist is only a secondary element in relation to the critic who makes and unmakes styles and reputations. ... Let us note that the art critic is a recent development. [emphasis added] This man who is a scholar of the material in question, music or novel, painting or poetry, who knows all that can be known, who is the true expert in all his knowledge of the imaginary museum; that man, a specialist, a meticulous connoisseur of all the techniques, is incapable of producing anything by himself, but, as the occupant of the public podium, he makes his opinions known. He promulgates evaluations, and he reveals the philosophy and meaning of these works. He decrees what is good for the general welfare, and what will be the legacy of our present world for the future. He can add nothing to this legacy but his explanations. The art critic did not exist in the seventeenth century, although there were a few hints. In reality, he is a product of the bourgeois, industrial, mass society; he is a shareholder in the culture, whose conscious and willful reality originates in the same era [emphasis added] (along with the idea of culture), ... The critic owes his existence to the mutation of the bourgeoisie: the bourgeois, perhaps uncultured, harried and involved with other needs, and dedicated to utility, does not possess the same understanding of art as the aristocrat. For the latter, there was no need for explanation. By contrast, the bourgeois, the philistine of the Gilded Age, needed explanations, needed to be led to understanding. And, just as businessmen needed their brokers, so, in matters of art, the bourgeois needed their critics in order to discern what kind of art to buy. And for the Bourgeois buying art is an act of status. He must not make a mistake. First and foremost, the critic guarantees the durability and lasting value of the work in question. The critic is just another business agent whose job is to guarantee status. [emphasis added]
So, in Ellul's reading of the role of the critic in the arts, the role of the art critic was never separable from commerce and marketing. It was, by definition, inextricably entwined in marketing. For all the moments in which arts critics may formally lament bourgeois culture and standards, Ellul proposed that there was virtually nothing more inherently bourgeois than art criticism.
I was inducted into this realization back in my days as a student journalist covering theater productions. It wasn't exactly my primary thing as I was more into visual media and music and animation, but I was game to watch a Harold Pinter play, for instance. But what I saw as nascent journalistic writing the theater folks saw, plainly, as a kind of free advertising. that's not necessarily a wrong way to put things. As Ellul himself put it:
page 153
... The art critic is a publicity agent for modern art.
But Ellul continued, pointing out that one of the ways in which criticism, collectively, hoodwinked itself was to mistake the emergence of critical theories as equivalent to vitality in the arts:
[ibid]... The link between the discourse of the critic and art itself is so essential that it appears, for example, in the view of Abraham Moles, as a proof of art's vitality. Everywhere they have proclaimed the death of Art, he asserts; now we are witnessing an "unprecedented flourishing of doctrines and movements," which prove that art is alive. However, these doctrines are the work of critics. They produce an infinite amount of discourse on art, but one must remember that this is not art. ...
As Tom Wolfe so viciously and memorably put it in The Painted Word, things had gotten to a point where critics were saying that without a theory of sight and visual cognition you couldn't even see a painting. Not entirely unlike a narrative in which a priesthood warns the laity that without their interpretation and mediation they cannot comprehend the divine written words, it could be said that art criticism elevated itself to a comparably priestly mediating role, teaching the unwashed what really was and was not supposed to be considered art.
Ellul's damning commentary on the role of the critic was that all too often their work was a necessary precondition for a great deal of modern art to have any meaning, and that retroactively:
page 154
Clearly minimalist and post-minimalist paintings and sculptures are nothing, absolutely nothing, without explanatory discourse. We are told that it is a "mental" art, which now requires conceptualization and no longer the sentimentality that has ruled art for too long. I can buy that. But I do not see in what way a red X traced on a white sheet is in any way "conceptual." Now, I must explain. A work like this has no character or any intellectually discernible quality unless the artist or the master know-it-all steps up and reveals the intellectual process, the means of understanding, and the logic of the work. This is what we could call an "instruction manual of poetics." I'll buy that, too. But why should this act of drawing two bars on paper be a greater act of creation than that of a lathe operator in a workshop?
To drive his point home even more aggressively, Ellul wrote:
page 155
... The work no longer speaks for itself; the critic speaks in its place and situates the work in the great current that carries art to this point. He becomes the irreplaceable companion on whom the artist relies. ...
page 155
I am not at all sure that modern art would have evolved as it has if it were not for the critic. In other words, it is an enormous resource to know that an explicator is behind the artist and whatever he produces; the explicator will take charge of providing a meaning and of decrypting symbols even when non exists. This will happen provided the artist in question falls in line with society and with the current development of sensibilities in artistic milieus. If this happens, the artist no longer has to worry about expressing a "form" attached to a "meaning," and he has the rare privilege of declaring that there is no meaning, that art is pure form; he knows that the critic is the specialist in discovering sense and nonsense, a meaning in pure form that pretends to say nothing. The critic is nothing more than a safety net for a high wire act. The artist, according to the model granted him by modern society, has the added privilege (and one that he always claims) of insulting without consequence the philistine public off which he lives. The critic is there to exalt these insults and to demonstrate that they are really a form of respect for the spectator who is involved in a newly minted reality. But, in order to play this role, the critic becomes a technician of art. He knows its history, its techniques, and its resources better than any artist. And the more the work becomes abstract, the more a technician is required who not only displays his knowledge of technique but, in addition, can elaborate his own techniques for interpretation. He possesses instruments the others do not. The critic, after having become an indispensible character of capitalist bourgeois society, becomes a representative epigone of the technical system. He makes art and the comprehension of art a technique; he leads us to think that there is no such thing as untutored reading or vision (except in those cases where it is false); he establishes himself as the sole judge of success and value, which is precisely the role of the technician. ...
pages 155-156
The critic, in his current role, and especially in relation to abstract art, fills a social function of monopolistic mediation based on technical competence. He is the technician for arts and letters, comparable to MBAs and other technocrats. And, like them all, he reduces every art form to an ensemble of techniques. It s not by accident that the denial of meaning and a refusal of anything to say is the result of the ping-pong match between critics and artists. The critic assures his pre-eminence, his social role, his indisputable status by asserting that there is nothing in art which is not hermetic, nothing which is not symbolic in the second or third degree, but that everything is beyond the understanding of the lay person. And the artist plays the same game, assured that his technique will hoodwink the public. ...
If Berlatsky is right to say that it is criticism that defines whether or not something is even art to begin with, this is, at best, an ambivalent and ambiguous reality about art and reception history and commerce.
page 156
... IN all cases what the author says is never to be confused with what he wants or would want to say. And it is New Criticism that seizes on an author's real meaning behind what he says. But despite this difference we can conclude with two quite remarkable positions. The first position is the pre-eminent role of the critic, who is situated above the creative artist. Roland Barthes states this position cogently; there is a kind of hierarchy where one goes from the word to the language, from the language to the work, and from there to the criticism, which is the "ultimate act of literary creation, a symbol superimposed on the symbol created by the work." Without the critic the work is sterile, because the critic is essentially the model for the reader; and so, the work must be studied not as an extension of the one who creates it but of the one who reads it. Reading constitutes the work. Hence, criticism is the fine flower, the ultimate point, the supreme creation of the artistic process. ...
Ellul summarizes the role of the critic in the technological society by saying:
page 157
... the critic has become the most important person in the world of art, and this relates at all levels to the technicization of society.
The arts critic, though perhaps seeing themselves as a paragon of humanism and philosophy, is functionally the ultimate technocrat, whose word and verdict decides whether or not something is or is not art. If the artist is the prophet in this bourgeois art religion, the critic is the priest, and those who manage to be prophet-priests or priest-prophets get particularly high notices.
But Ellul claimed that what these artists and critics were not doing is rebelling against the technological society. Far from it:
page 164
... Art has become one of the primary forces of integrating man into the technological complex, and that is why art is, as well, the bearer of a political-philosophical message of pure entertainment, perfectly bereft of significance and meaning, because man cannot abide with all the dimensions of the technological reality.
I would not so much say it is bereft of meaning as that in a post-Joseph Campbell entertainment industry that has a monomyth and a cosmogonic cycle, the art that emerges in technological/technocratic societies has a potently refined formula of insert-yourself-here.
Aesthetic Theory
Theodore Adorno
Copyright (c) 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
Continuum
ISBN 0-8264-6757-1
page 346
... Aesthetic experience first of all places the observer at a distance from the object. This resonates in the idea of disinterested observation. Philistines are those whose relation to artworks is ruled by whether and to what degree they can, for example, put themselves in the place of the actors as they come forth; this is what all parts of the culture industry are based on and they foster it insistently in their customers. ...
It isn't necessarily just something consumers do. The art of criticism can play a comparable role to the philistine stipulation that "I" have to be able to find "myself" in the art that I bother to consume. A reader-response critical approach can shift this process from the real or hypothetical consumer to a critical reader response paradigm, something becomes art once the "reader" designates it as such. What a traditionalist or conservative can find ghastly about this approach is that it allows someone to write about an episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic as if it were a novel by Balzac. These critical tools don't really bring with them the power to separate lowbrow from highbrow. I thought of linking to a few thousand words by Norman Lebrecht on the history of criticism and its recent decline but I didn't ultimately feel it was necessary. There may be plenty in the tools of critical analysis that have brought with them a redundancy to critical establishments. The internet has, perhaps "democratized" arts criticism to the point where some people can be aghast that people over forty have things to say about Into the Spider-Verse.
What Adorno described generally was an industry that sold to the public the kind of art the public can easily super-impose itself on to. Adorno was able to state that the culture industry had an illusion of freedom and choice to sell. Joseph Campbell's monomyth is a more distilled form of the schematic that guides a lot of popular culture. Despite the aspirational ur-humanism of Campbell's aims his legacy in the 21st century can be thought of as an apotheosis of technocratic means. We may live in an age in which the most paradoxically anti-humanist legacies have been unintentionally fostered by people who thought they were championing a new and more humane approach to the humanities.
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