![]() ![]() The theater is simply a den of snakes, and backstabbing is the law of the land. That’s what makes it a great movie Eve dethrones her idol Margo Channing by a calculated betrayal, but the result is not a complete injustice. After all, although DeWitt connives to make Eve a success, he does so because he knew she was worthy of stardom in the first place. It is, in fact, the thoroughness of his expertise that enables his corruption. There is never any suggestion he is anything less than an actual expert on theater. DeWitt is a malicious character, but he is not a hack. In threatening to blackmail Karen, he threatens to tell the truth about her misdeeds in his column. For example, in the above quote, Addison DeWitt, by proxy of Eve, is manipulating another character, Karen, to go along with his scheme to make Eve a star. Naturally, such a question is fallacious, as if the matter could be settled by a straightforward yes or no. That may seem a small distinction, but it already contains within it the existential question that any critic must put to himself: Is criticism nothing more than sophistry motivated by self-interest? Or does the critic have a role to play in helping us make “better” judgments about art? In common usage the critic and the cynic are nearly interchangeable terms: by one definition, courtesy of Merriam-Webster, a critic is “one given to harsh or captious judgment,” while a cynic is “a faultfinding captious critic, especially one who believes that human conduct is motivated wholly by self-interest.” The difference is mainly that the cynic believes selfishness is inescapable. These characters range from stock figures to outright parody: All About Eve’s Addison DeWitt, Basil Valentine in The Recognitions, even Statler and Waldorf on The Muppet Show. The critic was the decadent cynic who, having long since dissipated their capacity for artistic pleasure, used their rhetorical skill to manipulate popular taste for personal gain or idle sadism. Imagine how snide and vicious he could get and still tell nothing but the truth.įor much of the twentieth century the critic constituted a compelling, if semi-sinister, literary stereotype. This wasn’t always the case.Īddison could make quite a thing of it. But while art is an extreme case in this regard, it’s also a leading indicator: as a defender and judge of quality, the critic is an endangered species in many industries these days. There’s no clear economic reason for art criticism that is not glorified public relations to exist, and so it barely does. Critical discourse and consensus do have some limited correlation with the art market, but a good review generating a lot of foot traffic for a show is not at all guaranteed to generate income for artists and galleries-and, broadly speaking, participants in the art market mostly see critics as a threat to their investments. Film, music, food and book critics write for a general public that can be swayed to spend their money one way or another, whereas the general public cannot afford to buy the art that is written about in Artforum. ![]() One big reason that art criticism has always been a comparatively marginal practice-putting aside for now the special difficulties of writing about visual objects-is that there’s no market for the kind of quality-based reviews that have long proliferated for other kinds of cultural objects. ![]() I’ve ended up writing ten or more reviews every week more or less consistently since November of 2019, minus the COVID-19 lockdowns and a couple of summer breaks.Īll of this could sound like a rather obvious format to anyone familiar with Letterboxd, but it’s a disruption to the prevailing norms of art writing. But I quickly realized that my habits were more suited to going to galleries every week than to working regularly on longer pieces, that there weren’t very many shows I wanted to write about at length, and that a regular stream of blithe, off-the-cuff reviews would attract more attention than intermittent longer essays. Five stars is as good as it gets (at the time of writing I’ve given ten five-star ratings out of roughly eight hundred reviews, and six of those have been for historical shows), four is an unconditional success, three is indifferent, two is an unconditional failure, and one star signifies something I found personally offensive. I originally intended the section to be an afterthought: quick reviews with the rating acting as a shorthand for my reaction. Probably the most distinctive feature of the site, and certainly the most divisive, is the “Kritic’s Korner” section, which uses a rating system of one to five stars. Most of my writing is on my website, the Manhattan Art Review. ![]()
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