When you read the work of a great critic, you instantly understand why they’re a critical part of the art world.
Is popularity important for art? Is there a relationship between something being good and something being popular? Should the people decide what deserves the label “art” or should it be left to the experts and critics?
Answers to these questions vary wildly. At the outset of the Modernist period, around the 1880s, many artists began to think of themselves as being the true critics—that is, critics of the grubby materialism they thought was the primary quality of contemporary middle-class life, a materialism that prevented most people from even appreciating art that wasn’t just crass and trite. Therefore, anything the public liked was, by definition, wrong.
Such an approach today doesn’t set too well with our egalitarian attitude. After all, our culture counsels us to regard one person’s opinion as pretty much the equal of anyone else’s. In art particularly, we’re repeatedly told, “Who’s really to judge,” and “Isn’t art in the eye of the beholder?” But I’m not sure that attitude itself serves the cause of art very well either, any more than that of the modernists. The result is confusion for anyone who wants to become more informed about art in general, and about the contemporary in particular. How can one know what’s really good? What’s really worth the time and effort to go see, whether it’s a play, an art exhibit, an opera, anything.
With the Internet offering innumerable blogs and the opportunity for anyone with a keyboard to weigh in on everything from movies to art exhibits, it may seem as though the critic, at least as traditionally understood, is superfluous.
But they’re not, and here’s the deal: it goes back to something I’ve talked about a lot before, and that is the difference between informed opinion and opinion. If you make it your business—or your passion—to follow art, to learn about it, to take in as much as you can and notice all the differences you see or that hear, your opinions will become more informed, more insightful, and most of all more helpful when people ask you for them.
It is precisely because of our contemporary surfeit of opinion that good criticism is needed more than ever. Knowledgeable analysis tends to glimmer like a diamond when surrounded by the simple rehashing of heated opinion. Without it, it can seem as though the effort it takes to pursue the arts isn’t worth it.
Good critics are indispensable to a good art scene whether locally or nationally. Sadly, we recently lost one of the best. And I lost a good friend. Join me next week for more.