Local Gestures
  • Home
  • Dance
  • Literature
  • Music
  • Cinema
  • Home
  • Dance
  • Literature
  • Music
  • Cinema

Local Gestures

because the personal is cultural

Criticism Is Not Advertising: A Manifesto

18/7/2012

3 Comments

 
Picture
Cartoon by Lindsay Foyle
1.     The only reader who cares whether you like an artwork is one who has the exact same taste as you. In other words, no one cares if you like an artwork or not.

2.     One of the most overrated qualities in a critic is good taste. It is often a limited and limiting concept that ends up discrediting a lot of artworks that refuse to play by bourgeois or hipster rules. Art does not need to be well made so much as it needs to make well.

3.     Avoid any sentence that might be quoted for publicity purposes. Criticism is not advertising, nor is it public relations.

4.     Avoid empty rhetorical words such as “good/better/best,” “bad/worse/worst,” and their synonyms. Instead, use words such as “regressive/progressive”, “sexist/feminist”, “racist/anti-racist,” “homophobic/transphobic/queer-positive,” etc. These words carry weight, as they actually mean something.

5.     The role of the critic is not to tell readers what is worth their time and money. Criticism is not consumerism. The role of the critic, much like that of the artist, is to create meaning. The critic should not be an informed consumer, but an informed thinker.

6.     It is indeed hard to see the forest for the trees, especially when it comes to newer artworks, but that is precisely and imperatively what the critic must do. The role of the critic is to contextualize, to argue why a work is significant or relevant, or not.

7.     It is a mistake to believe that good criticism can only be about good artworks. Criticism is a form of thought, and the artwork is not doing the thinking for the critic.

8.     Like (hopefully) the artists they review, critics should have political and artistic convictions. These produce meaning, which is what a critic should be seeking.

9.     Turn your hate for works you despise for artistic reasons rather than political ones into admiration. These works will haunt you for much longer than the ones you merely like, and works that fail to be remembered also fail to create meaning.

10. Reward risks taken by artists, even if they ultimately fail. There is no point in rewarding those who play it safe and simply copy the success of their predecessors.

11. Do not emulate the style of critics who put out generic reviews for mainstream publications. There is no point in putting out a review that could have been produced just as well by another writer with no personality. If you are replaceable, you will be replaced.


3 Comments
Dorian
1/8/2012 04:55:31 am

You should read this, if you haven't already, I think you'd appreciate what Andy Horowitz has to say about criticism...

"At the same time that we distinguish between a consumer-oriented “reviewer” and a critic, so too do we distinguish between an old-model critic and The New Criticism. The traditional critical model proposes a “subject/object” relationship between writer and performance where the critic “objectively” judges the merits of a given performance. Culturebot proposes a new framework for arts criticism that we refer to as “critical horizontalism”. In this framework criticism is a creative practice unto itself and the writer exists in subjective relation to the work of the artist. The writer’s response is the continuation of a dialogue initiated by the artist. If this response is then published on the Internet, this creates a horizontal field of discourse with the work. This model resists the commodification of the performing arts as “entertainment” but rather situates it as time-based art. The performance itself is an ephemeral nexus where audience, artist and ideas converge. The critic supports the continued investigation of the art event across multiple platforms."

whole essay is here:
http://www.culturebot.net/2012/03/12883/culturebot-and-the-new-criticism/

Reply
Sylvain link
3/8/2012 05:28:40 am

Thanks a lot, Dorian! That was a great read. I wish I'd had the chance to see it before writing "The Death of Popular Criticism", which was the basis for this manifesto. I probably would have ended up using the quote you selected for it.

Reply
windows online support link
18/8/2013 09:22:52 pm

That was an eye opener. I had criticized the art works of my brother for a long time but never knew that there is a professional side to this. I am happy to know that such words do motivate them a lot.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Sylvain Verstricht

    has an MA in Film Studies and works in contemporary dance. His fiction has appeared in Headlight Anthology, Cactus Heart, and Birkensnake.

    s.verstricht [at] gmail [dot] com

    Archives

    March 2023
    January 2023
    September 2022
    December 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    April 2020
    February 2018
    November 2016
    September 2016
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    September 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    October 2013
    April 2013
    January 2013
    July 2012
    November 2011

    Categories

    All
    Alessandro Baricco
    Annick Lefebvre
    Best Of
    George Bernard Shaw
    Headlight
    Karl Marx
    Literature
    Nelly Arcan
    Popular Criticism
    Scrivener Creative Review
    Sheila Heti
    Theatre
    Thornton Wilder
    Utopias
    Words

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly