Critics used to be feared and respected for their ability to make definitive judgments on everything from conceptual art to catwalk fashions. This mattered not just for the success -- or failure -- of the individuals being judged, but for shaping culture more generally. Critical acclaim for 18th-century actor David Garrick changed how we viewed Shakespeare as well as actors. Hazlitt was Romanticism's critical muse, while Kenneth Tynan championed the post-war realism of plays like John Osborne's Look Back In Anger. It could even be said that criticism makes us who we are, forming, as Roger Scruton puts it, "part of the great transition from youthful enjoyment to adult discrimination." Today criticism can still -- sometimes literally -- define our tastes, with the Evening Standard’s Fay Maschler described as the "most feared and respected restaurant critic" in London.
But society often seems to have disavowed its critics today, particularly where high culture is concerned. If anything, tough criticism is less associated with the arts than lifestyle journalism and light entertainment, from Fay Maschler to Simon Cowell. Some fear the dearth of in-depth critical writing reflects something deeper. With teachers wary of criticizing students lest they damage their self-esteem, and professional journalism giving way to amateur blogging, are we the midst of a crisis of judgment? From politics to pop, some argue robust debate has collapsed to be replaced by a culture in which everybody's opinions must be respected.
Are we no longer comfortable with criticism and authority today? Who needs a coterie of "official" critics when anybody can publish a blog or write a reader’s review? Is this a liberating democratization, empowering the man and woman in the street? How can we refine our own judgment without a wider culture of criticism? Do we risk reducing critical clarity to a competing cacophony of unexamined prejudices? Isn't a society that is afraid to make critical judgments one that surrenders to paralysis and puerility? What is the role of the critic and why should we listen?
Bio
Tiffany Jenkins
Tiffany Jenkins is Arts and Society Director at the Institute of Ideas. Tiffany is also a writer and researcher currently exploring the cultural meanings of human remains in museums, at the University of Kent at Canterbury, in the school of social sciences. Her work explores questions about the cultural authority of museums, and the rise of the body in the high modern period.
Ronan McDonald
Ronan McDonald, senior lecturer, English, University of Reading; author, The Death of the Critic.
Munira Mirza
Munira Mirza, mayoral advisor, arts and culture, Greater London Authority; editor, Culture Vultures: is UK arts policy damaging the arts?
James Runcie
James Runcie, novelist, East Fortune; film-maker, Powerhouses and My Father; artistic director, Bath Literature Festival.
Gabriella Swallow
Gabriella Swallow, principal cellist, London Contemporary Music Group; permanent guest, BBC4's Proms.
Description, interpretation, and evaluation of works of art, manifested in journal reviews, books, and patronage. Art criticism encompasses a wide variety of approaches, from critical commentary to more subjective emotional reactions inspired by viewing works of art. Art criticism as a distinct discipline developed parallel to Western aesthetic theory, beginning with antecedents in ancient Greece and fully taking form in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 20th century perceptive critics became champions of new artistic movements. Beginning in the 20th and continuing into the 21st century, many critics used social and linguistic, rather than aesthetic, theoretical models. Prominent art critics include Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenblum, Lawrence Alloway, Rosalind Krauss, and Donald Kuspit. See alsoaesthetics.
Discipline concerned with philosophical, descriptive, and evaluative inquiries about literature, including what literature is, what it does, and what it is worth. The Western critical tradition began with Plato's Republic (4th century BC). A generation later, Aristotle, in his Poetics, developed a set of principles of composition that had a lasting influence. European criticism since the Renaissance has primarily focused on the moral worth of literature and the nature of its relationship to reality. At the end of the 16th century, Sir Philip Sidney argued that it is the special property of literature to offer an imagined world that is in some respects superior to the real one. A century later John Dryden proposed the less idealistic view that literature must primarily offer an accurate representation of the world for “the delight and instruction of mankind,” an assumption that underlies the great critical works of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. A departure from these ideas appeared in the criticism of the Romantic period, epitomized by William Wordsworth's assertion that the object of poetry is “truth…carried alive into the heart by passion.” The later 19th century saw two divergent developments: an aesthetic theory of “art for art's sake,” and the view (expressed by Matthew Arnold) that literature must assume the moral and philosophical functions previously filled by religion. The volume of literary criticism increased greatly in the 20th century, and its later years saw a radical reappraisal of traditional critical modes and the development of a multiplicity of critical factions (seedeconstruction; poststructuralism; structuralism).
I once asked a music critic for a major paper if she had been trained in music.....she replied, "No, people don't have to agree with me." I wonder how many careers she managed to destroy.
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