How much does it matter to us that a critic is an artist him/herself?
If I commend a statue, or on the other hand if I compare it invidiously to another, does it matter that I have never taken chisel to marble in my life?
Does the taint of the dilletante disappear if I have tried my hand at it, failed, and then have used my appreciation of and study in the art to assess the contributions of others? Or is that worse from the point of view of my trustworthiness than if I had never tried at all?
"Those who can do, those who can't carp," is a common enough complaint by those on the receiving end of such criticism.
So we turn, at least in some moods, with some relief to critics who have "done it themselves," and done it successfully.
Still, they have their own set of vulnerabilities. If an active and successful sculptor criticizes the work of one of his competitors in that line, is he not an interested party? Isn't it a bit like Goodyear offering an appraisal of tires one might consider buying from Firestone?
So what kind of critic is ideal?
I don't know, but those thoughts came to mind recently when I encountered, through circumstances I won't bother to relate, a scholarly paper written in 1938 on the critical writings of Walt Whitman.
The author, Maurice O. Johnson, concludes in a manner that reminds me a bit of Goodyear and Firestone. Whitman's critique of other poets was always in the service of the idea that "the poet who was to combine all the prescribed virtues was Whitman himself."
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2 comments:
But, if a sculptor were not a competitive sort of person, he would still have his biases, and, if Whitman had not been a poet, but merely a critic, he would still have had his biases. One criterion of an ideal critic is the ability to put one's biases aside and be open to judging fairly what one does not like. We, the audience of the critic, do not care what the critic likes; we care what he thinks is good.
As for how much it matters whether the critic is an artist himself, his being an artist himself may enable him better to educate us as to the subtleties of a work of art, but it does not make his judgment of the work superior.
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