19. A.O. Scott

“It would be too much to say that every artist is a failed critic, unable to appreciate what already exists without adding to it.” -A.O. Scott

 

It may be, as Scott suggests, too much to reduce every artist to the status of critic manqué, but what a tantalizing suggestion he makes. There is, after all, already so much out there: so many books, so many movies, albums, plays, video games, words, images. Under these circumstances, it can seem not only unnecessary but positively perverse to attempt to create any further works of art. To do so, to impose any more on an already oversaturated cultural landscape, can only reflect an embarassing failure of restraint, of imagination, perhaps even of morality. If we must add anything further to the world of letters then, it only makes sense that we restrict ourselves to offering a gloss on what is already there, elevating the worthy out of the forgettable mass of stuff and engendering an appreciation for those select few chosen objects.

            This is, of course, as the New York Times co-chief film critic and author of Better Living Through Criticism makes clear, pure fantasy. You can no more ask people to refrain from creating than you can from reproducing. Furthermore, the amplification of previously silenced voices means we now have access to a wider range of perspectives than ever before, surely a laudable development. Nonetheless, for the individual writer (or at least for this one), accepting the position that nothing more need be created comes as a something of a relief. If we are filled with fatigue at the amount of product being thrown at us, how many of us also suffer from a more general fatigue that makes the creation of new work increasingly difficult. Who, in this moment in history, has the energy to write a whole novel or an entire memoir? (Although, amazingly, people continue to do so.) Instead, we can choose to simply contemplate what already exists and cannibalistically create without creating. We can practice criticism.

            As it turns out, I already have practiced criticism, or at least reviewing (whatever distinction you wish to make between the two.) For five years, I wrote about movies on a freelance basis for some not disreputable outlets. The style encouraged by my editors was at once highly analytical and endlessly snappy, even snarky. The pieces were largely self-contained reviews that were allowed to range somewhat widely in cultural reference but were not to include too much personal detail or to make much use of the first-person “I”. This style was and is, by its nature, an incredibly limited form, although not one without its uses. But during those five years, I rarely sought to expand my range beyond these 400-1000 word pieces. I accepted a definition of criticism that interrogated the object it was assigned to consider but never looked beyond that object to consider the critical practice itself or the person doing the criticizing.

            If we were, though, to put a moratorium on the creation of new art, if we were to, in Scott’s words, give in to the “wishful declaration that the human project is complete,” we would need not be bereft of exciting written output, provided we turned our attention to the practice of criticism. That is, at least, if we understand this practice to be a much more expansive pursuit than the insular, self-contained version I used to perform. We can instead view criticism as constituting my now-preferred definition: the whole of a person grappling with the whole of a work or works. Criticism, so practiced, becomes a hybrid form, drawing as much from the personal essay as it does from dispassionate analysis and ranging freely over the expanse of human achievement to search out any artifact or idea that might be relevant to the discussion. It doesn’t assume that its judgements are absolute but understands that they are the tentative conclusions of a specific person whose views are shaped by a specific set of circumstances. It reveals and reflects on those circumstance and in so doing, it invites the reader in rather than shutting her out. It is, at its best, its own form of art. But by saying so, we back ourselves into an odd paradox. If artists are failed critics and criticism is itself an art, then critics, by expanding the scope of their pursuit into original creation, risk becoming the very thing they have supposedly doomed to irrelevance.