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continued...
V. THE CRITIC’S NEW CALLING
But what, today, is the critic’s purpose?
It is time for us to time-travel, to go Back to the Future, to capture
and bring back our forgotten art-appreciating selves – the self-in-the-world,
before arts appreciation became arts criticism, and criticism became a
degreed discipline, and the exclusionary discipline severed equal love
and attention to both arts and sciences into the Two Cultures, and the
cultures became professionalized; before the profession became an industry,
and the industry became theorized, and the theory became popularized,
and popular culture became commercialized, and the commodity ungrew to
adolescence, and adolescents became a suburbanized average, and that average
became commercialized, and the commercial was celebrated, and the celebration
was for us as we are, not as we might yet be.
And thus we declare, democratically, in echoes of Mill’s utilitarianism:
The 21st-century critic’s purpose and goal is to create
the conditions necessary for the fullest appreciation of the work of art
for the greatest number. In our world today, we have succeeded,
wildly beyond our dreams, in the latter, in a certain sense: popular arts
for the greatest number, by stimulating our lowest common denominators:
sex, the excitement of violence, the fantasized care-free confidence of
the celebrity, the luxury object, which is a status symbol of: independence,
defined economically – the most pithy and accessible definition
of the American Dream. --And we are succeeding, increasingly in this interconnected
and artificially-intelligent age, in a portion of the former: individually
funneling personally preferred culture to ourselves, each in our niche,
gaining the “fullest” appreciation we can: a pleasure to the
individual limits of our understanding. We are only just beginning to
establish loose, mostly disembodied affiliations of common interests via
Netflix, Flickr, YouTube and MySpace, blogs and online journal networks,
but for the most part we still lack the language and medium in which to
speak about our common appreciation – because our criticism has
been reduced from an art to a trade.
In 19th century Britain, when the printed word was the principle medium
of exchange between the languages of politics, economics, fact, fiction,
and the creative mind, we traded ideas about art in the common newspaper.
Today in America, with few exceptions – two being the exceptional
the New York Times writers Ben Brantley and Frank Rich –
in the mainstream press, in the forums, and in the ratings systems, we
trade opinions: plugged-nickel counterfeits of ideas.
Other literary-minded periodicals, like the New York Review of Books,
Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, and the New Yorker (these last
three the former homes of the great Edmund Wilson), have either become
organs of Left-leaning political analysis, by which the choir is preached
myriad Goldberg Variations of the sermon whose theme remains Doom; or
they have aged astride their readership, and speak of this new age as
a curiosity, as unfamiliar, and report on their bemused bewilderment to
their peers. Take, as a lesson, Mr. David Remnick, the undoubtedly savvy
and accomplished current editor of the New Yorker, who has recently published
a memoir. In an interview with the Guardian
on the occasion of this memoir’s publication, he admits an excitement
and an affiliation with first-generation Jewish authors such as Saul Bellow,
Malamud, and Philip Roth. Of them, only Roth remains creating art. Remnick
admits, in the same statement, to being left cold by Pynchon and Barth.
Whereas Pynchon is one of the augurs of the consciousness of our age.
(We do not, however, wish to be uncharitable toward the excellent work
consistently arriving in the New York Review of Books, the
New Yorker, and the Times Literary Supplement; they often
remain, however, prohibitively erudite for those of the younger generation,
who, lacking literary context, are, like Fatboy Slim, remaining in our
culture “lying in the gutter, looking at the stars.”)
The critic. Criticism. Critical thinking skills. What
do these words mean? The English word “critic” arrived in
1583 from the ancient Latin criticus and Greek kritikos, meaning
“able to make judgements, a definition itself derived from the Greek
krinein "to separate, decide, discern.” In conservative
eras, however, the critic has difficulty discerning himself from his twin
brother: the “censurer,” the “faultfinder” --
that other meaning. A conservative era, by definition, is afraid of
the future, a future in which standards decline, and order crumbles.
Thus the critic, within the shadow of conservatism, seeks to dismiss the
unworthy rather than elevate the imperfect but stridently New.
Oh, how we have loved, in our conservatism, and in our cynicism, to read
scorching invectives pillorying bad entertainment! Oh, how blithely we
have thrown about the words “sophomore slump,” rather than
observe an artist’s changing direction! And oh, how despite the
conservative critic’s chiding, have the public’s standards
of art and education fallen, and fallen more!
It is time to save the word, the art, and the profession of criticism
from its own name. We must be interpreters, cultivators, and curators.
We should be intertextual interdisciplinary hothouses. We must forge a
biosphere and release the hardiest, most beautiful plants into the wild.
The critic (interpreter, cultivator, curator) serves the artist. Who does
the artist serve? The future of humanity. We join hands.
VI. CONCLUSION
The Boy Bedlam Review arrives
in America in an age of fracturing. America, once the youngest society
on Earth, now looks in the mirror and sees the lines of age tracing the
face, and furrows of care beetling on the brow.
We must recognize this moment in history. For there is great peril. There
is also great promise. Fractures of worldview can lead to untold violence,
or they can lead to new Arts of Understanding. For the first time in human
history the world’s knowledge is available to each and every individual
with a reasonable education and an internet connection. If one wishes.
Seek, and lo, ye shall find.
Yet despite this grand opening of information to the world – the
gift of acid-tripping
Californian hippies who melded the ideas of John
Cage, Robert
Rauschenberg, Zen Buddhism and the science of ecological systems
to those of Buckminster
Fuller and Marshall
McLuhan – we remain children of technocracy. The technocracy
has so triumphed in our Age that we no longer understand what the word
means, and consequently cannot oppose it: we are severed from our memories,
and our histories, in this fast-forward society, and only with the greatest
strength of mind can we perceive ourselves as existing within a technocratic
regime: for it is us, and we know no different.
Two centuries ago, William Blake wrote:
Art Degraded, Imagination Denied:
War Governed the Nations
The Boy Bedlam Review is that
Noble Convocation of Individuals, with the grandest of good fortune –
and hopeful continuing support – in proudly remaining members of
the non-specialist, non-technocratic, technological age:
remaining in a dwindling art: understanding the truth in fiction, discerning
the fiction in “facts,” reading myths, feeling poetry, and
striving toward a POETICS OF INFORMATION in which ideas,
associated by Imagination, rise above Technique into Art.
We believe that mythologies communicate the conflicts of the human soul.
We stand with William Blake in affirming that “all deities reside
in the Human Breast.” We stand with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his
attempt to reconcile theology and science via the poetic imagination.
And we stand with James Joyce in his attempt to reconcile man and woman,
mind and body, and modern life and the mythical past. These are our three
philosophers; we
drink their ale.
We are Modern Fabulists. We believe that the world of art is far larger
than the artworld; we believe that high literary culture infinitely exceeds
the grasp of the publishing industry; and that great filmmaking lies in
innumerable places unseen to the film industry. We aim to join the best
of the Romantic impulse to the best of the Modernist movement, and help
repair things that have been broken. We believe that, in this digital
age, far fewer soldiers than Thermopylae’s 300 can accomplish far
more than a Last Stand; we believe that we can help end the war against
ourselves. And save the planet from its ruin.
David Schneider, Editor
April 22, 2007
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Macquette 2
by Lisa Temple-Scott
Fine Tuning
by Tom Acciarini
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