In Critical Condition

This article almost concludes our series on criticality, published as part of a partnership with Klimt02 under the label “the AJF feed.” I say “almost” because Pravu Mazumdar has just sent in a long essay titled Against Criticism (due for publication in October). Readers who cringed at the previous essays will surely rejoice over the one from the Munich-based Foucaldian master. In the meantime, I hope this one, by Suzanne Ramljak, will be food for thought, and please have a look at the other four, penned by Moyra Elliott, Clare Finin, Damian Skinner, and Garth Clark.

—Benjamin Lignel

It is fitting that the words “critic” and “crisis” share the same root: the Greek krinein, meaning to separate, decide, judge. Indeed, this is a decisive moment for critical writing, which is currently in crisis mode. While the amount of commentary on art, and on contemporary jewelry, has increased in recent years, criticism per se has been struggling on life support. The causes of this imperiled state are multiple—including the insidious effects of the Internet, a culture of self-esteem, and a growing anti-intellectualism—all pointing to a troubling prognosis.

Death has silenced many of our most potent critics within the last two years; in 2012 alone we lost Gore Vidal, Robert Hughes, Andrew Sarris, Judith Crist, and Hilton Kramer, and Christopher Hitchens passed in late 2011. When literary autopsies were performed on these critics, they were all found to share similar traits and their obituaries inevitably pronounced them “acerbic.” This biting quality, a veritable litmus test for criticality, is in keeping with other terms used to describe the finest criticism: pointed, cutting, incisive, piercing. Each of these departed writers was further commended for belligerence. Vidal was deemed “quarrelsome”; Hughs, “combative”; Sarris, “congenitally disputatious”; Crist, “savage”; Kramer, “contrarian”; and Hitchens, “fearlessly divisive.”[1] Thus the anatomy of a vital critic is shown to include healthy doses of sharpness and contentiousness, features that have marked history’s greatest critical minds. This is a discriminating lot, bravely intent on making distinctions, not friends.

Living critics who still strive to ply their trade are besieged by a host of noxious forces. One is the shrinking space given over to criticism at major magazines and newspapers. The dismissal of critics at these mass media outlets has been widely chronicled, along with the waning relevancy of critical judgment for popular opinion. With this decrease in criticism’s real estate comes the dwindling of a general audience for such seasoned discourse. The migration to the Internet, with its fractured readership, cannot compensate for the loss of these public platforms for critical performance. In many ways the web has actually undermined incisive exchange rather than bolstered it, as the medium has become the message. The drive toward faster, shorter, friendlier, more “social” communication is taking a toll on the content and tone of criticism. Leaving aside questions of quality, the sheer quantity of such digital output is polluting the critical landscape, often with ranting, cursing, and other unprocessed forms of mental waste.

In the article “A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical,” Dwight Garner laments that his profession is “being squeezed from all sides at the exact same moment that new mediums like Twitter and Yelp have become all opinion, all the time, with little in their digitized streams of yak that a critic might recognize as real criticism.”[2] With everyone taking turns on the digital stage, it is akin to having perpetual open mic night, with the real talents rarely getting a chance to shine and illuminate the public mind. The airing of opinions on blogs and websites has become the verbal equivalent of reality TV, where personal peeves and unscripted thoughts parade around as genuine critique. Although fine as an exercise in equal access, it fails to yield criticism of equal merit. We are left with a case of means without ends, not to mention paltry skill.

There is, today, a widespread discomfort with the very idea of quality and skill, and this lack of differentiation between good and bad writing is symptomatic of the critical deterioration we are now facing. In a recent essay on the death of expertise, Tom Nichols bemoans the “Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers … between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all.”[3] Beneath these crumbling distinctions can be detected a fear of inadequacy, which seeks to shelter itself in a notion of equality that ensures that no one will be better than anyone else. This craving for equal regard represents, for Nichols, the “full flowering of a therapeutic culture where self-esteem, not achievement, is the ultimate human value, and it’s making us all dumber by the day.”[4]

Indeed, ours has been labeled the Self-Esteem Culture, an era marked by excessive personal affirmation in education, child rearing, and social relations. It has become common practice in schools and sports leagues to not keep score at games (lest someone “lose”), and to grant awards to everyone (for fear that someone feel left out). This same syndrome is rampant within the familial context, where a blanket of affirmation and ego-boosting smothers any judgment or proportion, fostering a bloated sense of self-worth and entitlement within children.

This spreading malaise of affirmation is also afflicting those with critical credentials. Contesting such enthusiasm, writer Jacob Silverman described the lame amiability of literary culture spawned by social media. “A cloying niceness and blind enthusiasm are the dominant sentiments. Biting criticism has become synonymous with offense; everything is personal,” Silverman writes. “But that affirmation is the habitual gesture of the Internet. We like, favorite, and heart all day. The problem with liking is that it’s a critical dead-end.”[5] In their quest for likability, which helps promote online marketability, critics are becoming self-neutered, renouncing the verbal potency and needed discrimination that distinguishes true critical practice—in a word, they lack balls.

So among the agents undermining a healthy environment for criticism, we have dissolution caused by the Internet, solicitous social media, and a self-esteem culture with an aversion to harsh judgment. To these we must add a general climate of anti-intellectualism, a condition dubbed the Age of Irrationality and the new Digital Dark Ages. In his 2004 book, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?, Frank Furedi argues that intellectuals are vanishing due to a number of factors, including postmodernism, fear of elitism, and obsession with social inclusiveness, all resulting in a cultural relativism that renders everything meaningless.[6] And as postmodernism undermines the traditional intellectual pursuits of objectivity, universality, and truth, all rational and scientific thought becomes suspect. These are not ripe conditions for criticism, and in the decade since Furedi’s book, things have only grown worse.

With the rapid decline of intellectualism and the demise of established critical practices, it is understandable that craft criticism may be suffering from a similar funk. Unfortunately, just as the field is compiling its own history and cultivating dialogue, it encounters this larger cultural impasse. But even without a weakening in the critical Zeitgeist, craft writing has been challenged in unique ways, and an enthusiastically anti-critical tenor has long dominated the field.

The craft world’s chronic congeniality may stem in part from its deep roots in tradition and community. Amy Shaw, founder of Greenjeans, a former gallery committed to craftsmanship and sustainability, pondered the bond between craft and security. Shaw speculated that, due to its associations with home and tradition, craft is widely perceived as a realm of safety and refuge.[7] And perhaps this domestic connection might be feeding the enormous resistance to change and critique that characterizes the field. Craft objects, and certainly jewelry, provide a form of comfort art for many, and there is often a neighborly, touchy-feely tone to its exchange and reception. This supportive family vibe makes it more difficult for someone to launch a serious critical attack without seeming antisocial or downright mean. Such fear of hurting others through sharp criticality is less commonly found in the art world at large. There is a flip side to this agreeableness, however. The supportive craft ethos brings to mind a warning quote by Norman Vincent Peale: “The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.” Taking Peale’s point, we have come to believe that applauding is the best policy to help and promote the practice we love, rather than wielding critique to gain strength and salvation.

Our lack of faith in criticism also signals a larger crisis in our belief in ideas. Bonafide critics do not suffer from such doubt, remaining confident in the primal role that thought plays in shaping the world. As self-appointed culture vigilantes, such critics have the power of their convictions and refuse to surrender in the war of the wits. This unyielding devotion to the cause was conveyed by Christopher Hitchens who, when asked on his death bed (dying of esophageal cancer) if he regretted a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking, replied,“Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that—or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation—is worth it to me.”[8]

Though some may view it as foolhardy, Hitchens was ready to face death if it helped keep criticism, and the life of the mind, alive. Even more important than what to think, or any rendered verdict, critics show us how and why to think. Ultimately, this is the prime value of criticism—it combats mental stupor and rouses the mind into action. The bracing effects of stringent criticism can provide a crucial intellectual tonic, keeping us alert and preventing the slow slide into unconsciousness.