Oh the critics! Where are the critics?

Übercritics Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz

I found out about this thanks to a Facebook post by ex-Miami Herald art critic Lisa Turner. (As usual, we enter the thorny issue of social causation.) I pass.

How­ev­er, some­thing must be said in favor of the dis­il­lu­sioned crit­ic, who always writes from the ruins of cul­ture. Indeed, we all read that dis­en­chant­ed crit­ic proud­ly car­ry­ing the air of Weber’s Entza­uberung.  A strength of the crit­ic is their con­tempt for polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness. A superb case is 19th-cen­tu­ry rebel Jules Val­lès. His crit­i­cism was forged in anger against aca­d­e­m­ic pom­pos­i­ty and the cor­rect pieties of the Sec­ond Empire. He wrote with a pam­phle­teer’s fire, mix­ing irony with out­rage, con­tempt with humor. His con­tempt for “polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness” was not just styl­is­tic but existential—he refused the masks of pro­pri­ety because he lived and wrote on the side of those denied pro­pri­ety.

Jules Vallès appears in Fèlicien Champsaur’s Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui

Here are spe­cif­ic epigons of the French street scrib­bler:

1. The “Cas­san­dra of taste”, prophet­ic and warned, but nev­er heed­ed. Dwight Mac­don­ald’s end­less warn­ings about “Mass­cult” ver­sus “Mid­cult,” see­ing “debase­ment” every­where.
2. The per­ma­nent mal­con­tent? George Stein­er: sharp, mem­o­rable, iron­ic, always antic­i­pat­ing a col­lapse.
3. The crit­ic of ash­es?  Harold Bloom —his every lament about the decline of the canon reads like com­men­tary deliv­ered among ruins (while fierce­ly guard­ing the embers that remain).
4. The Jad­ed Ora­cle. She speaks with author­i­ty and weary skep­ti­cism (Camille Paglia’s best 1990s writ­ings are filled with nos­tal­gia for lost cul­tur­al seri­ous­ness).
5. One more! The “Ashen crit­ic” —they sur­vey cul­ture as though it were already ruins (as if sigh­ing through the dust). Let’s hear it for Theodor Adorno, Mae­stro of Malaise: wit­ty and pon­der­ous.
6. Son­tag became increas­ing­ly skep­ti­cal about con­tem­po­rary culture’s “super­fi­cial­i­ty”. Too late.
7. Clé­ment Greenberg’s bard atti­tude. He saw mod­ern art’s tra­jec­to­ry as nar­row­ing and often railed against kitsch and deca­dence.

Slavoj Žižek is our flam­boy­ant stand-in: end­less­ly say­ing “no” to lib­er­al opti­mism, cap­i­tal­ist real­ism, and post-ide­o­log­i­cal com­fort (with more jokes and spit than Adorno would have tol­er­at­ed). He clev­er­ly denounces ide­ol­o­gy while thriv­ing on its cir­cus.

How about play­ing Der Nein-Sager, clever and min­i­mal­ist, cap­tur­ing resis­tance and nega­tion?

Com­pared with these gods, I pre­fer to play the what­ev­erist.