A Critic On Criticism

Charles Mudede, "The New Criticism"

The problem with criticism in all of its forms (art, film, literature) has been its susceptibility to the charge that, ultimately, it is nothing more than the product of someone’s opinion. Criticism is not truth; it is an opinion—or what the Greeks called doxa. We can all agree that opinions are no good.

Kant tried to solve this problem by universalizing subjectivity. He failed miserably. Marxist criticism tried solve this problem by politicizing the function art. The art object, according to this school of thought, was like any other consumer object and so could be analyzed as such. As Marx removed the fetish magic from consumer products in Das Capital, the Marxist critic attempted to remove the aura from the art object. Also, the Marxist critic tried to expose the art object’s idealogical function—to show that the art object was made to reinforce certain beliefs, ideas that supported the reproduction of a given society’s means of production.

But the problem with the Marxist approach is this: it cannot make sense of the fact that some art objects made in societies dominated by the capitalist mode of production are great (Blade Runner) and critical of the system from which they arise; and some art objects made in former socialist societies are very weak (Cement) and support the anti-capitalist system from which they arise ....

Something About Art

The Independent, "The loo that shook the world: Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabi".

Fountain, as full of meaning as an egg is full of meat, changed art for ever. It had always been clear to thoughtful observers that the link between an artist's skill and the merit of his work was a false one. Some of the greatest painters in the world, such as Watteau or Goya, possess a limited technique, and many of the most brilliantly virtuosic and intricate produce art of no ultimate value.

There has never been any value in the proposal that the harder an artist works, or the more skilfully detailed his craft, the better the work of art in the end. The link between labour and product was not decisively broken until Duchamp, however.

Perhaps the larger context helps us to understand why this happened in 1917, and not before. Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dada and a thinker in tune with Duchamp, said in his 1918 "Dada Manifesto" that "a work of art should not be beautiful in itself, for beauty is dead. A work of art is never beautiful by decree, objectively and for all. After the carnage we still retain the hope of a purified mankind."