Tag Archives: criticism

Artists and Critics Sometimes Know Each Other

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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As a critic, I not infrequently know the artists or writers whose work I write about.

If you’ve been following the #gamersgate controversy at all, you know that some people think that this is really wrong. “Journalistic ethics!” people shouted over and over on twitter. It wasn’t exactly clear what they meant by this, but critics knowing artists seemed to be at least one semi-inchoate focus of outrage.

To some degree, you can understand the concerns. There’s a vision of journalistic objectivity which involves a reviewer ruthlessly evaluating the work in front of him or her without any reference to, or knowledge of the creator. The critic, in this view, is supposed to be a completely impartial observer, affixing a stamp of quality or animadversion so that readers can know that they are spending their hard-earned dollars in the best of all possible ways.

The reality is a lot messier. In part, that’s because, if you review a work positively, one of the things that often happens is that the creator of the work gets in touch with you to say, hey, awesome, you liked my work! Often creators will write me just to say thank you (which is lovely). Sometimes, though, they’ll contact me in the hopes that I might review their next book or project, too.

So, is that unethical? Now that I’ve talked to them, am I supposed to never write about their work again? That seems silly; the only reason I know them, after all, is that I like their work. I guess you could argue for some sort of disclosure — but what would I say? “Fair warning: I really like this creator’s work; this creator likes that I like their work. Now on to the review, where I say I like their work!”

The thing is, when I do like somebody’s work, that can also open the way for other collaborations. Many writers and artists I admire, like Ariel Schrag, Edie Fake, and Stacey Donovan, have posted on my little, all volunteer blog at one point or another, because I love their work and when they appear in my inbox to say they liked a review, I’ll sometimes ask them if they would be interested in contributing. If you were determined to be offended by that sort of thing, you could argue it’s a quid pro quo, and that I’m receiving content (even if not money) for good reviews. Edie even designed the banner for my site (which I happily paid him for.) But again, the whole reason I find their contributions valuable is because I value their work — which is what I say whenever I write a review talking about how awesome Ariel Schrag and Edie Fake are.

The disconnect here isn’t just about ethics. It’s about the nature of criticism. A lot of the people posting to gamersgate seem to see reviews primarily as a way to make purchasing decisions. Reviews, from this perspective, are a buyer’s guide; it’s the equivalent of a consumer report. You don’t want the person who evaluates the gas mileage on your Prius to be buddies with the Prius manufacturers, because you’d worry that they might try to help their friend out by saying that the Prius gets better gas mileage than it does. You want an objective take on the value of that Prius.

But while objectivity makes sense as a goal in evaluating Priuses, it doesn’t as a goal for evaluating art. Criticism of art is always, by its nature subjective. And, at least for me, criticism tends to be less about saying, buy this or don’t buy this, and more about trying to engage with, and think about, what an artist is saying, or what a work is doing. A piece of criticism is as much about talking to, or with, the artist as it is providing a consumer report. On #gamersgate art is seen as a product, which is certainly one thing art can be. But art’s also a community. Which is why having actual conversations with the artist in question doesn’t seem like an ethical violation. Having conversations with the artist is my job.

Fan Fiction Is Criticism Is Art

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This was one of those pieces where I said to myself as I was writing it, “I can’t believe a mainstream magazine is going to print this! That’s so cool!”

And as ever when I say that to myself, the editor who had accepted the pitch looked at it and didn’t get it. So, I thought I’d run it here for my patrons. This is my third Twisted Mass of Heterotopia column; if you like it, please consider donating to my Patreon so I can write more pieces like this.
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51xPgshGb8L._SX352_BO1,204,203,200_Fan fiction is despised. Criticism is despised. And both are despised for the same broad reason; they’re seen as parasitic. If a critic was a real artist, the critic would make a film rather than just writing about how superhero films are crap. If a fan fiction writer were truly creative, that fan fiction writer would develop their own characters and plots, rather than having Spock pour his heart out to Kirk for the gazillionth time. Great artists are originals; fan fiction writers and critics are derivative copyists, battened, like great aesthetic mosquitoes, upon the blood of their betters.

Charlie Lovett’s The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge must be doubly derivative, then, since it is both fan fiction and literary criticism. Lovett is best known for his best-selling book-centered mystery, The Bookman’s Tale. But in The Further Adventures he moves from broad bibliphilia to individual homage—or individual theft, if you’d prefer.

The short novella picks up twenty years after the end of Dickens’ famous A Christmas Carol. The formerly miserly Scrooge is now as renowned for his manic generosity and good will as he once was for his ill temper. “A generous, charitable, jolly, gleeful, munificent old fool, yielding as a feather pillow that welcomed the weariest soul to its downy breast,” as Lovett describes him in solid faux Dickensian prose. Determined to do even more good, Scrooge calls upon the Christmas spirits to work their nighttime magic on others: his newphew, his former-assistant-now-partner Bob Cratchitt, and his bankers. The result (spoilers!) is additional joy on earth for all.

The story is mostly an excuse to visit with Scrooge again, and for Lovett to splice in various passages from Dickens (the description of the the London slums from Bleak House, for example) with his own pastiche. But while the book is mostly tribute, it also functions as a criticism of the original novel. Early on, it mildly tweaks Dickens’ sentimentalism; Scrooge’s unfailing good cheer is, it turns out, as irritating as his former dyspepsia. Over twenty years, in fact, Scrooge’s “constant kindnesses had grown wearisome from years of use.” Is Scrooge generous, or is he, in his single-minded effort to store up treasures in heaven, really as selfish and unconcerned with others as he was in his single-minded miserliness? Maybe the ghosts didn’t change him all that much after all.

The main critique though, comes in the second half of the novella, when the ghosts lead Scrooge’s nephew to run for Parliament, and inspire his bankers to set up a permanent charity. Dickens’ Christmas Carol presents personal transformation as the route to social good; God reaches down and makes the world a better place by changing Scrooge’s heart. Lovett, though, suggests that ghost Marley’s chains can never really be taken from him through individual acts of kindness. Real change, and really helping people, requires political power and institutional investment.

Lovett’s combination of fan fiction and criticism isn’t an aberration. On the contrary, literary fan fiction like The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge frequently includes, or is based upon, a critical reading of the original work. Jo Baker’s marvelous Longbourn (2013), for instance, is a reworking of Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of the servants. As such, it functions as a counter-intuitive, but powerful reading of the original novel. Suddenly, the Bennett household is built, not on the goodness and wisdom of Jane and Elizabeth, but on the raw hands and constant toil of the women below stairs who wash the sheets and make the dinner. And Elizabeth’s story is not so much about true love, as it is about the power and privilege which enable true love. “What it is to be young and lovely and very well aware of it,” the servant Mrs. Hill thinks while looking at Elizabeth. “What it is to know that you will only settle for the keenest love, the most perfect match.” Mrs. Hill could not settle for the perfect match; she fell in love with Mr. Bennett, had his child, then had to give the boy (Elizabeth’s half brother) away to avoid scandal. Austen’s vision of respectable, respectful love is only possible because she’s in a family, and a class, where they can afford respectable, respectful love. Other people aren’t so lucky.

Again, criticism is often seen as parasitic on original art. But in Longbourn, this is turned around. Jo Baker’s novel is essentially parasitic on critical insight. The kernel of the novel is the critical question, how is class erased in Pride and Prejudice? “The main characters in Longbourn are ghostly presences in Pride and Prejudice, they exist to serve the family and the story,” Baker says in an author’s note. “But they are—at least in my head—people too.” The commentary on, and critical reading, of Pride and Prejudice becomes a work of art of its own.

Jo Baker isn’t the only writer who builds her art on criticism. Jane Austen, famously, did the same in Northanger Abbey, a book which is a parody, or reworking, of the Gothic novels of Austen’s day. Just as Lovett questions the presuppositions of Dickens, and Baker questions the presuppositions of Austen, so Austen’s novel is an extended critique of the tropes of the Gothic. “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine,” is Austen’s opening line—pointing not forward into the story, but backwards towards all those other Gothic narratives with extraordinary heroines. “She had a thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong features—so much for her person; and not less unpropitious for heroism seemed her mind. She was fond of all boy’s plays, and greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush.” Austen is criticizing, and questioning those perfect, feminine, marked-for-destiny Gothic heroines, just as Baker criticized and questioned Austen’s own sprightly, self-confident, self-determining ones. If Baker is parasitic on Austen, then Austen is parasitic on those Gothic novels — or, more directly, on a critical analysis of those Gothic novels. If Baker is Austen fan-fic, why isn’t Austen Gothic fan-fic?

Dickens’ Christmas Carol is not a direct parody or reworking of another story. But still, Lovett’s fan fiction seems so much in the spirit of the original in part because A Christmas Carol functions in a lot of ways as a criticism, or fan fiction retelling, of itself. Scrooge starts out as a “tight-fisted hand at the grindstone…a squeezing, wreching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!” That’s the iconic Scrooge…and then the rest of the book shows us what’s left out of the portrait, just as Jo Baker shows us what’s left out of Austen, and Austen shows us what’s left out of the Gothic. The ghosts don’t just transform Scrooge; they transform that original vision of Scrooge. We see his childhood; his love for his sister; his fiancé; we see, in other words, that the hard-hearted, miser Scrooge is not the whole story. Dickens could be seen as writing his own fan-fiction, creating an Elseworlds version of his own character. What if Superman had landed in Russia? What if Scully and Mulder had a passionate fling? What if Scrooge were a good man? That last is the premise of The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge — but it’s also the premise of A Christmas Carol.

Criticism, fan fiction, and original art seem like easily separable categories; Mark Twain’s works goes in the library, your online Twilight story about Edward and Jacob and all the things they do goes in the online forum, this essay you’re reading right here is in the TNR books section. But Mark Twain wrote Arthurian fan fic (and criticism) in Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. E.L. James’ Twilight fan fic went to the best-sellers list. This essay is, admittedly, not likely to enter the western canon, but still, I contend that it’s inspired by the same impulse as Baker’s Longbourn, or Northanger Abbey or those further adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge. For art, for criticism, or for fan fiction, the question is always the same. How might this story be changed? Questioning the world, playing with the world, and creating the world — those things aren’t so different. We can maybe even write a story, or an essay, if we’d like, and imagine a place, much like this one, where they’re all the same.

The Ways of White Critics

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Why is it when critics confront the American as Negro they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis?”

—Ralph Ellison, “The World and the Jug”

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book Between the World and Me has prompted the critical establishment to embarrass itself even more than is its wont. As I wrote earlier this week at Splice Today, the Economist and the NYT both wrote the same review of Coates’ book in which they flapped anxiously at his lack of respect for 9/11 firefighters and assured him that the world was getting better all the time because of nice establishment folks at the NYT and Economist, why oh why must he be so bitter? To follow that, Freddie de Boer spoke up for the anti-establishment establishment to insist that he did like Coates but only within limits—which is to say, he didn’t like him as much as he liked James Baldwin. DeBoer then went on to insist that the rest of the media overpraises Coates, thereby implying (in line with the anti-establishment establishment playbook) that he alone is telling it like it is and everyone else is blinded by something that sure sounds like liberal guilt, even though deBoer assures us that’s not what he means. (Posts are here and here.)

DeBoer on twitter suggested that objections to his minor critiques of Coates demonstrate his point—i.e., that Coates is overpraised. But I don’t think the resistance deBoer is meeting is because he criticized Coates. Because, as lots of folks have pointed out, there’s tons of criticism of Coates. Again, reviews in the NYT and Economist — two of the largest profile venues around—were both mixed to negative. There have also been a number of criticisms questioning his treatment of black women, notably Shani O. Hilton’s piece at Buzzfeed and a really remarkable essay by Brit Bennett at the New Yorker. I also saw Coates being taken to task in no uncertain terms earlier this week on twitter for alleged failures to reach out to black media with advanced review copies. The idea that Coates is somehow sacrosanct is simply nonsense. Though as Tressie McMillan Cottom pointed out on twitter, it might be easy to miss those critiques if you’re not reading, or considering the words of, any black writers.

And I think that’s really the frustrating thing about deBoer’s argument here. The discussion of Coates’ work, and the reception of it, is framed almost entirely in terms of the health and thought of a left which is figured as implicitly white. In an earlier piece on online media, for example, deBoer made a glancing sneer at folks who frequent Coates’ lovingly moderated comments section at the Atlantic. DeBoer characterized them as a “creepshow” and sneered that they were “asking [Coates] to forgive their sins.” I don’t know how to read that except as a suggestion that Coates’ commenters are actuated by white liberal guilt. Which assumes that none of the commenters are black. Which is a mighty big assumption to make, it seeems like.

Presumably deBoer would say that he wasn’t talking about all the commenters, just the creepshow white ones. But then, why are white commenters the only ones who get mentioned? Why is the criticism and the conversation always focused on white people? Why does a discussion of Coates’ work, turn, in deBoer’s second post, into an embarrassing paen to deBoer’s own righteous consistency? “They used to say I was leftier-than-thou, that I always wanted to be left-of-left. Now they say I’m anti-left. I guess that changed. But I didn’t change,” he declares. Coates’ book isn’t a chance to talk about Coates’ book. It’s not even a chance to respond to Coates’ criticism, exactly, since deBoer doesn’t directly acknowledge in his second piece that one of the people calling him out is Coates himself. Instead, the post is an opportunity for deBoer to declare himself, again, the one righteous man, stuck in the same righteous rut as ever.

I wish deBoer weren’t trapped in quite that impasse for various reasons, but the most relevant one here is that there really is a worthwhile discussion to be had about how white critics can, or should, approach black works of art. On the one hand, I think it’s important for white critics to engage with work by black artists because those works deserve serious consideration by everyone, of whatever color. Creators like Ta-Nehisi Coates, or Rihanna, or Jacob Lawrence, are not in some marginal genre, to be considered as footnotes. They’re at least as important as Harper Lee, or Madonna, or Picasso, and they should be treated as such by whoever happens to be sitting down at the keyboard.

But at the same time, when white critics write about black artists, they often bring with them a lot of presuppositions, and a lot of racism — both personal and structural. White people have been defining and criticizing black people for hundreds of years, and mostly that process has ended up with white people declaring, in one way or another, that black people aren’t human, not infrequently as a prelude to killing them. “Too often,” Ellison writes, “those with a facility for ideas find themselves in the councils of power representing me at the double distance of racial alienation and inexperience.” There’s a brutal, relevant history there that you have to think about before you as a non-black critic blithely insist a black author is too bitter, or start spiraling off at random to discuss your own career prospects.

Too easy praise can be as condescending as too easy sneering, of course. There’s no easy route to truth, though an awareness of the difficulty of the task should probably be balanced with the recognition that the trials of the white critic are not the most difficult trials ever devised. In any case, it’s worth keeping in mind, when that piece takes shape in your head, that out there in the world black people exist, who have been known to criticize black art themselves, and even, at times, white critics.

“So will my page be colored that I write?

Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me—
although you’re older—and white—
and somewhat more free.”

—Langston Hughes, “Theme From English B”

Can Rhetorical Layout Modulate Narrative Momentum? (Groensteen and Page Layout Roundtable 1)

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The entire Groensteen and Page Layout roundtable is here/

 

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“…[T]he experience of reading a comic is a function not only of what is contained within each panel, but also of the size, shape, and design of the panels themselves as well as the spatial relations among them.” (Joseph Witek, “The Arrow and the Grid,” in Heer and Worcester’s A Comics Studies Reader, 155)

 
I have a foundational question to ask before heading into the first of our five Pencil Panel Page posts responding to Thierry Groensteen’s exploration of page layout and rhythm in his recently translated work, Comics and Narration (Mississippi UP, 2013, trans. Ann Miller), especially Chapter Two, “On a Few Theories of Page Layout.” Are we selling traditional (i.e. non-abstract) comics short by foregrounding them as “sequential narratives” first and foremost? I wonder if, by privileging narrative momentum, that forward-thrusting gesture of story that we are so wired to detect and to favor, we have occluded the equally compelling possibility of nonlinear composition and meaning-making on the comics page. So many discussions of page layout, including Groensteen’s to a great extent, are predicated on propulsion, i.e. asking how the reader’s eye is drawn from panel to panel to make sense of the narrative. This narrative accretes; if the layout is effective, the story is built up (Ware allusion intentional, yes) from its component parts (the panels), and the reader is drawn across the pages, actively cooperating in its construction: “The multiframe lures the reader ever onwards, it designates in advance the images still to come; the reader therefore feels summoned by them and rushes headlong after the forthcoming narrative segments, as if running down a flight of stairs.” (“The Rhythms of Comics,” Comics and Narration, 136)

This underlying metaphor is seductive. Why wouldn’t we favor a formal model that upholds comics as a vigorous, agentic medium that grabs readers visually and verbally and carries them into the story? Why wouldn’t we favor a formal model that applauds the skilled comics reader for his/her ability to catch the wave and move in rhythm with the text? Kinda sexy, no?

‘Cept maybe it’s not the only game in town. Groensteen’s exploration of the multiframe (the page; in System of Comics, this was sometimes translated as “hyperframe”) in Chapter Two relies on the privileging of narrative thrust, but it does gesture at another possibility, even if it doesn’t explore it fully. This possibility is not limited to abstract or wordless comics, which in a later chapter (Chapter 7) are offered as the [only?] comics forms that escape the regular “beat” of linear progression (“In narrative comic art, rhythm is no longer part of the content itself [as it may be on some pages of abstract comic art] but merely a mode of narration.” 135). The possibility that intrigues me is the page composed of “rhetorical” panels: “the technique that molds the shape or size of the panel to the action that it encloses.” (46). Groensteen attributes this term and concept to Benoît Peeters (Lire la bande dessinée [Reading Comics]) and suggests (too briefly) that interesting tensions can be created when regular patterns are interrupted to visually echo diegetic material (e.g. dialogue that extends beyond a panel border or the occasional use of symbolic panel shapes). Joseph (Rusty) Witek, in his important essay, “The Arrow and the Grid,” (in Heer and Worcester’s A Comics Studies Reader, Mississippi UP, 2009), offers another term–“gestalt” — for such panels, defining this layout process as one in which the “overall shapes of the panels take on narrative or thematic significance” (154). Witek offers early Jack Kirby Captain America pages as an example, and here’s a simple example from David B.’s Epileptic:
 

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(Incidentally, these two pieces of criticism work beautifully in conversation with each other, though neither references the theory of the other; perhaps this is one answer to a question posed for the forthcoming Comics/Graphic Narratives Discussion Group MLA 2015 roundtable on comics theory: “Now that many Franco-Belgian works of comics criticism are available in translation—The System of Comics, Comics and Narration by Groensteen, to name two—are we beginning to see a blending of Anglo and French comics theories, or do these seem to be two separate lines of thought?”)

Both Groensteen and Witek see the regular pattern of layout as the basic structure of the comics page (for Witek, it’s a “grid,” for Groensteen it is the “waffle-iron”) and both discern relative degrees of complexity in any disruptions offered by comics creators, beginning with the “easiest,” which is based on the simple “elimination” of vertical or horizontal borders to create larger panels that still adhere to the basic structure, and in a modular form, insert smaller or larger panels into the given space of the grid. Groensteen conceives of this as “nested regularity,” and offers Chris Ware’s work as the quintessential example:
 

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Interestingly, there is a bit of tension here: on one hand, Ware is acknowledged as tightly controlling the rhythm by disciplining the reader to recognize the basic pattern and then follow it as it shrinks Fibonacci-style, yet readers can and do fight this highly controlled regularity, as Orion Martin did in his June 6, 2014 Hooded Utilitarian post, “I’m Lost: Path-Finding in Comics“:

“Recently, while reading Chris Ware’s Building Stories, I found myself completely ignoring the path that he had imagined. Instead of a narrative progression, I read the pages as clouds of remembered moments, letting each fall into place in due time.”

(Here, Martin has hinted at exactly what I’m hoping for: perhaps we don’t have to stay narratively inclined while reading narratives!)

More sophisticated versions of experimental layout that still do not reach the gestalt/rhetorical stage are other types of play on the regular grid; for example, occasionally altering the expected number of panels (“density”) in an otherwise regular album (book)–splash pages, landscape panels, etc.–, changing the very shape of the page from the usual rectangle to another shape,
 

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(see David Petersen’s enlightening discussion of why he believes the square page works best for his Mouse Guard), or making the grid slightly irregular– an “offset grid,” offers Witek—as Alison Bechdel uses here:
 

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Or how about combining bordered and borderless panels, while also varying the number of panels per line, as Seth does here:
 

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Here’s Joe Sacco doing even more clever things with the offset grid:
 

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Finally, we approach rhetorical panel layout, which not only takes into account what is happening diegetically, but also assists the reader in exploring thematic and tangential meaning on the page (i.e. keeps us on the page, and perhaps beyond the page/beyond the comic, rather than simply propelled forward in the narrative), as in this fine example from Jason Smith’s The Jumper:
 

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“…I mean what happens when the story actually calls for some kind of different layout?” Smith wonders in his meditation on the layout choices he made for The Jumper.

“The layout actually gets the reader to do two things that most comics don’t normally ask you to do: 1. read up the page from top to bottom [sic; I think he meant bottom to top], and 2. read from right-to-left.”

Though he doesn’t explore this gesture fully in his blog post, Smith does show how it is possible to significantly break with the grid in order to exemplify something fundamental to the story. I’ll be interested to see what Barbara Postema has to say about this in her chapter, “Concerning the In-Between: Layout in Frames and Gutters,” in the promising Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments (RIT Press, 2013), which I’m hoping to get to before (*#$^!) the fall semester crashes into me.

Want to hear a comic artist think about rhetorical panel layout experimentation in a complex, legible way, without even once mentioning Groensteen? Read the creator of Dresden Codak, Aaron Diaz’s post, “Advanced Layouts: Paneling Outside the Box,” on his blog, Indistinguishable from Magic. Diaz offers us clear and compelling examples of nontraditional layout in order of difficulty. It’s a far less turgid exploration of the topic than the post you are currently reading, and well worth the jump. Go now.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Crit

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I wouldn’t recommend talking about criticism too much.

Your audience will, most likely, frown and move on to more pleasurable pursuits, and before long, it’s you and three other people nobody likes sitting around the kitchen table, drinking and talking, until someone spills their gin out on the table, and then there will be no more gin, and you will hear your heart beating and hear everyone’s heart, hear the human noise you sit there making, not one of you moving, not even when the room goes dark.

Which is hardly surprising. It may well be true that people view criticism “as an extension of the artistic experience,” as Tom Spurgeon suggests. It’s probably fair to say, too, that “criticism” tends to be seen as being synonymous with “reviews,” and those, in turn, as a service rendered to the entertainment seeker—plot summary, some light background info, thumbs-up/thumbs-down recommendation, mission accomplished.

Consequently, the worst and most obnoxious thing a critic could possibly do is be a spoilsport, either by being ambivalent, or by revealing plot points people would rather find out themselves, or by suggesting their taste is superior to the taste of their readers. It’s no wonder critics aren’t terribly popular when, at best, they’re supposed to be glorified food tasters, efficient catalysts for a maximized entertainment and/or artistic experience, ideally with no delusions of being anything more than, at best, useful leeches.

If that’s your approach, then critics talking about criticism isn’t just the most tedious, pointless and presumptuous thing ever, but an outright affront to any and all true practitioners of the arts, to which criticism does not belong. And, you know, that’s a perfectly valid way of approaching criticism if all you’re looking for is someone to provide you with a service.

It’s also a pretty dumb way of approaching criticism.

First up, even if we’re just talking about “Criticism as a Revenue Source,” as Spurgeon does, then writing for people who view criticism in that vein is not a terribly smart thing to do. Sure, it’s good to be reliable and competent and realistic about the context of your work. But Pauline Kael—to stick with Spurgeon’s example—didn’t become Pauline Kael by writing criticism for people who wanted “more on Blade Runner.” Kael became Kael by writing criticism for people who might want to read Kael, even when most people reading her probably did want “more on Blade Runner.”

Second, criticism is an art like any other. And, contrary to popular opinion, it’s as independent as any other art, as well.

Broadly speaking, criticism is the art of thinking and talking about a subject; more narrowly defined, it’s the art of aesthetic interrogation—you don’t need literature, music, film, comics or cave paintings for either of that. An interesting rock will suffice. A tree will suffice. Sure, criticism needs a point of reference. But which of the arts doesn’t? Each work of art necessarily carries its own set of traditions, conventions and themes. Write a story about love, paint a picture of an apple, sing a song about the neighbors’ cat—or write a critical essay about the aesthetic quality of that big cloud formation up there.

Criticism frequently overlaps with the other arts, too. There’s a good deal of it in Romeo and Juliet, Gulliver’s Travels, Citizen Kane, Watchmen and Yeezus—each a work of art on its own terms, and each very much part of a larger discourse of the arts, and of culture. Criticism can be as plain or as artful as you want it to be, it can stand on its own or be part of a larger work. Criticism is arguably more independent than the other arts, because it doesn’t require one particular form—it can adapt to any form you want it to.

As a critic, you’re not the servant of your subject matter, nor its master. You’re its interrogator. It’s your job to strike up an engaging conversation with it, and whether or not you accomplish this is the only way for you—or anyone—to measure your success.

Third, and most significantly, if criticism is the art of thinking and talking about a subject, it follows that the alternative to criticism is to not think and to not talk. Which means that criticism is not merely a job, but an inherent necessity of democracy and culture.

“Not only does democracy demand freedom of criticism and require critical impulses,” German philosopher Theodore Adorno writes.
 

“It is effectively defined by criticism. […] The system of checks and balances, the two-way control of executive, legislature and judiciary, says as much as: that any one of these powers may exercise criticism upon another and thereby limit the despotism to which each of them, without any critical element, gravitates.” (Translation by me.)

 
In a social and political sense, consequently, what’s left without criticism is power unchecked. In a cultural context, what’s left without criticism is a state of stagnation and complacency.

* * *

Adorno also points out that the frequent call to be “constructive” is a smoke screen invoked to divert and defuse criticism—to render it ineffectual.

Indeed, even when people mean well and just don’t know any better, the notion of “constructive criticism” misses the rather crucial fact that criticism itself is, inherently, a constructive endeavor, and to achieve its beneficial effects, it needs to be rigorous, thorough and clear in the appraisal of its subject matter.

So asking critics to be “constructive” is a little bit like asking firemen to bring marshmallows. What these people mean is, actually, that they don’t want you to criticize, because being criticized does not result in happy thoughts. But making happy thoughts a priority is utterly destructive, of course. Before long, we will all be munching marshmallows while houses are burning down, and eventually our teeth will fall out and we will die fat and lame-brained and homeless.

So, please, whatever you do, don’t try to be “constructive” with your criticism. That’s not your job. Leave it to the people whose work you’re criticizing to do their jobs. Your job is to criticize, and if you do it right, you’re already contributing something that’s culturally significant and healthy by definition. If somebody just needs happy thoughts, then there are pills for that.

“Those who talk about the positive the most,” Adorno says, “are in agreement with destructive power.” So: “constructive criticism”? Kill it with fire.

* * *

“I think it’s worth reconsidering,” Spurgeon concludes, “what we believe the specific value of criticism to be in the context of the media we have, and maybe not as we think it should be… or fool ourselves into thinking it was.” This is not necessarily the best sentence he’s written. If you replace “criticism” with “art” in that sentence, it sounds pretty goofy; if you don’t, it still does.

I get the sentiment. Spurgeon is talking about revenue streams, after all, and it’s good to be realistic about this stuff. Nobody in the arts has the god-given and inalienable right to be paid, and critics are no exception. If you want to be paid, you have to deal with whatever options there are in the market, maybe adjust your work accordingly, and find someone who agrees to give you money for your work. If that’s what Spurgeon is saying, I’m with him.

However, this doesn’t mean that the work which results from this sometimes less-than-ideal context gets a free pass. If you turn in bad work, it’s not made any better by the fact that you needed to in order to get paid.

It behooves us to keep scrutinizing criticism for what it is, rather than for its context—especially if the context happens to be less than ideal. There’s a responsibility to keep recognizing—and criticizing—poor work, including criticism, regardless of the circumstances it was produced in.

And I’d rather not reconsider that.

* * *

Critics aren’t writing in a vacuum, though. There are fans and creators, too, and I think it’s fair to say that they tend to be fond of criticism in so far as it confirms their own tastes and sensibilities. Which is fine, but sometimes seems to be having an unfortunate effect on the people writing the reviews.

Personally, if I ever complain about too much “negativity,” feel threatened by people who don’t start their sentences with “I think” or “In my opinion,” or peg somebody as a “hater” because I closely identify with some thing or other that’s not up to their critical standards, then please shoot me, chain my corpse to a heavy rock and dump it somewhere over the Mariana Trench. Maybe slit my wrists, too—just to make sure the sharks find me on my way down.

That’s just my opinion.

You see, as a critic, I accept your tastes in art, and they don’t bother me much, whatever they may be. But respect them? Respect, now that’s asking a lot. I’m sorry, but if you’re a huge fan of, say, Joss Whedon’s half-cooked juvenile nonsense, I don’t see a way for me to respect that. How could I possibly respect that? I don’t want to respect that. I hope you’re happy with your tastes, certainly, and secure in them, they being your tastes and all. But asking me to respect them, that seems like a bit of a stretch to me.

I could pretend that I do, of course, in the spirit of harmony—that’s a great point. But what good could possibly come from that, other than maybe you liking me a little bit better and you feeling a little bit more secure in your appreciation of art that I consider to be poisonous, phony and stupid? Not much good, I think, so I probably won’t be doing that. Not that I don’t want to be liked as much as the next guy, mind you, but I guess I’m dysfunctional enough to realize that being a critic and being liked are two things that don’t necessarily go well together and happily pick the former anyway.

Likewise, being a critic, it wouldn’t occur to me to ask for respect. I have no delusions about the fact that most people—including, unfortunately, the ones who practice it—don’t have a clue what criticism is. No matter how long you’ve been at it, no matter where you’ve been  published, no matter what you get paid—respect? Pheeew. You gotta have a lotta nerve asking for that shit, if only because it’s not something that can be given just like that.

Respect isn’t something that can be extended at will. Rather, it’s something that grows over time, and that has to be earned through the quality of your work. Which is doubly hard as a critic, because, obviously, your work involves a truthful appraisal of other people’s work. You do the math. Of course, if you establish yourself as someone who does a lot of free PR and is very nice to a lot of people, then a lot of people are going to like you, in a professional kind of way, and I suppose that’s easy to confuse with respect.

Not that there’s anything wrong with liking comics, and being buddies with creators, and pushing and promoting the ones you’re excited about as much as you can—not at all. Fans, creators and PR people do that all the time, and more power to them. But that’s not criticism. Most of the so-called comics reviews out there are not criticism.

Critics whose work I respect are the ones who expose themselves by taking a stance, even when it’s unpopular; the ones who write fearlessly, with passion, knowledge and substance, in ways nobody else could write. If you keep making a lot of noise instead about what you deserve and why-does-so-and-so-not-respect-me, and boohoo, someone was talking about critics and they did not mention me, then I guess I might remember your name eventually, but not necessarily in the context of “respect.”

* * *

Ultimately, a piece of art that nobody ever thinks about or has a conversation about might as well not exist. So, by all means, be a critic. Criticism—harsh, honest, passionate criticism—is crucial. Where criticism does not occur, the arts are dead and people don’t think.

When rigorous and fearless and insolent criticism no longer exists as a political and cultural corrective and is replaced by people “just focusing on the positive” and “sharing what they like,” that’s when you need to worry.

Hey, still here? I’m afraid the booze is long gone, and we’ve switched to drinking from the bitter tears of young-adult-fiction fans instead. We, of the terminology thought police, you know. Can you take it?

(Apologies to Gordon Lish, who hopefully apologized to Raymond Carver.)
 

Adorno

Step back; he is preparing to criticize.

 
 

Art vs. Art: Zen Pencils and the Critical Imagination

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emerson

Trying to figure out the exact point of Zen Pencils has not been easy. Created and written by Australia-based cartoonist Gavin Aung Than since 2012, it is at least usually a series of comics about inspirational quotes made by famous people, a sort of Chicken Soup for the Cartoonist’s Soul. With its feel good premise and emphasis on inner creativity, self-realization and the transformative power of a single out-of-context quote, it isn’t surprising that the comic series has been since its inception a hit on Facebook walls and Pinterest boards alike. Whether or not you recognize the author, if you’ve seen a comic floating around about a quote by Carl Sagan, Helen Keller, or Theodore Roosevelt, chances are you’ve seen some of Aung Than’s work. Though not all focused on unrelenting positivity, the vast majority of Zen Pencils comics are small and quickly gratifying fell-goodisms, nuggets of good vibes that find their ideal germinating ground in the digital networks of chain emails your uncle likes to send out. Yet at the same time, Zen Pencils has long had an underlying current of negative, vitriolic vein of thought running through it, expressed in angry comics on teaching, the terrors of post-graduation life, and the impact of technology on society, among others. These comics received a certain degree of notoriety for this, and, as this is the internet, a certain degree of trolling directed at Zen Pencils in general and Aung Than in particular. But it is not these initial comics that the crux of Zen Pencils’ notoriety rests on, but rather the way Aung Than responded to his critics; by creating a massive, four part comic about the evils of his interlocutors. It’s an ignominious, textbook example of how one should not respond to criticism.

The comics begin with a group of internet critics and naysayers, apparently quite literally full of shit, bursting into piles of green sludge randomly and violently. As more and more cardboard cutout cynics meet their fate this way, the green sludge begins to take form, transforming into a massive slime monster aptly titled (and with a hashtag) #hate. To counter the threat of #hate, which threatens to engulf all creativity and art in the world, an anachronistic group of artists led by one “H. Miyazaki” (copyright issues and all) gather together and, with veritably Captain Planet like gumption, form a giant mecha robot called A.R.T., emblazoned with an inspirational quote by Theodore Roosevelt, and blast off to fight the evil #hate in a climactic showdown. When they finally succeed in the comics’ thrilling conclusion, they take the entrails of their slain adversary, fly to the moon, and write the word ART on its surface as a message (and perhaps a warning) to all those who may question and criticize art.
 
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Be afraid, my fellow HU critics.

There is so much going in this bizarre four part comic, written by a man best known for writing feel-goodisms about Albert Einstein and Helen Keller, it’s difficult to know where to begin. For long-time naysayers and critics of Zen Pencils, this vociferously anti-criticism criticism is going to do little but validate their objections, that Aung Than’s work is little more than moralizing, didactic tripe that doesn’t see the world with nuance. And in doing so, of course, they will only reinforce Aung Than’s position that critics are hacks at best and slime beings at worst. So where is there to go from here? It seems all too easy to dismiss the Art vs. Hate comics as angry, senseless diatribes, long winded rants in the vein of a public meltdown, but there’s a clear form and directionality to these comics that your average twitter breakdown lacks. Aung Than has planned out these comics thoroughly, and released them successively, each within a few weeks of each other. Several weeks to a month seems a long time to hold onto the white hot rage the comics seem to project, so what is their purpose? Aung Than is clearly making a statement, however confused and angry, and this in itself seems worth at least trying to unpack. What he ends up expressing is not a rant so much as a Manichean prophecy, a declaration that we live in a world of light and dark, art and criticism, #hate and #create. And we – all of us, from immediate readers to anyone with a stake in the exploration of art itself – must take a side. Will we stand with the artists, and try to create? Or will we be swept away as critics, like so many little slime monsters?
 
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The glaring weakness in Aung Than’s dichotomy is the weakness of most dichotomies – that the binary they are predicated upon does not really exist. In writing this article, I am at least ostensibly in the position of critic, but I do not think of myself solely as such, and dedicate much of my time to my own creative endeavors. Does this make me a critic, or an artist? Am I made of slime and hate, or goodness and creativity? In truth, I and most people are a holistic mix of both. Criticism is not inimical to art; it is the molecular reaction, the most basic process, through which art of any sort is created. Art doesn’t emerge from a vacuum; it is created in response to the world, indeed as criticism towards it, and art evolves as an active process of criticisms and reassessment across decades and centuries. The Realists would not have emerged were they not critics of the Romantics; Postmodernism would never have occurred were it not for the faults present in Modernism. The moment we strip art of its critical dimension, we strip it of its ability to grow, to change, and to affect us. Art, if it is to serve a purpose, cannot simply stop being critical or subversive when we deem it so; it cannot be made for its own sake. And if you will forgive me for trying to answer the forbidden ‘what is art’ question, I would say that art exists to inform, to reflect, and to critique, and the moment it ceases in this function it is no longer art. It is something else entirely.

I hope #Hate isn’t #trending.

Is this what Aung Than wants? To strip art of its critical component and make it a dead and static thing to be hung up on a wall and endlessly gestured to? I do not think so. Zen Pencils is based on the words of wisdom spoken by some of the most notable figures in our world, and many of those figures quoted are indeed artists. Imagine a world where artists did not exist to say inspirational things! What would Zen Pencils, Hallmark, and the chain email enthusiasts of the world do?! The horror! But in all truth, in evaluating the Art vs. Hate comics, my suggestion would be for Aung Than to think back to one specific character; H(ayao) Miyazaki, his self-described biggest idol and influence. What is it about Miyazaki’s work that he appreciates the most? What does he try to emulate, and what makes it worthwhile to him? Criticism is not merely an act of negation; it is as much choosing what to keep in creative endeavors as it is figuring out what to leave behind, and what to oppose.
 

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I do not say any of this to condescend to Aung Than or his work, for when it comes to mindlessly negative internet trolls and their detrimental impact on discourse and the creation of art, we are in total agreement. The nastiness directed towards Zen Pencils does not constitute good criticism, but the comics as a whole could stand to realize that there is more to the process of creating than empty eulogies. In raising art to a pedestal-beyond-pedestals, Zen Pencils does not enshrine art, but merely the idea of art, an empty rhetorical figure used metonymically to refer vaguely and uncritically to everything good and pure in the world. This emptying out of art, so to speak, is not a new phenomenon; defending art for art’s sake, as if art exists independent of the world from which it arises and must be bulwarked against that very world, is a common and noxious idea that gains ground whenever one speaks of art as a goal in and of itself. It is easy to appreciate art, to worship the very idea of it and identify it as the sentinel against which all the evils of the world are kept at bay, but this is tantamount to a betrayal of art itself. Art does not preserve the world, nor does it transcend it; art creates the world, and to criticize is to define and create art itself. We make art not to transcend the world, but to critique it, and make it a better place. And when we can fully recognize and appreciate this, then maybe Aung Than’s dream will be realized, and art will truly triumph over #hate it all its forms.
 

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I’m not the first to point it out, but there’s something truly unfortunate about the idea that “H” Miyazaki would find much wisdom in the words of noted white supremacist and American imperialist cheerleader Theodore Roosevelt.

Caroline Small on Critic-Practitioners

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Caroline Small has been away from HU too long. She left a comment recently on Suat’s post about comics criticism, though, and so in the absence of a real full length post, I thought I’d highlight this, in part because I miss new Caro content, but mostly because it’s worth highlighting.

Having spent a great deal of time lately thinking about critical theory and art practice in the company of some marvelous, critically minded practitioners (and not thinking at all about comics), I second Suat’s suggestion that at least one reason comics criticism is in this condition is because so few cartoonists practice criticism. And by “practice”, I mean read and write not journalism, not the “theory of craft” (as Frank Santoro does so brilliantly and charmingly), but classical “criticism” – argumentative/philosophical/descriptive essays, about art in general, both inside and outside their area of specialization. In fields where there is a strong critical culture, there is typically also a significant population of working artists who consider critical conversations about art, with other artists and critics, in their own and other fields, to be an essential part of their creative practice. Something they do for themselves, because it makes their art richer and better.

Film and literature and music have extremely healthy critical cultures, but they also have large numbers of engaged critic-practitioners – not just practitioners who occasionally toss off a piece of writing about something they’ve read or something they think is important, but practitioners who consider the work of criticism (i.e, reading incisive, informed essays on a range of art-related topics as well as working out their own ideas about their art and practice in essay form) to be an essential facet of being an original, challenging practitioner. (Fine art has a tremendous history in this regard although post-postmodernism is a bit of a nadir.)

This is not to say you have to be a practitioner to be a great critic (or vice versa), but to have a great critical conversation about any field, you need a critical mass of practitioners participating in that conversation at the highest levels. The conversation between…let’s call them practitioner-critics and philosopher-critics — so many of the great critical ideas historically have come out of that conversation. But the practitioner-critic has an exceptionally tough go in comics’ supercool, DIY, populist, “a picture is worth a thousand words” climate. There are vigilant souls, but by in large the critical stance seems to be treacherous waters for cartoonists.

 

082710_James_Baldwin

A practitioner-critic.