Episode 58: What Do Critics Do?

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2019

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What is the role of the critic in the world of art? For some, including lots of critics, the figure exudes an aura of authority: her task is to tell us what this or that work of art means, why it matters, and what we are supposed to think and feel in its presence. Cast in in this mold, the critic is an arbiter, not just of taste, but also of sense and meaning. The American art critic Dave Hickey categorically rejects this interpretation, which he says gives off a mild stench of fascism. For Hickey, the critic plays a weak role, and it's this weakness that makes it essential. In his essay "Air Guitar," published in 1997, Hickey argues that criticism can never really penetrate the mystery of any artwork. Criticism is rather a way to capture the "enigmatic whoosh" of art as one instance of the more pervasive "whoosh" of ordinary experience. So, no act of criticism can ever exhaust an artwork. The critic interprets a singular experience of art into words so that others might be encouraged to have their own, equally singular experiences. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss what criticism has to do with art, life, politics, and ordinary experience. Header image: Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599-1600) REFERENCES Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy Plato, Republic Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying" Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? Dave Hickey, "Buying the World" Clinton e-mails exhibition at the Venice Biennale Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio.
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:23.3	For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weirdst. I'm J.F. Martel. This week, we discuss Air Guitar, an essay by the American
0:56.3	critic Dave Hickey about his not really chosen profession of art criticism. In this text,
1:03.1	Hickey raises some interesting questions such as, what is the nature of the relationship between
1:08.3	a piece of criticism and the artwork it pertains to describe.
1:12.7	What is the difference between what critics do and what artists make?
1:16.5	And ultimately, what do criticism and art have to do with life and politics?
1:21.6	Hickey cautions us against the, quote, police mentality that strive to impose correct readings of art, unquote. Art and criticism are for
1:30.1	him, forms of social discourse. They are, to use McLuhan's term, probes for seeking and articulating
1:36.4	the new, and they act as a corrective to our tendency to turn contingent views into hardened dogma.
1:42.8	For Hickey, no artists can know ahead of time the full
1:45.8	redemptive potential that her work may hold for society. It's the critic's job to articulate that
1:51.6	potential as she experiences it, and the result at times can be the creation of a new constituency,
1:57.8	what Gilles de Lélleux might have called a people to come. This is why Hickey insists that
2:02.9	art needs democracy and democracy needs art. The corporate and political interests that seek to
2:08.1	control the message of art in our times are all after the same thing. They all seek to make
2:13.3	us believe that their take on life and reality is final and complete. In other words, they want
2:19.2	us to forget that all truth claims in this world are made against an immovable backdrop of mystery.
2:25.1	Art and criticism call us back to this mystery. They put us all in the position of the first humans
2:31.0	who looked up from the dusty ground and gasped at the stars.
2:35.1	The result of a free society so much as the means by which such a society can come about.
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