the arts lie dreaming of the life to come

For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude.

To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed.

Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man's memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends in tragedy.

In aesthetics the present is the only tense there is.

There is a truth of the matter about what an author meant. There is a truth of the matter about whether a piece does something new. What else is there to say?

: almost everything!

I don’t want to ‘review’ things anymore. I’d like to criticise instead. 1

Why the distinction? Because we’re at war with the Observer, with the whole moribund practice of Reviewing. It’s everywhere, having long usurped critical thought (since it looks like criticism but is shorter and less wanky). Bite-sized impersonality is the reviewer’s way, because it makes the review seem objective, and thus worth reading.

To review is to tell someone if a thing is shit or not. To be critical is to investigate how something works, not just to say it does or doesn’t.

I don’t agree with Wilde when he says “all art is useless” - but he’s on to something. Reviews are functional beasts. Their function is to provide a short dose of generalised perspective for those without the time or tools to form their own opinion: album reviews are horse tips for the 1000-albums-per-week derby that is modern music.

I crave the chance to react for myself. 1

Premise: Value is mind-dependent.
Premise: Meaning is intersubjective, mind-dependent on a grand scale.
Premise: Interpretations are second-order features of states of affairs. A pattern seen is a pattern present, regardless of author-intention (that’s what interpretation is!).
Premise: We produce meaning involuntarily, and project value onto every thing we contact.
Premise: Value is not a matter of whim; we are given tastes in a similar way that we are given physical traits. (Though obviously more dynamic and steerable.)

Conclusion: You can’t be ‘right’ about cultural objects, but you can be wrong. You’re wrong if your interpretation doesn’t conform to the first-order features of em. (Might be better to say “aesthetically senseless” rather than ‘wrong’ here.)

Reviews prop up the conspicuous consumption of music: the much-mocked hipster attitude. You listen to bands, rather than songs or albums. You listen to things so that you can say you listen to things.

We can’t help judge each other by our tastes - but we place too much weight on it, and obscure the sound behind propositions and affiliations.

These generate the weird neurotic character of modern music fandom: the “guilty pleasures”, the canons of airless “Classics” whispered of in endless retro magazine profiles, and above all in the great joyless indie-cred cult of authenticity, which all musical subcultures are guilty of.

(…Maybe not house.)

Don’t say ‘the light show’s excellent’ - it makes you smell of the laboratory instead of a fan of the band…

• Half Man Half Biscuit

Poptimism

...music shows its heterogenous nature and superior intrinsic virtue by its complete indifference to everything material in the plot; in consequence of this, it expresses the storm of the passions and the pathos of the feelings everywhere in the same way, and accompanies them in the same pomp of its tones, whether Agamemnon and Achilles, or the dissensions of an ordinary family furnish the material for the piece.

At some point you might have told yourself and others that you listened to the Backstreet Boys because it was funny. But in fact, you were enjoying it; it's just a different kind of enjoyment...

What’s wrong with reviewing in general is doubly wrong with the pop review. The modes you see a pop review take:

• I: Autobiographize. Compare album to their old albums, say it’s not as good as the last one. (Crap contextualization)
  
  
• II: List the tracks, assign them genres, trace their lineage. Say the middle bit isn’t any good. (Crap textualization)
  
  
• III: Sophomoric criticism, “ooh, I once read something like this in class they mean this concept”. (Crap intellectualization)
  
  
• IV: Identify what they were trying to do. Compare to paradigm songs, of the band in question or of bands who tried the same thing.
• Intentionalize. Pick representative details and paint the page with them. Pull out narrative if you see narrative.
• Include the personal, 1) cos all attention is personal and 2) to remind readers that all reviews are just readings and if you see it, it is present. (Actual analysis.)
  
  

In my head, a "proper critic" is an intellectually rigorous individual with an encyclopaedic knowledge of their specialist subject and an admirably nerdy compulsion to dissect, compare and analyse each fresh offering in the field – not in a bid to mindlessly entertain the reader, but to further humankind's collective understanding of the arts.

But it takes creative power as well as noble nerdishness.

I want someone younger than me to get foolish about pop again, to stop telling me all the things I could be listening to and start telling me why I SHOULDN’T listen to certain things. Reattach guilt to pop, reattach hierarchy, reattach shame, reattach style, remember that style is different from fashion, instead of just adding their void-voice to the general hey-if-you-enjoy-it-that’s-cool numbness of discussion. Stop fucking rehabilitating everything and start locking stuff up and out and AWAY. It will be out of reach for a reason. Pleasure forced to justify itself again.

Police mentalities will always try to impose correct readings, to align intentions with outcomes, couple imaginary causes with putative effects, but we always have a choice.

Kulkarni calls this syndrome “critical sleepiness” - you might know it better as relativism. He’s wrong but in a very interesting way: he’s wrong because cultural objects like pop songs, or nationality, or masculinity can have no single analysis.

But Kulkarni’s right that we shouldn’t let this muzzle disagreement; the fact that contradictory interpretations stack (without needing to be sorted into “true” or “false”) means that we absolutely can and should be opinionated! We can speak unqualifiedly about things we feel strongly about, because, no matter how violently we deride a thing, our reaction isn’t really oppressing anyone (if they’re secure in their own positive reaction to the object). Just because there’s no right answer doesn’t mean that all answers are as good as each other. We cannot change the fact that people enjoy Wagner (either Wagner). But why bother, politics aside?

(It does occur to me that this theory is not a good thing to put in the hands of the internet. Perspectivism is fine for the patient and the modest, but…)

I intervene in what I read. You relate to one of the characters in Brothers Karamazov? No shit; you’re in every text you’ll ever look at, because that’s what reading, and consciousness is. The more ‘present’ you are (the more its symbols resonate with meanings already in you), the more you’ll like it.

Corollary: No one has ever read the same book as anyone else, just commensurate ones. Come to that, no one has ever read the same book as themselves some time later.

Awesome corollary: anything can be critically engaged with. This is what Schopenhauer (opening quote) implied but could not say (being as he was such a snob). “Poptimism”!

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears. I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.

Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

These two remarks suggest a philosophy of life - empiricism of the spirit. “What’s art for?” Eh; same as everything else.

Yeats says that “the arts lie dreaming of the life to come”. But we shouldn’t think that “dreaming of the life to come”, that all dreams are good in themselves. (The Futurists and the Communists put paid to that.)

(2024 addition)