STATE OF CRITICISM
37
sculpture, and maybe of some of the other arts too." I mean outspoken
value judgments, judgments that can be discussed. Implied judgments
abound, and have to: they decide usually (though by no means always)
what items, or occasions, of art critics give their attention to. But
implied judgments don't get discussed enough, they don't get put on
the table. Art will get explained, analyzed, interpreted, historically
situated, sociologically or politically accounted for, but the responses
that bring art into experience as art, and not something else-these will
go unmentioned.
Need they be mentioned? Only in so far as it's art as art, and not
anything else, that's to be talked about. Sure, art can be talked about as
something else: as document, as symptom, as sheer phenomenon. And
it does get talked about that way more and more, and by critics no less
than by art historians and by philosophers and psychologists. There's
nothing necessarily wrong in this. Only it's not criticism. Criticism
proper means dealing in the first place with art as art, which means
dealing with value judgments. Otherwise criticism becomes something
else. Not that it is to be so narrowly defined as to have to exclude
interpretation, description, analysis, etc.; only that it must, if it's to be
criticism, include evaluation, and evaluation in the first place-for the
sake of art, for the sake of everything art is that isn't information or
exhortation, for the sake of what's in art's gift alone.
To experience art as art is-again-to evaluate, to make, or rather
receive, value judgments, consciously and unconsciously. (A value
judgment doesn't mean a formulation or statement, a putting of
something into thoughts and words; a value judgment takes place; the
thoughts and words come afterwards.) The critic happens to be under
the obligation to report his value judgments. These will be the truth,
for him, of the art he discusses. It will also, most often, make for the
greatest relevance, and greatest interest, of what he says or writes.
°E.D. Hirsch, Jr. in
Th e New York R eview of Books
(14 June 1979): "Ever since Plato,
literary theory has concerned itself almost exclusively with the problem of value, e.g.,
'Are the ancients better than the moderns?' 'Are standards of judgment universal? ' You
can read through virtually all the major works of the important literary critics before the
twentieth century without finding an extended discussion of the problem of interpreta–
tion. In Britain, writers like Sidney, Pope, Hume, Johnson, Coleridge, and Arnold
... asked of a piece of writing, 'Is it good?' or 'Why is it good?' rather than 'What does
it mean? '
"By con trast, ever since the revolution begun by the New Critics during the 1940s,
and the enormous increase in the numbers of academic interpreters over the past forty
years, the question of value has fall en into th e background. ..."
