184
PARTISAN REVIEW
Many people who feel that they want
to
call themselves, for
whatever reason, art critics, focus primarily not on art but on project–
ing a sense of self. They therefore must conceive of what they do not as
subordinate to
th~
work of art but as a separate entity, an entity as
creative and autonomous as the work of art itself. In the place of
criticism we now have a kind of confessional literature of a highly
suspicious character, which predicates itself on the obvious fact that
criticism is subjective and takes this subjectivity and runs it into the
ground. We have records of the studio visits, the digressions, the gossip,
all in the guise of criticism. This self-indulgent letter writing is
published because art editors have to scramble to decorate the advertise–
ments with some sort of copy that makes them look presentable.
. . The critic' as artist who writes true confessions, the critic as
structuralist or deconstructionist, the critic as semiotic analyst, pursues
an entirely value free activity. The methodology employed is neutral.
Therefore, the critic is not involved in any ideology, formalist or
Marxist. Judgments of any kind become unnecessary to value free
activity. It is crucial to the pluralistic culture we now embrace publicly
to eliminate hierarchies of value. We do not have to choose, I heard
someone say recently, between Henry James and Bugs Bunny any
more. Critics used to be the referees who forced that choice. Today they
are free
to
perform a structural analysis of Disneyworld-or to write an
art book or museum catalog about it. The liquidation of the critical
function is essential to the inevitable progression toward total massifi–
cation. However, the collaboration of critics themselves in this process
is not altogether necessary.
Mark Shechner
How can anyone take issue with Irving Howe when he tells
us the literary critic should be intelligent, and should submit to the
discipline of acquiring taste before handing out judgment? What is
anyone to do but declare himself of Irving Howe's party and pass on to
other issues? I would even second his vote for a "light-fingered
recognition of literary theory" over the heavy-handed displays of
theoretical attainment that now clutter up so much of literary criti–
cism, though I wouldn't put it quite that way. Light-fingeredness
suggests dilettantism, the better critic being a pickpocket of ideas, a
user of stolen goods. That is not what I think, or hope, Irving Howe
