THE STATE OF CRITICISM
195
decided advantage to the critic. They force you to be terse and concise
and not to spread yourself out. At the very least they limit the
number of mistakes you can make.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: How many art critics or art reviewers are there of
the stature of earlier figures? Has there been a decline or a disappear–
ance of the genre?
HILTON KRAMER: There has been a very serious decline in the writing
of art criticism.
BARBARA ROSE: I'm glad we agree about something.
HILTO KRAMER:
It
relates to the decline of literary crItICiSm and
criticism generally. Unless one understands the New Criticism and
what is now called the New Art Criticism as a response to the great
masterpieces of modernist literature, one simply doesn't know what
the function of this criticism was.
It
came into existence to answer
the need for an understanding of a very difficult body of literary art.
That was what gave Clement Greenberg his important function as
an art critic. But neither our literature nor our art today really re–
quires this criticism. You are not going to have a return to the kind
of high seriousness in criticism you once had until the literature and
art requiring it come into existence.
PETER BROOKS:
It
certainly is true, as Hilton Kramer says (and it has
been said during the conference before), that the attempt to deal with
and propagate the ideal of literary modernism which served as an
impetus for criticism of about twenty or thirty years ago, has been
lost. What's taken its place is a feeling of a void underneath the
critical discourse, and therefore a groping for the grounding of one's
judgments and analysis. And it's into this void that continental
models of theory have penetrated. I see that as one of the reasons for
their having caught on. So I really think it comes to the question of
self-reflectiveness.
If
you feel that criticism can proceed even in the
most journalistic sense without any self-reflectiveness, then you
don't feel the need for a theory. But more and more practicing critics,
as opposed to theoretical critics, are worried about the justification
of their enterprise. Now what this has led to is not so much a sterility
of criticism as a period of dubious battle.
IRVING HOWE: I think that the problem some of us see is not so much a
lack of self-reflectiveness in literary criticism as a self-contained
discipline. It may be true as you said, Peter, that some of us don't
have this self-reflectiveness, and we simply have to plead guilty. But
we have far greater sources of disturbance and uncertainty and
querying about the culture as a who le. I don't know what we're
