Episode One of “The Critic and Her Publics”
In a series of conversations with Merve Emre at Wesleyan University, some of today’s sharpest working critics discuss their careers and methodology, and are then asked to close-read a text that they haven’t seen before. The Review is collaborating with Lit Hub to publish transcripts and recordings of these interviews, which across eleven episodes will offer an extensive look into the process of criticism.
[..]It’s a public, right? There is no beauty without a public. That, to me, is very revolutionary. The legacy of Kant, or even the whole Kantian tradition, can sometimes end up in this place of contemplating the beautiful, seeing the play of colors on a canvas or hearing the tone in a musical phrase or whatever. It is very isolated and often very elite. Someone like Susan Sontag is happy that most people don’t get modern art. That is a certain kind of tradition.
But if you’re attending to the way that it’s laid out, it’s about our being thrust onto each other. There’s a reason that there’s an analogy between judgments of taste and morality for Kant. When I go to a movie with my sister and I say something bad about it—or not even bad, if I just start to enumerate some of its qualities—she will get offended. And she’s right. I want to say, “Oh, come on, I’m just talking about the movie.” But she’s right. I’m saying, this is how you should feel about this movie. She resents it. We are delivered into each other’s hands.
Source: I Want a Critic | Andrea Long Chu | The New York Review of Books
