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The emotional aspect of the consumption of art seemed more and more important. I was beginning to feel that I wasn’t going to solve this problem of monstrous men by thinking. In fact, I was beginning to wonder if it might be solved instead by feeling. Not by referring to authority, but by referring to my own subjective responses. I needed to be more like those kids at the Harry and the Potters show, giving myself wholeheartedly to the experience. This tension between authority and subjectivity has marked my whole life as a critic—which is to say my whole life—as Ms. Smith so rightly (if
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“Every work of art provides its reader with all the necessary elements with which to judge it. In my view, these elements are: the author’s intent; whether this intent was reasonable; whether the author has achieved his intent.” This trinity of questions, a sturdy and seemingly eternal three-legged stool, is a useful structure for reviewing. But does it actually bring us any closer to objective truth about a work? The three questions attempt to anatomize the process of determining whether or not a work of art is great. Our typically messy, emotional responses to art—picture me squirming in my
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When a character in a novel or even a memoir thinks as I think, behaves as I behave, acts as I act, it doesn’t stop me short or amaze me. I just barrel along with my reading and don’t give it another thought; the story is all. But when a critic does that—articulates my own feelings or responses—it has always jostled me, excited me, moved me. Probably because critic and reader share the same experience. They (we) watch the same movie, read the same book. The frame of reference and the landscape are entirely shared. That knowledge of shared experience has always made reading criticism an
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Authoritative criticism believes in the myth of the objective response, a response entirely unshaped by feeling, emotion, subjectivity. A response free, in fact, of any kind of personal perspective. For the male critic, there’s no need to question that response because the work is being made by someone like himself.
Listen, I’d rather watch the Pythons than Gadsby any day of the week, but the point is this: None of these guys has the bandwidth to even entertain the idea that a woman’s or person of color’s point of view might be just as “normal” as theirs, just as central. They seem incapable of understanding that theirs is not the universal point of view and that their own comedy has left people out. That exclusion is not necessarily a problem for me, it’s just a fact. As lifelong excluders, they shouldn’t use their own (ridiculous) feelings of exclusion as a critique of the work of people who look
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The old-fashioned critic, like the Pythons, can’t see that he’s part of a group, because he’s never been left out. He feels unbounded by his own biases; the critic doesn’t even understand he has biases.
Better to be aware of who you are, where you come from, and all that you bring to a piece of art. Better to acknowledge that you respond from who you are and how you feel. Think of the work of the music critic Greg Tate, who wrote from the center of his own
are subject to the forces of history and the biography we ourselves are living out in the conditions of that history. We think of ourselves as ahistorical subjects, but that’s just not so.
a painfully limited perspective to say straight white men shouldn’t be heard from; it’s also painfully limited for those white men to skip the part where they learn that their feelings, too, are tied up with history. Remember that male critic who told me, over dinner, that I really ought to judge Manhattan on its aesthetic merits? The idea that his own experience shaped his response never occurred to him. He left that to me, the former girl. His own subjectivity was entirely invisible to him; a ghost in the critical machine.
And yet I still want to consume the art. Because, out in front of all of that, I’m a human. And I don’t want to miss out on anything. Why should I? Why should I be deprived of Chinatown or Sleeper? This tension—between what I’ve been through as a woman and the fact that I want to experience the freedom and beauty and grandeur and strangeness of great art—this is at the heart of the matter. It’s not a philosophical query; it’s an emotional one. —
Aesthetic experience is tied to nostalgia and memory—that is to say, to subjective experience. Lived experience expands and illuminates the art we take in. This is not ideal, perhaps, but it’s real. The brilliant critic/poet Hanif Abdurraqib (writing about Kanye West) makes a case for uncoupling our personal memories from the artists who seem to define them: “I think the political responsibility of the fan is to challenge that memory—challenge the desire for nostalgia and, in doing that, challenge the soundtracks that have latched onto this nostalgia.” Abdurraqib is making a case for
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Nostalgia, personal experience—these things become meaningful in terms of calculating the badness of the act against the greatness of the work. Greatness isn’t something that is simply agreed upon by authority—as we’ve seen, that authority too often runs contra to the interests or the experiences or simply the aesthetic tastes of too many people. What makes great art depends on who we are and what we live through. It depends on our feelings. It’s too easy, when we’re running the calculus, to forget love. Love that is a quiet voice next to the louder call of (even deserved) public shaming.
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The accusations terminally complicated their fans’ relationship with PWR BTTM. How could they listen to this beloved music when they felt betrayed by its maker? The songs were soured, or stained. The band fell off thousands of playlists at once, a very specific kind of heartbreak. PWR BTTM (like Bowie before them) brought with them the idea that you, too, can be free. Yes, even you. They promised a wider liberation, a liberation that could encompass us all. Their oddball joy promised your freedom. The accusations seemed to suggest that this band’s actions were governed by the same set of
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We each bring our subjective experience to art and to love. If I were to give an exhaustive list of monsters and tell you my response to them, I would be acting out a kind of falsehood. I would be suggesting there is a correct answer in each particular case. I would be telling you what to think, and, in telling you what to think, I would be telling you what to do. And I don’t want to enshrine my own subjectivity in that particular way; don’t want to cloak it in the garb of authority.
Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art. This occurs in every case.
I noticed that a certain kind of person appeared to be immune to the stain. A certain kind of person demanded to be loved, no matter how bad his behavior—and we (oh, we) all agreed he was worthy of love. This was the person called the genius. This person might be stained—in fact almost always is stained—but the stain seems not to dent his importance. His primacy. The genius is a proposition. He’s a fantasy that we have collectively. The genius isn’t so much a kind of person as a status of person: a person who can do whatever he wants.
He invoked the word “genius,” with all its vague majesty. Genius is the name we give our love when we don’t want to argue about it; when we want our opinion to become fact. When we want to push our obsession onto the next guy. When we don’t want to hold our heroes accountable.
The word “genius” came to my mind like a brisk wind from the north, a word that blew away all my worries and all my guilt. Polanski was a genius, after all, so the chips must fall in his favor. When it comes to balancing the greatness of the work against the badness of the deed, the word “genius” simply breaks the calculator. It’s a glittering absolute set into a dreary dutiful system of relative worth.
The tools that lie before him, representing mastery, are important, but so is the mysterious force traveling through him. His subservience to something outside himself is hallowed. In the genius we call this subservience the artistic impulse. The impulse has a vast importance; without it, he’s just a craftsman. The artist needs the impulse; he needs to do whatever it takes to keep it flowing. When your job title is “genius,” your impulsiveness becomes the source of what is good in your life.
The thing is, freedom and energy can become confusing, morally or ethically speaking. If you are handsomely rewarded for giving in to some of your impulses, doesn’t it begin to seem like all your impulses ought to be honored? Especially because it’s hard to tell the good from the bad.
The fact that Picasso embodies our image of the genius is not an accident—or maybe it is an accident of history. Picasso’s rise was contemporaneous with the explosion of mass media. Picasso became the image of art itself, transmitted via newsreel (“Picasso Sees a Bullfight”) and magazine until he was indisputably the most famous artist in the world. His image and his persona were perfectly matched to the moment. His maleness, the expressiveness of his gestures, his black-button eyes, his compact, coiled physique—it all read on-screen.
Dickens crafted the persona Public Genius; Wilde ironized it. But his twentieth-century counterparts seemed not to get the joke. Picasso carried on with the job of publicizing his own genius, but he rid the process of wit. This was a great success and soon everyone knew his name.
had that paradoxical quality of mutability combined with recognizability: he is this one thing, always and forever, infinitely reproducible, but he can also be anything. Wrote Berger, “The associations around Picasso’s name create the legend of the personality. Picasso is an old man who can still get himself young wives. Picasso is a genius. Picasso is mad. Picasso is the greatest living artist. Picasso is a multi-millionaire. Picasso is a communist. Picasso’s work is nonsense: a child could do better. Picasso is tricking us. If Picasso can get away with it all, good luck to him!”
Masculinity, glamour, cruelty, brilliance, media-awareness: Picasso had a literary counterpart in all these qualities. If Picasso was the most famous painter in the world, Hemingway was the most famous writer.
Hemingway’s reputation for asshole-ness, like Picasso’s, precedes him—or, rather, his work. Hemingway’s name is synonymous with brawling and womanizing and glamorous violence: the running of bulls, the catching of really big fish, the stalking of lions, the battering of women and children. Like Picasso, he created a kind of multi-car pileup of women over the decades. He had four wives, who gave him three sons, sons whom he loved and bullied terribly. He and his child Gregory became increasingly estranged, until at the end they were unable to meet for fear of the violence they would do each
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one is solely a monster, after all, and Hemingway had complicated relations with wives, friends, children. The fact that they always seemed to end in divorce, estrangement, recriminations, tears doesn’t mean that these relationships weren’t tender and vulnerable.
They were not exactly oafs or lugs, but brutes. Brutes with depths, brutes of sensitivity, brutes whose inner tenderness the brutes kept revealing, again and again, to an enraptured public. There is a special human thrill—perhaps a female thrill—in locating the tender heart of the brute. There’s a physics, an achievement, an Olympics to being gifted enough to appreciate what’s tender on the inside. But of course this dynamic doesn’t work without the brutishness.
early work is vivid, funny, strange, full of tossed-off-seeming beauty and a kind of off-kilter prose that expresses a huge brashness; the fact that you as the reader will follow is assumed—and you’ll be glad you came. To
Hemingway’s particular stain was a kind of brutish, careless masculinity; this was the image that accompanied him. In The Old Man and the Sea, he seems to be doing an impersonation of himself, bringing that toughness and vigor to the page. The Old Man and the Sea is nothing if not terse, oracular, male. The spectacle was, upon revisiting the work, deeply embarrassing.
As fantastically tormented as Hemingway was, his masculinity was always ascendant in his image. The male mask was the visage that was presented to the world, no matter what sensitivities lurked beneath. The performance of masculinity, and its conflation with genius, has not been a great thing for women, who are simultaneously the genius’s victims and forever excluded from the club of genius. But The Garden of Eden makes us wonder about the cost to the genius himself. What did it cost Hemingway to be so much one thing (a man) and never its opposite?
Why does all this matter? Because genius informs our idea of who gets to do what. Who gets to have license. Who gets to give in to their impulses. Whom we choose to aid and abet when they do indulge in those impulses. When genius is tied to masculinity—a masculinity that continually reasserts itself—then someone is being left out.
All of which is to say, the genius is not you. Not me.
We allow the genius to give in to his impulses; he is said to have demons. Demons are cousins to the artistic impulse. The Devil card in the tarot inverts the symbols of the Magician; he’s pulling energy up from down below; he wears an inverted pentagram instead of an infinity sign. The devil made me do it, we say—and is that really so different from the experience of being inspired by a muse?
Are brilliant people more apt to be crazy? Are geniuses more apt to be miserable? Are the really talented also generally mentally unwell?
Is it necessary to feel like shit in order to be creative? To what degree does an artist need to slip the confines not just of societal conformity, but of mental or emotional conformity as well? This idea of the artist outside the norms of society can be anesthetized or smoothed or made pretty in the image of the free spirit, the Byronic hero. Once again, this image is only available to certain people, who happen to be men.
Lunacy and license reached an apotheosis in the rock era, when wildness became a commodity. Hemingway’s and Picasso’s true descendants were the determinedly demonic men of rock. Rock stars enacted an escalating ideal of freedom, from Elvis gyrating his hips to Jim Morrison pulling his dick out onstage (which I always picture him doing with a puzzled look on his face: “What’s this, then?”). They were given the license to behave with perfect liberty; they were also given the simultaneous pressure to perform that liberty—the liberty to be men in full; they could be silly or bombastic or mythical.
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Rock stars are free, and that’s what he wants to be. Rock stars—white men—are able to be everything and anything. They are able to be the fullest of humans.
We want to take in the spectacle of the virile wicked mad geniuses because they make us feel excited and alive. They flood us with a sense of possibility—the possibility of what? Maybe the possibility that whatever infinitude has touched them might likewise infect us. Maybe, too, the possibility that they might do something bad.
The sometimes-truth is that we are interested in and, yes, even attracted to bad people. When the latest news comes out and we’re all aflutter with outrage, we’re ignoring a truth: Part of the reason so much attention has been trained on men like Picasso and Hemingway is exactly because they’re assholes.
We want the asshole to cross the line, to break the rules. We reward that rule-breaking, and then we go a step further, and see it as endemic to art-making itself. We reward and reward this bad behavior until it becomes synonymous with greatness. Not just because the gatekeepers and publishers and studio heads have traditionally been men, but also because we ourselves yearn for plot and action. We yearn for events!
Here, again, obviously, I am employing the word “we” to protect myself. I want these things. I drink in the spectacle of bad behavior. I have a penchant for assholes. Which is an uncomfortable thing to say. But important. To pretend that there’s no allure to bad men is to sidestep reality. The women around these men stack up like cordwood. Certainly some part of the allure comes from the man’s badness. Even George and Jerry knew the power of the Bad Boy. I myself have had any number of truly terrible boyfriends and paramours. Their terribleness was their calling card. Life is so dull. With a
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One of the great problems faced by audiences is named the Past. The Past is a vast terrible place where they didn’t know better. Where monstrous behaviors were accepted. Sometimes the Past seems incredibly far away, sometimes it seems to have ended last year or even last week; more difficult to accept is the idea that we are living in it right now—if by the Past, we mean a moment in history when injustice and inhumanity reigned. The Past is the place where anti-Semitism and racism and misogyny were woven into the very warp and weft of literature; where women were filed into boxes like so many
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is part of why I kept trying to solve the monster problem by thinking harder, by finding an expert, by applying reason, by building a calculator, by locating the correct answer. Because of this feeling that I must be the natural outcome of the Enlightenment. I am a citizen of the Present, where we know better.
I kept toying with this idea—the idea that I was writing the autobiography of the audience. But I wasn’t seeing myself as an audience member clearly—was only dimly aware that my perspective from my perch in the Present was not necessarily enlightened. An autobiography of the audience should be subject to the same rules that govern all memoir, including the rule that the writer of memoir must be onto herself. Which is to say that bad memoir happens when an author is a little in love with herself—when she can’t see her own faults. The same thing could be said of the audience: we think we’re
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Wagner is vilified for his own words, but also because those words and his music became tied to the horror of the Holocaust—because he contributed to the aestheticization of fascism. But isn’t his essay “Judaism in Music” bad enough in itself? If language needs to have effected action in order to be objectionable, haven’t we just let every raging bigot who doesn’t actually hold political office off the hook? Anti-Semitism isn’t only wrong when it contributes directly to a Holocaust.
to be considered intolerant. I mentioned to a Jewish friend that I’d rumbled Virginia Woolf’s anti-Semitism and had been thinking about how this stained her work—or didn’t. My friend replied matter-of-factly, “Well, if we give up the anti-Semites, we’ll have to give up everyone.” Why has Woolf’s anti-Semitism been forgotten? It’s far from the first thing we think of when we think of her. And it’s a small thing, a casual thing, a buried thing. As with T. S. Eliot and Edith Wharton and Dostoevsky, we think first and foremost of literary output. When confronted with their anti-Semitism, we think
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We think it’s ignorance, on the part of these people in the past. We imagine these poor deluded souls simply waiting for scales to fall from their eyes, but in fact what is really happening is that anti-Semitism and racism were often tied to a larger project of domination.
We think they didn’t know. And at the same time, we believe we would’ve done better. This time-traveling impulse is crucial: we, like, Stephen Fry, want to hurtle back in time and sort of spritz our enlightened-ness all over the place.
The liberal believes in the constant improvement of man. Liberalism has as one of its central tenets a teleology of goodness, a rising toward justice. We have an idea that somehow we’re getting better. This idea separates us from history—we are no longer subject to its forces. History is over there, or behind us, or beneath us. We are in a special position: its apex. From this apex, we know best.
The idea of time—laden with the badness that came “before”—and our apex at the top of it is a way of distancing ourselves from the negative aspects of humanity. The idea of the Past functions in the same way the word “monster” does—it serves to separate us from all that is worst about humanity. We are the adults of the world. We have outgrown our worst behaviors. We are not monsters. That is not us. We cast history, and monsters, out from our enlightened circle.