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I wished someone would invent an online calculator—the user would enter the name of an artist, whereupon the calculator would assess the heinousness of the crime versus the greatness of the art and spit out a verdict: you could or could not consume the work of this artist.
Biography used to be something you sought out, yearned for, actively pursued. Now it falls on your head all day long.
That knowledge of shared experience has always made reading criticism an intimate act for me. I and a faraway stranger have consumed the same art—in my case, usually gripped more by feeling than by thought—and then I get to have my feelings explained to me. There’s real pleasure and even consolation in this.
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. Critical thought must bow its knee to love of the work—if something moves us, whoever we are, we must give that something at least some small degree of fealty.
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.
