Beatriz Baptista > Recent Status Updates

“For, though indignation may make a great poet, bad temper always makes a poor critic.
(…) its criticisms merely reveal the critic without illuminating what he would criticize for us. The best that we can say of it is that it is a Sentimental Journey through Literature, the worst that any one could say of it is that it has all the merits of such an expedition.”

😭

— 8. A Sentimental Journey through Literature —

“There are two ways of misunderstanding a poem. One is to misunderstand it and the other to praise it for qualities that it does not possess.”

— 8. A Sentimental Journey through Literature —

“The fault of his book is that it tells us far more about his own personal feelings than it does about the qualities of the various works of art that are criticized. It is in fact a diary of the emotions suggested by literature, rather than any real addition to literary criticism(…).”

9. In Defence of Dorian Gray: 5/5 ⭐️

“To art belong all things that are and all things that are not, and even the editor of a London paper has no right to restrain the freedom of art in the selection of subject-matter.”

and that’s on PERIODT

“you (…) should try to teach your critics to recognize the essential difference between art and life.”

“It is proper that limitations should be placed on action. It is not proper that limitations should be placed on art. To art belong all things that are and all things that are not, and even the editor of a London paper has no right to restrain the freedom of art in the selection of subject-matter.”

“(…) so by a tacit admission that he has really no critical instinct about literature and literary work, which, in one who writes about literature, is, I need hardly say, a much graver fault than malice of any kind.”

“What really confirmed me in my first impression was his reiterated assertion that my book was tedious and dull. Now, if I were criticizing my book, (…) it is far too crowded with sensational incident, and far too paradoxical in style, as far, at any rate, as the dialogue goes. (…) But tedious and dull the book is not.”

“A Government might just as well try to teach painters how to paint, or sculptors how to model, as attempt to intertere with the style, treatment and subject-matter of the literary artist; and no writer, however eminent or obscure, should ever give his sanction to a theory that would degrade literature far more than any didactic or so-called immoral book could possibly do.”

“(…) the editor of a paper like yours should appear to countenance the monstrous theory that the Government of a country should exercise a censorship over imaginative literature. (…) and any critic who admits the reasonableness of such a theory shows at once that he is quite incapable of understanding what literature is, and what are the rights that literature possesses.”

“If they existed they would not be worth writing about. The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle. There are no such people. If there were I would not write about them. Life by its realism is always spoiling the subject-matter of art. The supreme pleasure in literature is to realize the non-existent.”

“Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace, tvpe, are artistically uninteresting. Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one's reason; bad people stir one's imagination.”

— 9. In Defence of Dorian Gray —

“As regards erudition, it is always difficult, even for the most modest of us, to remember that other people do not know quite as much as one does oneself.”

— 9. In Defence of Dorian Gray —

“Now, as regards grammar, I hold that, in prose at any rate, correctness should always be subordinate to artistic effect and musical cadence; and any peculiarities of syntax that may occur in Dorian Gray are deliberately intended, and are introduced to show the value of the artistic theory in question.”

— 9. In Defence of Dorian Gray —

“(…) I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of arb and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate”

— 1. Against Interpretation: 5/5 ⭐️ —

rip susan sontag, she would’ve hated goodreads

“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art — and, by analogy, our own experience more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”

“What is important now is to recover our senses. We must lean to see more, to hear more, to feel more.

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.”

“Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life — its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness — conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.”

“What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?
What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of(form would silence.”

“(…) that films for such a long time were just movies; in other words, that they were understood to be part of mass, as opposed to high, culture, and were left alone by most people with minds. Then, too, there is always something other than content in the cinema to grab hold of, for those who want to analyze.”

“Ideally, it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making works of ast whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be . . . just what it is.”

“But programmatic avant-gardism — which has meant, mostly, experiments with form at the expense of content— is not the only defense against the infestation of art by interpretations. At least, I hope not. For this would be to commit art to being perpetually on the run. (It also perpetuates the very distinction between form and content which is, ultimately, an illusion).”

“To avoid interpretation, art may become parody. Or it may become abstract. Or it may become ("merely") decorative. Or it may become non-art.”

“Abstract painting is the attempt to have (…) no content; since there is no content, there can be no interpretation. Pop Art works by the opposite means to the same result; using a content so blatant, so "what it is," it, too, ends by being uninterpretable.

1. Against Interpretation

“It is always the case that interpretation (…) indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious with the work, a wish to replace it by something else.”

“Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.”

1. Against Interpretation

“Never trust the teller, trust the tale.”

1. Against Interpretation

“In most modem instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.”

😭😭😭

1. Against Interpretation

“(…) interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world-in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings." It is to turn the world into this world. ("This world" As if there were any other.”