Saturday, March 28, 2009

Look in the mirror


The unexamined life

is not worth living



(Socrates said this at his trial for heresy)

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1 comment:

David Wilson said...

more words, but a similar thought from Northrop Frye: The fate of art that tries to do without criticism is instructive. The attempt to reach the public directly through 'popular' art assumes that criticism is artificial and public taste natural. Behind this is a further assumption about natural taste which goes back through Tolstoy to Romantic theories of a spontaneously creative 'folk.' These theories have had a fair trial; they have not stood up very well to the facts of literary history and experience, and it is perhaps time to move beyond them. An extreme reaction against the primitive view, at one time associated with the 'art for art's sake' catchword, thinks of art in precisely the opposite terms, as a mystery, an initiation into an esoterically civilized community. Here criticism is restricted to ritual Masonic gestures, to raised eyebrows and cryptic comments and other signs of an understanding too occult for syntax. The fallacy common to both attitudes is that of a rough correlation between the merit of art and the degree of public response to it, though the correlation assumed is direct in one case and inverse in the other. from Anatomy of Criticism.

March 29, 2009 at 7:40 PM

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