Sugarcane

<<set $discerned = 9>>\s\n<<set $total = 9>>\s\n<<set $seen010 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen011 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen012 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen013 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen014 = true>>\s\n\s\n<<set $seen020 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen021 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen022 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen023 = true>>\s\n\s\n<<set $seen030 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen031 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen032 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen033 = true>>\s\n\s\n<<set $seen040 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen041 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen042 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen043 = true>>\s\n\s\n<<set $seen050 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen051 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen052 = true>>\s\n\s\n<<set $seen060 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen061 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen062 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen063 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen064 = true>>\s\n\s\n<<set $seen070 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen071 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen072 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen073 = true>>\s\n\s\n<<set $seen080 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen081 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen082 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen083 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen084 = true>>\s\n\s\n<<set $seen090 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen091 = true>>\s\n<<set $seen092 = true>>\s\n\s\n[[Criticism: An Aspect Space|INTRO-01]]

<<set $seen023 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 2.3</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as a marker of the end of an artwork's natural life, indicating it now has to be preserved artificially</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nA few words too many, and an artwork [[leaves consciousness and enters history|ASPECT051]].\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT020]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen081 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 8.1</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as the exposure of suppressed meanings</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nCritics are coming to terms with the fact that the most politically insidious ideas are not focused, intentionally injected into narratives by some identifiable source. Rather, they're diffuse constellations of crass generalizations that only register when you step back and consider the broad conceptual space that artworks occupy.\n\nThis is how recent criticism has identified archetypes like The Magical Negro and The Manic-Pixie Dream Girl. It's noted patterns in pop culture, and it's explored the psychological neuroses those patterns are supporting. In service to this function, [[TV Tropes|http://www.tvtropes.org/]] is an indispensible resource.\n\nThis is one of [[the positive and necessary functions of jargon|ASPECT012]], which allows those diffuse concepts to be isolated and placed under the light of interrogation, behind the two-way mirror of pop culture criticism.\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT080]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen022 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 2.2</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as concrete product of the university system</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\n<div class="quote">\s\nWhen I started grad school in the Seventies, I was startled to find that my new friends looked down on essays I’d written for Film Comment and other magazines. Academics didn’t indulge in what one in my seminar cohort called "film buffery."\n\nOn the other side, cinephile critics, though bona fide intellectuals, were hostile to the developments in academe. As Grand Theory took over the humanities, it seemed that academics were suffocating the art of film under a fog of incomprehensible ideas and tortuous prose. True, some scholars wrote for FC and other cinephile magazines, while some critics, like Manny Farber and Raymond Durgnat, became professors (and at least one, Robin Wood, eventually embraced a version of Grand Theory). Yet the split, cast as one between mandarins and philistines, remained."\n</div>\s\n\n- David Bordwell, [[Academics vs Critics|http://www.filmcomment.com/article/never-the-twain-shall-meet]], Film Comment May/June 2011\s\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT020]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<div class="mainhead">CODEX</div>\n\n<div class="emph">1 <<if $seen010>>[[CRITICISM as Discourse|ASPECT010]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>></div>\s\n1.1 <<if $seen011>>[[CRITICISM as the distributed communal equivalent to the individual act of "thinking about art"|ASPECT011]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n1.2 <<if $seen012>>[[CRITICISM as a community's shared language and body of knowledge|ASPECT012]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n1.3 <<if $seen013>>[[CRITICISM as a scaffolding that converts an art object from a freestanding monolith to a foundation/platform for more art|ASPECT013]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n1.4 <<if $seen014>>[[CRITICISM as a web of language, woven around art, that obscures its essential experiential meaning|ASPECT014]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n\n<div class="emph">2 <<if $seen020>>[[CRITICISM as Commodity|ASPECT020]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>></div>\s\n2.1 <<if $seen021>>[[CRITICISM as a justification for funding certain scholarly disciplines|ASPECT021]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n2.2 <<if $seen022>>[[CRITICISM as concrete product of the university system|ASPECT022]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n2.3 <<if $seen023>>[[CRITICISM as a marker of the end of an artwork's natural life, indicating it now has to be preserved artificially|ASPECT023]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n\n<div class="emph">3 <<if $seen030>>[[CRITICISM as Resource for the Artist|ASPECT030]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>></div>\s\n3.1 <<if $seen031>>[[CRITICISM as a reservoir of historical and contextual knowledge|ASPECT031]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n3.2 <<if $seen032>>[[CRITICISM as a means for educating new artists|ASPECT032]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n3.3 <<if $seen033>>[[CRITICISM as a way of clarifying the boundary between the amateur and the innovator|ASPECT033]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n\n<div class="emph">4 <<if $seen040>>[[CRITICISM as Thirdness|ASPECT040]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>></div>\s\n4.1 <<if $seen041>>[[CRITICISM as connective tissue between isolated artistic events|ASPECT041]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n4.2 <<if $seen042>>[[CRITICISM as an institutional framework around the spontaneous act of creation|ASPECT042]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n4.3 <<if $seen043>>[[CRITICISM as a practice of drawing boundaries and assigning labels|ASPECT043]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n\n<div class="emph">5 <<if $seen050>>[[CRITICISM as Research|ASPECT050]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>></div>\s\n5.1 <<if $seen051>>[[CRITICISM as an historical narrative of emerging forms and ideas|ASPECT051]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n5.2 <<if $seen052>>[[CRITICISM as theory, anchored in the cultural matrix|ASPECT052]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n\n<div class="emph">6 <<if $seen060>>[[CRITICISM as Appreciation|ASPECT060]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>></div>\s\n6.1 <<if $seen061>>[[CRITICISM as a token of validation for an artist, medium, or movement|ASPECT061]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n6.2 <<if $seen062>>[[CRITICISM as the ideal form of consumption|ASPECT062]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n6.3 <<if $seen063>>[[CRITICISM as a way of making crass entertainment look like art|ASPECT063]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n6.4 <<if $seen064>>[[CRITICISM as an inevitable, spontaneous reaction to creative energy, like dancing is to music|ASPECT064]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n\n<div class="emph">7 <<if $seen070>>[[CRITICISM as Prescriptive Service|ASPECT070]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>></div>\s\n7.1 <<if $seen071>>[[CRITICISM as a lesson in how to create better art|ASPECT071]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n7.2 <<if $seen072>>[[CRITICISM as an arbiter of public taste|ASPECT072]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n7.3 <<if $seen073>>[[CRITICISM as a long, slow process of filtering and establishing a canon|ASPECT073]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n\n<div class="emph">8 <<if $seen080>>[[CRITICISM as Political Act|ASPECT080]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>></div>\s\n8.1 <<if $seen081>>[[CRITICISM as the exposure of suppressed meanings|ASPECT081]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n8.2 <<if $seen082>>[[CRITICISM as an interrogation of power structures within art and entertainment|ASPECT082]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n8.3 <<if $seen083>>[[CRITICISM as a way of connecting art with personal history and experience|ASPECT083]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n8.4 <<if $seen084>>[[CRITICISM as a straitjacket of conventions and interpretations from which artists must escape|ASPECT084]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n\n<div class="emph">9 <<if $seen090>>[[CRITICISM as Self-Contained Art Form|ASPECT090]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>></div>\s\n9.1 <<if $seen091>>[[CRITICISM as the creation of new meanings by a process of extension and elaboration|ASPECT091]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n9.2 <<if $seen092>>[[CRITICISM as a blind journey along the infinite chain of signifiers|ASPECT092]]<<else>>[ --- as --- ]<<endif>>\n\nYou are at the CODEX. | <<back label "Return to Aspect">> | [[Return to Y-HUB|Y-HUB]]

<<set $discerned = 0>>\s\n<<set $total = 9>>\s\n\s\n[[Criticism: An Aspect Space|INTRO-01]]

<<set $seen083 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 8.3</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as a way of connecting art with personal history and experience</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\n<div class="quote">\s\nIt is interesting to note that many of those taking to writing journalism or design games with a strong focus on the personal are social minorities. What was, indeed, once a genre where those recounting their childhood memories of video games or pet projects with mary sues abound is now subverted by a newer trend. People have found a method for speaking where once they had none. A method to not only plainly recount and explain their marginalization, but to actually get people to feel it.\n</div>\s\n- Mattie Brice, [[Decolonize Me|http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=10148]]/\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT080]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen082 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 8.2</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as an interrogation of power structures within art and entertainment</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nIn his essay on the moral assumptions underlying Orson Scott Card's influential novel //Ender's Game//, John Kessler [[performs one of the essential, indispensible functions of criticism|http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm]]. He basically encapsulates his revelations about the novel in a single paragraph, late in the essay:\n\n<div class="quote">"In every situation where Ender wields violence against someone, the focus of the narrative’s sympathy is always and invariably on Ender, not on the objects of Ender’s violence. It is Ender who is offering up the voluntary sacrifice, and that sacrifice is the emotional price he must pay for physically destroying someone else. All the force of such passages is on the price paid by the destroyer, not on the price paid by the destroyed. 'This hurts me more than it hurts you,' might well be the slogan of Ender’s Game."</div>\s\n\nThis devastating challenge to a seminal novel gives us a whole stack of insights: not just into the neurosis the book exhibits, but into the larger power structure it serves, which supports the same neuroses in the larger culture that has embraced //Ender's Game// so enthusiastically.</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT080]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen021 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 2.1</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as a justification for funding certain scholarly disciplines</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nCapital is still not quite free-floating. There is still a tenuous economic link between newspapers and university departments, film-media-cultural studies and public reception, artistic production and mass media consumption.\n\nWithin this system, criticism's value consists in its claims on taste: whether via paid reviewers or amateur academics, [[it still has a unique ability to confer validity upon the products of both art and mass entertainment|ASPECT061]].\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT020]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen063 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 6.3</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as a way of making crass entertainment look like art</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nIndividual products of low culture and mass entertainment seem to want some sort of a token of their historical significance. After all, they have creators, and they follow aesthetic principles, and they set new directions for our culture.\n\nSo they become the center of a mass masturbatory debate: what is art? What gets that special distinction? And as it engulfs the rude, challenging, vulgar works of art that have snuck into galleries, [[it metastasizes like cancer to the larger bodies -- the media -- that those instances comprise|TRANS10]].\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT060]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen062 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 6.2</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as the ideal form of consumption</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\n<div class="quote">"One doesn’t want to talk about how Tolstoi got his effects but about the work itself. One doesn’t want to talk about how Jean Renoir does it; one wants to talk about what he has done. One can try to separate it all out, of course, distinguish form and content for purposes of analysis. But that is a secondary, analytic function, a scholarly function, and hardly needs to be done explicitly in criticism. Taking it apart is far less important than trying to see it whole. The critic shouldn’t need to tear a work apart to demonstrate that he knows how it was put together. The important thing is to convey what is new and beautiful in the work, not how it was made—which is more or less implicit."</div>\s\n\n- Pauline Kael, //Trash, Art, and the Movies//\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT060]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen061 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 6.1</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as a token of validation for an artist, medium, or movement</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\n<div class="quote">\s\nAs long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain sublime assurance of success, but as soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.\n</div>\s\n\n- Ralph Waldo Emerson\n\n<div class="quote">\s\nOne of the most valuable things one of my art teachers said to me was, 'Don’t get upset by criticism. Value the fact that at least someone noticed what you did.' \n</div>\s\n\n- Chris Ware\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT060]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $lastaspect = 6>>\s\n<<if (not $seen060)>>\s\n<<set $discerned = $discerned + 1>>\s\n<<endif>>\s\n<<set $seen060 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 6</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as Appreciation</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nFor a work of art:\n\n[[The harshest judgment is silence.|ASPECT061]]\n\n[[The best engagement is fiercely attentive.|ASPECT062]]\n\n[[The broadest appeal is the most personal.|ASPECT063]]\n\n[[The most honest reaction is spontaneous, which itself becomes an act of creation.|ASPECT064]]\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\nYou are at the Aspect Root | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $lastaspect = 8>>\s\n<<if (not $seen080)>>\s\n <<set $discerned = $discerned + 1>>\s\n<<endif>>\s\n<<set $seen080 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 8</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as a Political Act</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\n[[Art and culture encode certain assumptions|ASPECT081]]\n\n[[and support the dominant narrative, no matter their intention|ASPECT082]]\n\n\n[[When the political voice of the work is reclaimed by the critic|ASPECT083]]\n\n[[Are we freeing the art, or suppressing it?|ASPECT084]]\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\nYou are at the Aspect Root | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen064 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 6.4</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as an inevitable, spontaneous reaction to creative energy, like dancing is to music</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\n<div class="quote">"Likewise, art writing must attempt to draw new connections, weaving in unpublished, hushed talk that always gets spoken but generally not on the record. The documentation of the piece, the Facebook posts, tweets, and vines that surround such work, the gossip about the work in the bathrooms of the gallery and outside during the smoke breaks and back in the patios and bars after the opening, the press releases both in unchecked email and listserv format, and the 10,000 art-opening invites that networked artists receive each day on social media, the write-up of the work, the studio visits, the sketching out of the ideas, the conversations that influence and sustain the practices—all these are rich and evocative and can provide tremendous energy and meaning to a work and extend its life out beyond."</div>\s\n\n- Nick Faust, in [[Get Off (The New Inquiry, Aug 2013)|http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/get-off/]]\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT060]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen041 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 4.1</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as connective tissue between isolated artistic events</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nLet's follow this conceit: if culture is a body, and art stimulates, and mass entertainment circulates, then criticism is the stabilizing, amplifying force, allowing those resources to be equalized across the whole shuddering structure.\n\nIdeas hold everything together, and criticism is a web woven from that raw protein of the collective consciousness.\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT040]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $lastaspect = 4>>\s\n<<if (not $seen040)>>\s\n<<set $discerned = $discerned + 1>>\s\n<<endif>>\s\n<<set $seen040 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 4</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as Thirdness</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nVia Charles Saunders Pierce: if the Artifact is Firstness, and the Meaning is Secondness, then criticism becomes Thirdness when positioned between them, as mediator.\n\n[[Fulfilling this function, it creates context|ASPECT041]]\n\n[[Context around artworks is continuity beyond them|ASPECT042]]\n\n[[Context and continuity define space over time|ASPECT043]]\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\nYou are at the Aspect Root | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen043 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 4.3</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as a practice of drawing boundaries and assigning labels</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nA cartography of media, method, and practice.\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT040]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen042 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 4.2</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as an institutional framework around the spontaneous act of creation</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nQuite a few members of the cultural elite have betrayed their view that criticism is essentially the opposite of the creative impulse. There's some merit to this view, if you think "art" is defined by its irrational spontaneity and self-sufficiency and authenticity, whereas "criticism" is defined by its cold calculations, its dependence, and its ressentiment.\n\nFor instance, Susan Sontag (//Against Interpretation//):\n\n<div class="quote">\s\n"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.) The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have."\n</div>\s\n\nAnd Chuck Palanhiuk (letters to Salon.com, August 2003):\n\n<div class="quote">\s\n"Until you can create something that captivates people, I’d invite you to just shut up. It’s easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It’s a lot more difficult to perform one."\n</div>\s\n\nAnd Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (//The Waste Books//):\n\n<div class="quote">\s\n"The highest level than can be reached by a mediocre but experienced mind is a talent for uncovering the weaknesses of those greater than itself."\n</div>\s\n\nThere may be insight lurking within this defensiveness. However, it also stands to be contested, especially by [[those who strongly believe in a kinship between the artist and the critic|ASPECT091]].\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT040]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

Maybe ludo-essay is a better term. The idea is simply that the ideas here are simultaneous, not linear, so it makes sense for the reader to have some agency in how they're navigated. Twine*, an engine for creating hypertext games, is the perfect medium for creating that kind of artifact.\n\nThis exploration -- the discernment of many possible aspects of criticism -- begins with a sort of mutant inquiry, joining two more common questions:\s\n\n<div class="sub">\n#what criticism actually consists of\n#why criticism exists\n</div>\n\n[[And so, the degenerate hybrid question can finally be asked...|Y-HUB]]\n\n<div class="sub footnote">\s\n\nDon't miss Porpentine's excellent missive on Twine and the new possibilities it opens up, [[Creation Under Capitalism and the Twine Revolution|http://nightmaremode.net/2012/11/creation-under-capitalism-23422/]]\n</div>\s

But criticism can, and should, be many things, and that's my bottom line here. Writing analytically about utterances, interrogating and discerning them, has huge potential as a discursive act.\n\nCRITICISM: AN ASPECT SPACE was created to explore some of these possibilities. As a gesture toward the potential new horizons of criticism*, it's been assembled as a game, using Twine.\n\n[[Or maybe ludo-essay is a better term?|INTRO-06]]\n\n<div class="sub footnote">\nMy interest in finding an alternative form for this essay is inspired partly by Richard Kostelanetz's [[Essaying Essays: Alternative Forms of Exposition|http://www.amazon.com/Essaying-Essays-Alternative-Forms-Exposition/dp/0984130950]].

Criticism doesn't need to be self-righteous, especially self-righteously negative. On this point, I side with W. H. Auden, who said in //The Dyer’s Hand, and Other Essays//:\n\n<div class="sub quote">"Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off."</div>\s\n\nEvery informed, conscientious consumer of media has a potentially valuable place in the discourse, but each also has a particular context and set of assumptions. No judgment is monolithic, though it's become fashionable for critics (especially younger ones) to fashion themselves such a throne.\n\nI would go so far as to say that criticism should be humble -- that it should never trade in contempt, nor in rhetorical hyperbole, nor in revisionist hypotheticals that second-guess the legitimacy of the author's vision -- but saying that would be prescriptive in itself. I don't have that kind of authority, and I'm here to shed light on the possibilities of criticism, not to shut any of them off.\n\n[[But criticism can, and should, be many things, and that's my bottom line here.|INTRO-05]]

I can’t deny that I write from a certain advocacy position, as well, though I’ll try not to be a scold or a shill. The ideas in this compilation are inflected with my own biases about what kinds of criticism we need more of, and what kinds we might consider cutting back on, for fear of drowning in the surplus. I'm particularly sympathetic to positions like Jan Zwicky's, as published in the Malahat Review [[and reprinted on the Canadian Women in the Literary Arts website|http://cwila.com/wordpress/ethics-negative-review-jan-zwicky/]].\n\nIn all types of criticism, but especially in the culture of movie reviews and political critique, I've noted a bias toward confrontation that borders on sadism... a terrifying glee that writers take in ravaging an artist's work and callously rationalizing their aggression. The idea that an informed opinion must take the form of a sword for skewering, and that every artwork's first responsibility is to deflect or withstand a blitzkrieg of knee-jerk contempt... this is a radically chauvinistic idea of criticism, and it's disheartening to see how it's become firmly entrenched in the expanding rhetorical universe.\n\nThis entrenchment has led to a massive proliferation of what Margaret Fuller called the "subjective critic," writers who think that their opinions deserve to be heard without qualification, and that the best way to accomplish this is to exaggerate those opinions as much as possible.\n\n[[Criticism doesn't need to be self-righteous.|INTRO-04]]

Just as this is happening to filmmaking, photography, and fiction writing, so it is also happening to criticism. In such an age – an age where the task of the critic is being outsourced to well-informed bloggers and aggregate websites – it behooves us to remain aware of the space we're operating in, and the space we're creating. Those who have a serious commitment to media literacy, to informed criticism, to scholarly interpretation... they need to keep in mind the breadth of possibilities that criticism encompasses.\n\nMargaret Fuller was [[thinking about this as far back as 1840|http://www.berfrois.com/2013/05/short-essay-on-critics-margaret-fuller/]], and she seems to foretell the character of the snarky contrarian blogger -- the “subjective critic” -- but she also sees more expansive possibilties for criticism, wherefore she advocated.\n\n[[And I can’t deny that I write from a certain advocacy position, as well, though I’ll try not to be a scold or a shill.|INTRO-03]]

In this world of rapid democratization, where all things scholarly and specialized are suddenly in the hands of the masses, there is incredible promise: new voices, fluid definitions, the kind of innovation that results from a flood of participation. As those new participants converge on certain habits, certain modes and conventions, some possibilities are prioritized, and others are in danger of being forgotten. \n\n[[Just as this is happening to filmmaking, photography, and fiction writing, so it is also happening to criticism.|INTRO-02]]

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<div class="mainhead">Why is CRITICISM?</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\n [[Because art wants to be talked about|ASPECT010]]\n\n [[To help us put a market value on the products of pure subjectivity|ASPECT020]]\n\n [[To give artists a structure, to facilitate innovation|ASPECT030]]\n\n<<if $discerned gt 3>>\s\n Aspect space threshold cleared.\n [[Feel free to close the space at any time.|ENDING01]]\n<div class="quote">(note: this will take you to the conclusion of the essay.)</div>\s\n<<endif>>\s\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\nYou are at the Y-hub. | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

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Criticism: An Aspect Space

<<set $seen073 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 7.3</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as a long, slow process of filtering and establishing a canon</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nCreating lists seems to be the primal act of critical masturbation these days. By stepping back and looking at these lists, the casual reader can start to discern something like a "canon"... a tier of media that appears on practically every list, and a tier of creators who are responsible for those immortal works.\n\nThis is, of course, a novel media-fashioned model of qualitative opinion and statistical generalization. One wonders how anybody decided on a canon of essential media, before there was a mass culture industry to help aggregate the vast range of critical opinions.\n\nThe sparking, unstable field of critical consensus is both massively influential and largely ignorable, but like all hegemonies of taste, it begs a political question:\n\n[[Whose canon is this, and whose authority does it serve?|ASPECT082]]\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT070]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

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I’ll cop to my vanity: I’d rather be writing something called "theory" than "criticism," though the actual writing I enjoy doing is probably better described as the latter. I suspect it’s just the term’s pedigree that attracts me, something cosmetic that "theory" brings to mind, kind of like a mugger would definitely rather think of themselves as an "outlaw." Still, the two terms’ proximity to one another warrants some consideration.\n\n[[The relationship between theory and criticism is elusive.|TRANS02]]

This definition of theory allows a line to be drawn: criticism is the cousin of theory that keeps one foot firmly planted in human artifacts and experiences. Yet, deep in Heidegger’s works of theory, there are unmistakable flashes of criticism, unabashed tributes to pieces of art and the meanings they make possible. Consider, for example, the famous passage from //The Origin of the Work of Art//:\n\n<div class="quote sub">\s\nFrom the painting by Van Gogh, we cannot even ascertain where these shoes stand. There is nothing around this pair of peasant shoes in or to which they could belong, only an indeterminate space. Not even clumps of earth from the field or from the field-path cling to them, which at least could point to how they are used. A pair of peasant shoes, and nothing further. And yet.\n\nOut of the dark opening of the worn out insides of the shoe-tool stares the toil of laborious steps. In the sturdy solid heaviness of the shoe-tool is stowed up the stubbornness of the slow trudge through the far-stretched and monotonous furrows of the field, over which a raw wind blows. On the leather lies the dampness and fullness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field path as evening falls. In the shoe-tool vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet bestowal of ripening corn and its unexplained self-denial in the desolate fallow of the winter field. Extending through this tool are the uncomplaining fear as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of once again having withstood need, the trembling before the arrival of birth, and the shaking at the surrounding threat of death. To the earth belongs this tool, and in the world of the peasant woman is it heeded. From out of this heeded belonging, the tool itself stands up in its resting-within-itself.\n</div>\s\n\n[[Theory, finding meaning in experience of man's artifacts, becomes criticism.|TRANS04]]

The relationship between theory and criticism is elusive. Intuitively, theory is abstract and universal, concerned with metaphysics and the horizons of the possible, territory of gurus and philosophers who aren’t afraid to approach the incomprehensible. Heidegger is one of this tradition’s highest practitioners... in articulating the nature of alethia, Being as unconcealment in the clearing of possibility, he was divining for the threshold of our ability to imagine unreconstructed reality.\n\n[[This definition of theory allows a line to be drawn.|TRANS03]]

Theory, finding meaning in experience of humanity's artifacts, becomes criticism.\n\nAnd criticism, acting as it does on the malleable intellectual substrate reified in human communication, deserves a place alongside theory. Criticism is pure ideation, structured around human culture.\n\n[[Both, ultimately, are, in themselves, creative acts|ASPECT091]], so any attempts they make to place themselves outside the realm of art are futile.

<<set $seen092 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 9.2</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as a blind journey along the infinite chain of signifiers</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nIf you listen to the deconstructionists, you have to consider the possibility that beneath all our distinctions of motive, of expertise, of authority and intelligence and epistemic claim, there is a vast ocean of utterances, a massive, endless text that encompasses all human communication.\n\nWithin this text, the boundaries between art and commentary can no longer be maintained.\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT090]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $lastaspect = 9>>\s\n<<if (not $seen090)>>\s\n<<set $discerned = $discerned + 1>>\s\n<<endif>>\s\n<<set $seen090 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 9</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as Art Form</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\n[[Art Is Radically New|ASPECT091]]\n\n[[Art Is Infinitely Continuous|ASPECT092]]\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\nYou are at the Aspect Root | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen091 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 9.1</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as the creation of new meanings by a process of extension and elaboration</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\n<div class="quote">\s\nI have often misunderstood men grossly, and I have misrepresented them when I understood them, sacrificing sense to make a phrase. Here, of course, is where even the most conscientious critic often goes aground; he is apt to be an artist before he is a scientist, and the impulse to create something passionately is stronger in him than the impulse to state something accurately.</div>\s\n\n- H.L. Mencken, //H.L. Mencken's Smart Set Criticism//\n\nArt, defined broadly and without rigor, is the creation of new meanings. The nice thing about this nebulous definition is that it accounts for art's constant, frustrated desire to be radically innovative, //as well as// its desire to be personal: in the latter case, it expands the scope of meanings for the individual practitioner; in the former, it does so for the culture, the species, and perhaps the universe.\n\nCriticism is the sustained observation of the subliminal processes behind culture -- the creative process of the artist, the political process of the propaghandist, the interpretive process of the audience -- and the products of criticism keep that creative process as their subject... in their acts of criticism, critics create new objects that weave new lattices of meaning.\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT090]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $lastaspect = 7>>\s\n<<if (not $seen070)>>\s\n <<set $discerned = $discerned + 1>>\s\n<<endif>>\s\n<<set $seen070 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 7</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as Prescriptive Service</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\n[[How many critics see themselves as art teachers, lecturing from the podium of mass media?|ASPECT071]]\n\n[[Those, especially, who see taste as something that can be learned, and that must be taught...|ASPECT072]]\n\n[[Or who see themselves as the filters of history, ordering culture according to merit and distinction.|ASPECT073]]\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\nYou are at the Aspect Root | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen071 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 7.1</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as a lesson in how to create better art</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\n<div class="quote">"Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,- criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led, - this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society"</div>\n\n― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk\n\n\n<div class="quote">"The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it."</div>\n\n― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature\n\n<div class="quote">"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."</div>\n\n― Ralph Waldo Emerson\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT070]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen072 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 7.2</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as an arbiter of public taste</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nThis is especially true now that critical consensus is instantaneously trackable on ubiquitous websites like Rotten Tomatoes and MetaCritic.\n\nIt scares many cultural elites that these consensus engines exist, giving a convenient data-driven picture of the landscape of "informed subjectivity." It seems to rob them of their particular claim to authority, generalizing them with hundreds of peers whose opinions are irreconcilably different from their own.\n\nOf course, most of our opinions on films are simply invisible, except to our friends at the water-cooler. But when you are used to being listened to, it may really hurt that a website can treat your deeply personal experience of a film like a mere data point.\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT070]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

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<<if (not $firstaspect)>>\s\n <<set $firstaspect = 3>>\s\n<<endif>>\s\n<<if (not $seen030)>>\s\n<<set $discerned = $discerned + 1>>\s\n<<endif>>\s\n<<set $seen030 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 3</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as Resource for the Artist</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\n[[By contextualizing the practice and the medium|ASPECT031]]\n\n[[By teaching new artists about their craft|ASPECT032]]\n\n[[By setting criteria for evaluating new work|ASPECT033]]\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\nYou are at the Aspect Root | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen031 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 3.1</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as a reservoir of historical and contextual knowledge</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nAn artist is served well by being conscious, not only of their influences, but of the cultural landscape shaped and challenged those influences as they emerged.\n\nCriticism like Pauline Kael's [[brilliant "On the Future of Movies" (1974)|http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1974-08-05#folio=042]] is indispensible as [[a text that uses a culture's artifacts to chronicle that culture's attitudes and assumptions|ASPECT051]].\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT030]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen032 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 3.2</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as a means for educating new artists</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\n<div class="quote">\s\nLie naked on the table, and let them cut. Criticism is surgery, and humility is the anesthetic that allows you to tolerate it. In the end, the process will make you a stronger, more flexible, and truly creative writer. It will replace attitude with genuine confidence, and empty arrogance with artistry.</div>\n- Molly Cochran\n\nThe discourse can enrich or impoverish the artist, depending on whose voices are privileged in the stream.\n\nOn one hand, there's the chatter of audiences that consume on auto-pilot, as part of a habit ingrained by capitalism. On the other hand, there are audiences that consume seriously, thinking critically about their reactions, always trying to learn about their cultures so as to contextualize their experiences.\n\n[[Those are the ideal consumers|ASPECT062]], the ones who have something substantial to teach the practitioner.\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT030]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen033 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 3.3</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as a way of clarifying the boundary between the amateur and the innovator</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nThe informed critic is responsible for knowing their medium, and being able to evaluate new work based partly on what's been done before. This means navigating the rocky shoals between two creative ideals:\n\n[[NOVELTY: Is it new?|ASPECT071]]\n\n[[CRAFT: Is it good?|ASPECT071]]\n\nIf a practitioner has enough of one, it might redeem the lack of the other. If you don't know what either one looks like, though, what's the point of talking about it?\s\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT030]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen052 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 5.2</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as theory, anchored in the cultural matrix</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nIt seems the relationship between "theory" and criticism is pretty fraught with instabilities and ambiguities. This is to be expected, when you're talking about two intellectual domains that are both so porous.\n\nMy way of thinking about this: THEORY = thinking through abstractions; CRITICISM = thinking through instances. I see this as a continuum... much of the best theory is also criticism, and vice versa.\n\n[[I’ll cop to my vanity: I’d rather be writing something called “theory” than "criticism," though the actual writing I enjoy doing is probably better described as the latter.|TRANS01]]\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT050]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $lastaspect = 5>>\s\n<<if (not $seen050)>>\s\n<<set $discerned = $discerned + 1>>\s\n<<endif>>\s\n<<set $seen050 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 5</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as Research</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nArt as a systematic domain of knowledge includes at least two aspects:\n\n[[A history of art and its influence|ASPECT051]]\n\n[[New conceptual approaches to thinking about art|ASPECT052]]\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\nYou are at the Aspect Root | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen051 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 5.1</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as an historical narrative of emerging forms and ideas</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nMarshall McLuhan called artists 'the antennae of the race.'\n\nWith this in mind, critics must follow immediately after, processing the artists' signals and filtering out the noise. Fulfilling this function, they can help sort out and articulate the half-formed intuitions that artists are channeling ahead of the culture as a whole.\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT050]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen012 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 1.2</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as a community's shared language and body of knowledge</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nSome terms are determined at [[the level of theory|ASPECT052]], which overlaps criticism, but tends to drift more in the direction of abstraction.\n\n* Authorship\n* Hermeneutics\n* Mise en scene\n* Intertextuality\n\nOther terms are the product of criticism itself, coined by some astute critic and then propagating through the discourse:\n\n* Specific tropes and conventions\n* "Immersion" (video games)\n* The Auteur (film)\n\nThis shorthand becomes both an analytical tool and a social badge, indicating the fluency demanded by membership.\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT010]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen013 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 1.3</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as a scaffolding that converts an art object from a freestanding monolith to a foundation/platform for more art</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nPractically every artist manifesto is an act of criticism, being a document of resistance to some exhausted or pacified philosophy or practice. Most of them obscure this function by protesting abstractions, rather than calling out specific artists or artworks that offend them; it's a form of passive-aggression, tagging along with the rhetorical swells that artists use to strike sparks.\n\nSome manifestos, like [[The Stuckist Manifesto|http://www.stuckism.com/stuckistmanifesto.html]], eschew this kind of evasiveness, calling out movements (Post Modernism) and patrons (Saatchi) and practitioners (professionals and experts). In this, they provide a vivid illustration of the critical potential of the artist manifesto.\n\nOf course, such works also reveal [[the political nature of an aesthetic call to arms|ASPECT084]]: the inclusive "artists' democracy" spirit of the inspirational manifesto is inverted into exclusivity, where anybody who doesn't paint is somehow denied the status of "artist."\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT010]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<if (not $firstaspect)>>\s\n <<set $firstaspect = 1>>\s\n<<endif>>\s\n<<if (not $seen010)>>\s\n<<set $discerned = $discerned + 1>>\s\n<<endif>>\s\n<<set $seen010 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 1</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as Discourse</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\n[[Thinking about and reacting to art|ASPECT011]] does not need to be perfectly private. With [[a voice and a vocabulary|ASPECT012]] it can grow beyond the constraints of subjectivity and become a [[fertile space for a culture's proliferation|ASPECT013]].\n\nOf course, the danger of creating a language around yourself is that [[you might get stuck in it|ASPECT014]].\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\nYou are at the Aspect Root | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen011 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 1.1</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as the distributed communal equivalent to the individual act of "thinking about art"</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nWhat used to be private, the reception and reaction to percepts, can now be public, sculpted into a structure of revelations and assessments, shaped by conflicting consensus (consensii?) and perpetual contention, the troubled mental processes of a unified social body.\n\nRelated, conceptually, to [[the metaphor of culture as an actual physical body|ASPECT041]].\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT010]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

<<set $seen014 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 1.4</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as a web of language, woven around art, that obscures its essential experiential meaning</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nRainer Maria Rilke, in //Letters to a Young Poet III//:\n\n<div class="quote">"But let me make this request right away: Read as little as possible of literary criticism. Such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are clever word-games, in which one view wins , and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them. Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentation, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights."\n</div>\s\n\nIf criticism is opposed to art, it is because [[where the latter is expressive and spontaneous, the former is systematic and reactive|ASPECT042]].\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT010]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]

"Is it art?" has been replaced by "Why do you care if it’s art?"\n\nBut then, it’s an easy question to answer: “art” is the only word we have that seems to sum up the unmotivated ambition behind these irrational acts. “Art” is the instance that exists only for itself, according to its own criteria... unaccountable to market value ("product") and ethical value ("ritual") and truth value ("claim").\n\nOnce these claims to "art"ness are broken down and opened up, we open the gate for all sorts of objects and texts to take up the challenge of artistic aspiration.\n\n[[This includes Criticism itself, the traditional arbiter of artistic merit and taste|ASPECT092]], as it becomes part of the endless chain of utterances that form the DNA of culture.

Before you think too hard about this "what is art" question, it's good to look back in awe at the proliferation of media, before and after the late Rennaissance. Before the age of mass media, the "media" that provided art its platform were pretty stable for a couple millenia... painting, sculpture, poetry, long-form narrative, music, drama... and at the beginning of the Rennaissance, we mostly just saw a revival of these classical forms.\n\nBut starting with the age of mass media, the world saw a proliferation of new forms: photography, comics, film, performance art, installation art, video games. And each of these media, in its particular moment, has had an identity crisis vis a vis its status as an "art form."\n\n[[There are many examples.|TRANS11]]

<div class="quote">While some intellectuals were prepared to utter kind words on behalf of individual cartoonists, the essayist Gilbert Seldes was one of the first to consider the comic strip as a creative, expressive medium. Seldes deemed comics 'the most despised, and with the exception of movies' the most popular of the 'seven lively arts.'</div>\s\n\n- Introduction, //Arguing Comics// (2004, ed. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester)\n\n<div class="quote">Many strived for 'beauty' in their pictures. wishing to find a place for the photograph within the realm of the arts. But such a realm seemed founded upon a key principle in the larger idea of 'culture,' that art distinguished itself from science and industry by its special qualities of 'spirit.' And if 'spirit' was marked by a certain organization of feelings and sensibility -- the mark of "tradition" and personal "genius" -- then how could one achieve true art by use of a mechanical device?</div>\s\n\n- Introduction, //Classic Essays on Photography// (1980, ed. Alan Trachtenberg)\n\n<div class="quote">I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.</div>\s\n\n- Roger Ebert, ''Video Games Can Never Be Art'' (Roger Ebert's Journal, [[16 April 2010|http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-never-be-art]]\n\n[[The "art" question has been manhandled so many times, we've started rejecting it.|TRANS12]]

<<if $lastaspect eq 4>>\s\nCriticism is the soul exiled from itself, the estranged cousin of creativity that insists on standing apart. It is a permanent fixture of difference, never situated at the center… instead, it is always outside and in between, mediating between the creative act and its various effects: the private and public reception, the interface with culture and meaning, the submission to a higher standard, or the resistance to that standard.\n\n[[Whatever art is doing, criticism is watching, absorbing, and retransmitting.|ENDING02]]\s\n<<else if $lastaspect eq 5>>\s\nIn a world of pure spirit, man would be a purely creative force, a fountain of new ideas untethered to the constraints of reality. But man is many more things than that. At his best moments, he is creation, but he is also knowledge and memory and interiority and exploration, and criticism is the substrate of all those functions, integrating art into the larger fabric of life and knowledge. Criticism envelops humankind’s creative instinct and, powered by all those other human capacities, it amplifies it into the historical extension that it promises to be.\n\n[[It is the "knowing" that must accompany every act of "making."|ENDING02]]\s\n<<else if $lastaspect eq 6>>\s\nCriticism, abstracted from its more mundane functions, is nothing less than a lover’s soliloquy, a tribute offered to culture from the altar of language. Whether the words themselves express praise or blame or rigorous analysis, it’s always a speech spoken in appreciation. Critics can’t stop thinking about their subjects because they are infatuated, driven mad in the tradition of the wildest romantics. That kind of love can’t be silenced, lest it lead to melancholy, neurosis, and self-destruction.\n\n[[We must let that love speak.|ENDING02]]\s\n<<else if $lastaspect eq 7>>\s\nAre the critics mad, are they suffering from hysterics, because they think art can be subjected to judgment and analysis? Is it a crime against the products of creativity to set some kind of bar, to ask probing questions, to treat every artifact as though it should submit to violations by the discerning mind? Perhaps it’s unfair… but perhaps, also, it’s necessary, the fires of critique summoned to temper the steel of creation.\n\n[[And ultimately, even the toughest and most demanding criticism serves a higher, more mysterious purpose.|ENDING02]]\s\n<<else if $lastaspect eq 8>>\s\nThrough our art, our entertainment, and our communication, we give flesh to our spiritual substance. Through this creative process, an inalienable human impulse, we establish patterns and shamelessly expose our assumptions. Yet, without the ability to recognize those effects, we would not be fulfilling our human promise. We would be animals, acting out a mere instinct, however noble it may be. Criticism is that recognition, the self-conscious act of witnessing our own spirits through the works they produce.\n\n[[We should see with clear eyes.|ENDING02]]\s\n<<else if $lastaspect eq 9>>\s\nAt the root of every creative act – those of artists, but also those of philosophers, of entrepreneurs, of engineers and scientists and laborers and parents and children – there is //the idea//. The collective life of the human race is a dense weave of ideas, built upon ideas, buried deep in a bottomless substrate of small acts of creation. Criticism is an intensive, self-conscious, fiercely perceptive form of this creative act, carried out every day by every person who perceives the world and responds to it.\n\n[[Criticism creates by inhabiting, accepting, and reacting.|ENDING02]]\s\n<<else>>\s\nSomehow a closing aspect didn't get stored.\nYou can still [[finish the ending|ENDING02]], though.\n<<endif>>\s

Jesse Miksic

<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM: AN ASPECT SPACE</div>\s\n\nThis has been a ludo-essay written and designed by [[Jesse Miksic|http://www.miksimum.com/]]\n\nThanks for playing it through.\n\nAlso, thanks to [[MachineStarts|http://www.themachinestarts.com/]], [[Porpentine|http://aliendovecote.com/]], [[MammonMachine|http://mammonmachine.com/]], and [[Berfrois|http://www.berfrois.com/]] for feedback and exposure.\n\nTo restart CRITICISM: AN ASPECT SPACE, [[click here|javascript:window.location.hash='';window.location.reload();]].\n\nTo restart the essay with all aspects discerned, [[click here|Start2]].\n

<<if $firstaspect eq 1>>\s\nAnd where art slips into history as an utterance, man’s spontaneous, durable self-construction, so criticism will follow, surviving as its echo. If history was a book, all our reflection and commentary would be so much scribbling in the margins, distancing us from the pure words of the spirit that our cultural leaders have inscribed – in this history, every word is spent on its first articulation, and every subsequent repetition is just so much noise.\n\nBut that is not my history. My aural history is an echo chamber, a resonant interval where each voice becomes part of the expanding, intersecting waveform of collective thought… where culture is not burdened by the hum of its circulation, but rather, where this growing, echoing amplitude becomes the body itself, infinitely complex and able to withstand the scarcity of the universe without fading into silence.\n\nThis is my history, whose flesh is criticism: a history of echoes.\n<<else if $firstaspect eq 2>>\s\nIn the end, though, criticism enacts the same perverse logic as so many other dimensions of the human experience: the logic that insists on two mutually exclusive impulses, incompatible, but indispensable to one another. In capitalism, it’s the abstraction of all entities into the universal language of value, which, paradoxically, infects those objects with the parasite of non-being. In criticism, it’s the disunion of the personal and the universal, the forever war between critiquing and understanding… the need to fully inhabit an artifact, while also placing oneself radically outside it, in order to effect both an appreciation and a stern judgment.\n\nThis is an act of looking, listening, and finally enclosing and reducing. Its operation upon the basic material of the universe is akin to that of Being itself, abstracted from all content: the ineffable which bestows presence upon the imaginary, and yet, which disappears upon closer inspection. We are all a piece of art; we exist because the universe understands us, forever recasting us in an act of cosmic exegesis, the criticism of the stars.\n<<else if $firstaspect eq 3>>\s\nIt is the beauty of art – and culture, its bumbling macroscopic cousin – that they have the power to set fires in the minds and hearts of individuals, so we can see one another in the dark. Within this field of lonely beacons, criticism still has an invaluable place... without the catalyst, the pumping oxygen of discourse and critique, those fires would flare up and burn out too quickly, and we would still be stumbling from revelation to revelation, never finding one another.\n\nIt its gushing tributes, its harsh words and snap judgments, its penetrating gazes and rhetorical flourishes, criticism is fueling the fires of culture. It lets those miraculous, spontaneous acts of creation linger for longer than the physics of our bodies and brains intended, and it allows our cultural soul to attain some small sort of immortality... even if it’s just the kind of deathlessness that leads to one more person, forever sparking one more small flame.\n<<else>>\s\nSomehow a launch aspect didn't get stored. This ending is incomplete. Apologies.\n<<endif>>\s\n\n\n[[End|ENDING03]]

<<set $seen084 = true>>\s\n\s\n<div class="superhead">ASPECT 8.4</div>\s\n<div class="mainhead">CRITICISM as a straitjacket of conventions and interpretations from which artists must escape</div>\s\n\n<div class="sub">\s\nThe critics of identity-consciousness and political sensitivity like to rail against "Political Correctness."\n\nThis dovetails with the clarion call of the philistine: "Why do you have to tear it apart? Just enojoy it!"\n\nTo what degree is their meta-critique supported by theories of creative autonomy, like Sontag's //Against Interpretation//?\n</div>\s\n\nYou have discerned <<if $discerned eq 0>>0<<else>><<print $discerned>><<endif>> out of <<print $total>> aspects.\s\n\n[[Aspect Trace|ASPECT080]] | [[Y-HUB|Y-HUB]] | [[CODEX|CritCodex]]