the arts lie dreaming of the life to come

"Knife-Edge also Standing Figure"

(c) Henry Moore (1967)

"...music shows its heterogenous nature and superior intrinsic virtue by its complete indifference to everything material in the plot; in consequence of this, it expresses the storm of the passions and the pathos of the feelings everywhere in the same way, and accompanies them in the same pomp of its tones, whether Agamemnon and Achilles, or the dissensions of an ordinary family furnish the material for the piece."

- Schopenhauer

"At some point you might have told yourself and others that you listened to the Backstreet Boys because it was funny. But in fact, you were enjoying it; it's just a different kind of enjoyment..."

- John Darnielle

I stopped formally studying English more than a year ago now; this should mean I never have to criticise anything that I don't feel intensely about ever again. For similar reasons I don't think I want to 'review' things anymore. I'd like to criticise instead.

Why this distinction? Because we're engaged in skirmishes in a war with the Observer, with the whole moribund practice of Reviewing. It's everywhere, having long usurped most public critical thought (since it looks like criticism but is less wanky). Bite-sized impersonality is the reviewer's format, because it makes the review seem objective, and thus worth reading.

To review is to tell someone if a thing is shit or not. To be critical is to investigate how something works, not necessarily to say that it does or doesn't.

And the former is not dialogue but autopsy! (Morticians - i.e. historians - are great, but they really should only work with things that have metaphysically died first - as no object when considered aesthetically ever will.)

I don't agree with Wilde when he says "all art is useless" - but he's on to something. Reviews are primarily functional and artless beasts. Their function is to provide a concise injection of perspective for those without the time or tools to form their own opinion: reviews are horse-betting tips for the 1000-albums-per-week derby that is modern music.

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Premise 1: Value is mind-dependent.

Premise 2: Meaning is intersubjective (mind-dependent on a grand and dynamic scale).

Premise 3: Interpretations are second-order features of states of affairs. A pattern seen is a pattern present, regardless of author-intention: that's what interpretation is!

Premise 4: We produce meaning involuntarily, and project value onto every thing we contact.

Premise 5: But value is not just a matter of whim; we are given tastes in a similar way that we are given physical traits. (Though obviously it's much more dynamic and steerable.)

Conclusion (aesthetic falsificationism): You can't be "right" about cultural objects, but you can be wrong. You're "wrong" if your interpretation does not conform to the first-order features of em. ("Aesthetically senseless" might be better than "wrong".)

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Putting on my Marxist hat for a moment: reviews prop up our conspicuous consumption of music: the much-mocked hipster attitude. They appeal to the social superstructure of music rather than the aesthetic base (by base I just mean actually listening to songs, rather than bands). We can't help judge each other on taste - but latterly we place too much on it, and in doing so we obscure the sounds to listen to the propositions. It's another instance of our poisonous dismissal of subjective things.

It's processes like these that create the weird neurotic character of modern music fandom: the "guilty pleasures", the canons of airless "Classics", and, above all, the great joyless indie-cred cult of authenticity, which I think all musical subcultures are guilty of. (...Maybe not house.)

"Don’t say the light show’s excellent -
it makes you smell of the laboratory instead of
a fan of the band..."
- Half Man Half Biscuit

(Note: Nobody totally escapes the cred game, nor anyway is it such a bad place to live. But remember that its handmaiden, the review, is not really a reaction to art at all. And I do so crave the chance to react.)

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What's wrong with reviewing in general is doubly wrong with the pop review. Modes of the pop review:

I: Autobiographize. Compare to their old albums, say that it's "not-as-good-as-the-last-one" (Crap contextualization)

II: List the tracks, assign them genres, trace their lineage. Say that the middle bit isn't any good. (Crap textualization)

III: Sophomore, "ooh, I once read something quite like this in class maybe they mean this concept". (Crap intellectualization)

IV: Identify what they were trying to do. Compare to paradigm songs, of the band in question or of bands who tried the same thing. Intentionalize. Pick representative details and paint the page with them, for god's sake. Pull out narrative if you see narrative. Include the personal, 1) cos all attention is personal and 2) to remind readers that all reviews are just readings and if you see it, it is present. (Actual analysis.)

Pop deserves better.

Robert Christgau, one of the more auteurish people talking about pop, is at least honest: his long-running archive of mini-reviews is called the "Consumer Guide", and he calls himself a "media professional" as well as "rock critic".

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"In my head, a "proper critic" is an intellectually rigorous individual with an encyclopaedic knowledge of their specialist subject and an admirably nerdy compulsion to dissect, compare and analyse each fresh offering in the field – not in a bid to mindlessly entertain the reader, but to further humankind's collective understanding of the arts."

- Charlie Brooker, denying that he is a critic.

There's something to that. But good criticism takes creative power and inner life as well as noble nerdishness.

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"I want someone younger than me to get foolish about pop again, to stop telling me all the things I could be listening to and start telling me why I SHOULDN’T listen to certain things. Reattach guilt to pop, reattach hierarchy, reattach shame, reattach style, remember that style is different from fashion, instead of just adding their void-voice to the general hey-if-you-enjoy-it-that’s-cool numbness of discussion. Stop fucking rehabilitating everything and start locking stuff up and out and AWAY. It will be out of reach for a reason. Pleasure forced to justify itself again."
-Neil Kulkarni

"Police mentalities will always try to impose correct readings, to align intentions with outcomes, couple imaginary causes with putative effects, but we always have a choice."
- Dave Hickey

Kulkarni calls this syndrome "critical sleepiness" - you might know it better as relativism. He's wrong, but in a very interesting way: he's wrong because cultural objects like pop songs, or nationality, or masculinity can have no single true analysis. But Kulkarni's right in that we shouldn't accept relativism as a muzzle on disagreement; the fact that contradictory interpretations stack (without needing to be sorted into "true" or "false") means that we absolutely can and should be opinionated! We can speak unqualifiedly about things we feel strongly about, because, no matter how violently we deride a thing, our reaction isn't really oppressing anyone secure in their own positive reaction to the object. Just because there's no right answer doesn't mean that all answers are as good as each other. We cannot change the fact that people enjoy Wagner (either Wagner). But why bother, politics aside?

(It does occur to me that this theory is not a good thing to put in the hands of the internet. Perspectivism is fine if you've patience and modesty, but...)

I intervene in what I read. You relate to one of the characters in Brothers Karamazov? No shit; you're in every text you will ever look at, because that's what reading, and consciousness is. The more 'present' you are (the more that its symbols resonate with the meanings in you), the more you will like it.

Corollary: No one has ever read the same book as anyone else, just commensurate ones. Come to that, no one has ever read the same book as themselves some time later.

Awesome corollary: anything can be critically engaged with. This is what Schopenhauer (opening quote) implied but could not say (being such a snob).

It's terrible that this transformatory, egalitarian way of seeing stuff has been presented in the maximally obscure manner that it has. What would they call it? "Postmodern hermeneutic-aesthetic perspectivism", perhaps. What should we call it? "Poptimism"

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"After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears. I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations."

- Oscar Wilde’s mouth

"Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him."

- Aldous Huxley

These two remarks suggest a related piece of my sort of philosophy of life - what we might call spiritual empiricism. "What's art for?" Eh. The same as everything else.

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Yeats says that "the arts lie dreaming of the life to come". But we shouldn't think that "dreaming of the life to come" is good in itself. (The Futurists and the Communists put paid to that.) Let's look at Art Nouveau trains:

Eurgh. The inherent menace of the style was most recently realised in some artsy computer games.