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The only good critic
Near the end of the charming Pixar feature Ratatouille, an unforgiving food critic voiced by Peter O’Toole gives a lengthy monologue that ends with the sticky sentiment which Michael Ruhlman paraphrases like this:
This critic acknowledges, as so few do, that simply striving for art is harder, more courageous, more valuable, than all the efforts of the best critic working at the height of his or her powers.
It’s not uncommon bromide; whenever it’s trotted out again I’m reminded of Bernard Shaw’s “those who can — do; those who can’t — teach”. But Shaw was being ironic, and some real critics do appear to feel genuinely powerless when confronted with this. Even Randall Jarrell, in “The Age of Criticism”, comes close to voicing it. Lesser powers sometimes seem completely disarmed: the New York Times’ chief food writer Frank Bruni says,
One of the real joys of any form of criticism — and I say “any form” because when I wrote movie reviews years ago, I felt the same way — is being exposed to something worthy and then being able to direct attention to it, to say to people, “Look! Over there! Something really valuable and really pleasurable is going on.”
If you’re inclined to make a distinction between “reviewers” and “critics”, here you have Bruni pretty nearly capitulating. It’s strange that this suggestion can so easily provoke such a defensive reaction — it’s as if critics are faintly ashamed at themselves. Perhaps that’s just the nearness of “criticize” meaning deride, and “criticize” meaning evaluate: the old “I’d like to see what you can do”. Sure; but why when confronted with this presentation in particular? This rhetoric doesn’t seem, as most platitudes do, too easy: it seems sort of plain and wrongheaded. So the solemness of its presentation tends to provoke a certain amount of disbelief. It always tempts me to merely contradict: was Samuel Johnson’s work really easier to do than Dan Brown’s? is Eliot’s prose really worth less than the undergraduate verse of Barack Obama?
But isn’t that beside the point? Saying the greatest critic is lesser than the most incompetent artist is like saying the most expert mapmaker isn’t even as worthwhile as the most directionless explorer. They’re not doing the same thing. Critics who are properly doing their job do not only guide people to things valuable and pleasurable — they do that too — but they also chart what “valuable” means. They show the importance of that “striving” in art. They record the impression of the art, they record the fact that is has successfully been communicated, that it has really truly existed to begin with. It’s the critical operation in any reader that does the essential job of making sense — not literal sense, but contextual, determinant sense — of art. Practical critics bring a finely sharpened point to specific works; general critics create the order of whole media and genres. That’s not to say they are final arbiters, beyond all appeal; or that people printed in newspapers and magazines and journals have some special power over art or ability to judge it (after some recent issues I’m tempted to say quite the opposite). But what a critic does is at its root what all readers do; great critics are, by their nature, first of all great readers. And readers, it should seem clear, are neither more nor less than the artists they read.
Remarks: 4 of 4
Remark · Doug · 24 July 2007
Not to get nitpicky, well, or, to get nitpicky, I’m under the impression that quite a few early map makers were explorers in their own right. Maybe not the guys with the monocles sitting at home with rulers, compasses of the other sort and various kinds of sweet pencils, but I think there have been quite a few explorers who might think of themselves as mapmakers, making the field markings and rough sketches that themselves use as maps to guide them through the wilderness until such time as the artisans back home have had a chance to sit down with their sweet pencils to cartographize in a more artistic way.
Could be this is something you already thought of, but it makes the analogy a little more meaningful, I think.
Remark · zbs · 25 July 2007
I’m sure there’s a better analogy out there somewhere, but to the credit of your observation, many great critics were also artists (though as often as not for another art) — Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Swinburne, Baudelaire, Frost, Eliot, Jarrell, O’Hara, Reynolds, Fairfield Porter. It’s interesting that, with the partial exception of literature, this is becoming increasingly uncommon. Now it sometimes seems like only those screened by academic background and their bundle of apparatus are qualified to make any points: I recall Randall Jarrell’s memorable image,
In the same way, if a pig wandered up to you during a bacon-judging contest, you would say impatiently, “Go away, Pig! What do you know about bacon?”
Remark · cmb · 2 August 2007
To me it seems the greatest disparity (cf. mapmaking-exploring) between critic and artist might be between food critic and chef. Certainly, at least, with critics like Bruni, who are in the position of reviewing haute-cuisine establishments. There is a lot of historical basis with literary critics and art critics who performed themselves, and indeed some food critics do cook, and quite well (I recall Austin-American Statesman critic Dale Rice being inordinately good at it), but the differences between at-home cooking and high-level kitchen activity seem to produce a more developed segregation between critic and artist.
But conversely, the gustatory nature of the critical subject here (that one eats what he critiques) brings critic and artist closer, through taste buds; Anton Ego’s nostalgic flash at the close of Ratatouille — when tasting the peasant dish of his childhood — portrayed this accurately. The consumption of the critical subject might be a more visceral activity with food. Or perhaps I simply feel taste is a more primordial sense than sight or sound.
I’m dilating Zach’s ideas here, or dragging them somewhere else, but food crit is an odd thing, a thing far more complex than it seems.