Wha?
A couple of days ago I was reading Harper's in the Ontarion offices (the June 2005 issue) and got to read David Mamet's "Bambi v. Godzilla: Why Art Loses in Hollywood". It's kind of muddled in places and has all the focus of a not-very-focused thing but some parts of it are really top-notch, particularly the section where Mamet details the way in which the traditional political oppositions really mask our retreat from our hidden belief that things would be perfect if it was us in charge:
Guelph or Ghibelline, Red or Blue, Capital or Labour, Free Trade or Protection, the big Choices, then, can be seen as a sham, the true choice not between them but between them and a different level of abstraction. Not: Which to choose to make the world perfect, but: How do I live with my own desire to mutiny and take it all into my own wise hands?
(I told you it ranged a little far)
But there's a brief section where Mamet briefly writes of critics where Mamet has entirely, if you'll excuse the phrase, lost the plot. A single line from there, I think, proves my point:
Critics derive sustenance from opposing growth.
Well, either he's redefining "critic" to refer to a subspecies of writers on the arts that the rest of us really would prefer not to be associated with and that I certainly don't recognize in the writings of my peers (i.e. the people I read online), or else he simply has lost touch with what criticism is. To be critical is to investigate why and how something works, not necessarily to say that it doesn't. I'm sure there are people who think they are critics who fit what Mamet is thinking of here (although even they don't always fit his statement), but then again that's like saying that scientists are people who believe in evolution like it's a religion. I'm sure there are people who think they are scientists who do that. But real scientists abhor them.
No, what we have here is the sound of someone bitter at their reviews, and what surprised me the most about this sentence and the rest of the paragraph (which sadly I don't have here to quote in full) was its petulance. I suppose it shouldn't, but it always shocks me when artists so fundamentally misapprehend what criticism is about and like, especially when it almost invariably is because they've been hurt by bad reviews. I'm not denying those hurt - I'm saying that the number of artists who can only deal with that by condemned en masse those who write about art is truly depressing.
Guelph or Ghibelline, Red or Blue, Capital or Labour, Free Trade or Protection, the big Choices, then, can be seen as a sham, the true choice not between them but between them and a different level of abstraction. Not: Which to choose to make the world perfect, but: How do I live with my own desire to mutiny and take it all into my own wise hands?
(I told you it ranged a little far)
But there's a brief section where Mamet briefly writes of critics where Mamet has entirely, if you'll excuse the phrase, lost the plot. A single line from there, I think, proves my point:
Critics derive sustenance from opposing growth.
Well, either he's redefining "critic" to refer to a subspecies of writers on the arts that the rest of us really would prefer not to be associated with and that I certainly don't recognize in the writings of my peers (i.e. the people I read online), or else he simply has lost touch with what criticism is. To be critical is to investigate why and how something works, not necessarily to say that it doesn't. I'm sure there are people who think they are critics who fit what Mamet is thinking of here (although even they don't always fit his statement), but then again that's like saying that scientists are people who believe in evolution like it's a religion. I'm sure there are people who think they are scientists who do that. But real scientists abhor them.
No, what we have here is the sound of someone bitter at their reviews, and what surprised me the most about this sentence and the rest of the paragraph (which sadly I don't have here to quote in full) was its petulance. I suppose it shouldn't, but it always shocks me when artists so fundamentally misapprehend what criticism is about and like, especially when it almost invariably is because they've been hurt by bad reviews. I'm not denying those hurt - I'm saying that the number of artists who can only deal with that by condemned en masse those who write about art is truly depressing.
