On Criticism

Noel Carroll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134221301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In a recent poll of practicing art critics, 75 percent reported that rendering judgments on artworks was the least significant aspect of their job. This is a troubling statistic for philosopher and critic Noel Carroll, who argues that that the proper task of the critic is not simply to describe, or to uncover hidden meanings or agendas, but instead to determine what is of value in art.

Carroll argues for a humanistic conception of criticism which focuses on what the artist has achieved by creating or performing the work. Whilst a good critic should not neglect to contextualize and offer interpretations of a work of art, he argues that too much recent criticism has ignored the fundamental role of the artist's intentions.

Including examples from visual, performance and literary arts, and the work of contemporary critics, Carroll provides a charming, erudite and persuasive argument that evaluation of art is an indispensable part of the conversation of life.

Three
The Parts of Criticism (Minus One)

I. INTRODUCTION

By the “parts of criticism,” I mean the component operations that go into producing a piece of criticism. Although, as a rule, these operations are not completely independent of each other, but rather inflect one another mutually, we can make some pragmatic distinctions among them. As indicated in earlier chapters, these operations include: description, classification, contextualization, elucidation, interpretation, analysis, and evaluation.

On the view of criticism advanced in this book, the first six procedures typically function as grounds for evaluation.* However, a piece of criticism, properly so called, need not contain all of these operations. For me, a piece of criticism must contain at least one of the first six of these operations, plus, of course, some form of evaluation (either implicit or explicit).

The requirement that at least one of the first six operations appear in a critical effort follows from the notion that criticism involves grounded evaluation. It is on the basis of description, and/or contextualization, and/or classification, and/or etc. that the critic supports her appraisals.

Moreover, without saying something about the work of art by way of discussing it in terms of one or more of these operations, the critic’s remarks would be virtually uninformative—little more than a gesture of thumbs up or down. So, the critic undertakes the description, and/or analysis, and/or so forth of the artwork for the sake of producing a communication that is effective rhetorically as well as for the sake of logic.

Although I have underscored the need for a piece of criticism, properly so called, to comprise at least one of the six operations plus evaluation, perhaps needless to say, this allows that a work of criticism might involve all of the first six operations plus an evaluation or, for that matter, any combination of the six operations plus an evaluation. What is essential to criticism is an evaluation backed by reasons—which reasons can be advanced by means of description, and/or contextualization, and/or classification, and/or elucidation, and/or interpretation, and/or analysis.

The purpose of this chapter is to review the parts of criticism (minus evaluation), sketching that which each of the first six procedures involves, and commenting upon some of the special problems and issues that arise with each part.* Given its indispensability and centrality to the work of criticism, evaluation merits a chapter unto itself. Thus, the next and concluding chapter of the book will be turned over to evaluation, its problems and prospects.

II. DESCRIPTION

Description is a matter of telling one’s readers or listeners something about what the work of art at hand is like.* It gives the reader something concrete to hold onto cognitively. If the work is a representational specimen of visual art, for example, the critic says what it pictures—a haystack at dawn, for example—as well as how it appears in terms of things like its color, its disposition of figures, its facture, etc., as well as often including some observations about their accompanying aesthetic and expressive qualities. If it is an abstract work of visual art, then the critic itemizes its shapes, if any, as well as other parts of the painting, and their relations and qualities. With works of narrative art, the critic usually begins by at least offering a paraphrase of the story.

But whatever the artform, some description of the work is usually put forward if only so that the reader or listener has some cognitive purchase upon that which the critic discourses. For, it is hard to know what a reader or listener could make of a critical evaluation bereft of any description whatsoever of the artwork—other than, maybe, that the critic was either enthusiastic or vexed by something. Still, what that something was would be pretty obscure otherwise.

I suppose that there could be cases where the work of art is so well known by everyone that a description of it seems redundant.* Perhaps Hamlet might be an example of this. But even in cases such as Hamlet, it is difficult to imagine that description can be avoided entirely. For not only the evaluation of the work but all the other parts of criticism will require that the critic specify something about the work that he intends to contextualize, elucidate, interpret, or analyze, and, furthermore, that specification will involve description. When analyzing a work or a part or an aspect thereof, the critic will usually describe what she is analyzing, even if the audience knows the work, if only to orient readers to the object of her analysis. For example, the critic may describe Eliot as treating Prufrock compassionately—perhaps supplying a paraphrase or an example—in the process of analyzing how this was done. Likewise when the critic classifies or categorizes the work, she will need to describe the features of the work that warrant the proposed categorization. So, although it may be possible to imagine a piece of criticism with no description, such a feat seems highly unlikely, for reasons of both logic and rhetoric.

One, possibly frivolous, worry about critical description is the charge that, in one sense, critical descriptions can never be adequate to the artwork. Most artworks are very complicated objects. Indeed, even a readymade has many parts, and, in any event, its relationship to its institutional and historical contexts can be both intricate and rich. Because of this complexity, artworks can never, it might be said, be fully described. There are just an indeterminately large and practically boundless number of things you could say about artworks as you look at them from every angle—formal, economic, historical, and so on. Consequently, description is inherently quixotic.

Something in the preceding claim is probably true. A full description of an artwork, such that there is nothing left to say about it—no relation of its parts that has gone un-remarked—sounds, to put it mildly, impracticable in the vast number of cases. It seems there is almost always some further angle from which the work may be surveyed, some additional comment that could be made.

And yet there is significant slippage in this argument in its movement from the unlikelihood of full descriptions of the work to the claim that there are no adequate descriptions. Simply put, there are adequate descriptions of artworks that are not full descriptions, given the apparent unattainability of so-called full descriptions.

Yet, how can there be adequate descriptions that aren’t full descriptions? It is because adequate descriptions are selective. They are selective out of necessity. It is doubtful that anyone could deliver a full, indefinitely large description and, furthermore, it is even more improbable that any reader or listener could process it. Also, such a description would shirk the central task of criticism—to abet the audience’s understanding of the work—because such an attempt at criticism would fail to shape the work in such a way that people can comprehend it better.* Rather, a full description would overwhelm them cognitively and perhaps even flabbergast them emotionally.

Moreover, the function of the description of the work in the overall act of criticism is to ground the other operations of criticism, especially evaluation. Clearly, not every aspect of the work and its context, scrutinized from every conceivable vantage point, will be relevant to these other operations. That which needs to be described about the work are those features of the work that are important to draw to the audience’s attention for the purposes of classification, contextualization, elucidation, interpretation, and/or analysis, and, of course, evaluation. That is, the demands of these operations provide the frame, in a manner of speaking, in which the critic outlines his portrait of the work; they guide him in his selection of which details and which relations in the work merit description.

Nevertheless, as soon as it is conceded that description is selective relative to certain hierarchically overarching pursuits—such as, for example, interpretation and evaluation—the worry ignites that critical descriptions are bound to be specious or tainted. The critic’s evaluation or interpretation of the work, for example, will lead her, so it is charged, to describe the work in what must be a gerrymandered fashion. That is, she will offer a description of the work that suits her evaluation and/or interpretation and that shunts to one side those aspects of the work that contradict or, at least, contest her viewpoint. Description is not only necessarily selective; it is selective in an epistemically suspicious and contaminated fashion. Putatively the critic’s conclusions drive her choice of those details and relations that she deems to be the ones important enough to warrant descriptive attention.

Again, there are some grounds for this anxiety. The critic, where competent, will generally put forward—by way of description—the evidence that best suits her case. But there is nothing nefarious about this, since her descriptions can be challenged from a number of directions.

We may find her guilty of mis-describing the work. She may claim that it has certain features that it lacks. Or, she may describe something that is there, but in language that is so vague or misleading that it only supports the pertinent evaluations or analyses by means of equivocation. Of course, it is not only we who may correct the critic in this way; the critic may catch her own mistakes.

Moreover, the critic may fail to describe something about the work that the rest of us—other critics and lay folk alike—recognize to be such an important feature of the work that there is a consensus that any adequate analysis, interpretation, evaluation, etc. of said work should include explicit reference to it as part of an acceptable description of the work. For instance, a criticism of last night’s ballet that neglected to mention that the male dancer dropped the prima ballerina on her head every time they attempted a lift together is something that everyone will agree should be part of the description of the performance, just as a piece of music criticism that forgot to describe the fact that the orchestra was out of tune would be regarded as remiss from all sides.

In short, it is true that description is tailored to the other operations of criticism, something we will discuss anon under the rubric of the hermeneutical circle. This relativity of description to the other operations of criticism may open the door to bias. But bias does not necessarily enter. For the critic, in crafting her descriptions, can remind herself of important features of the work—perhaps features of the work noticed in all or most of the antecedent criticism of the work—that call for description but which do not fit the viewpoint that she is exploring at the moment.* In this way, she can correct herself. And, failing that, others can call attention to the generally recognized aspects of the work that the critic has failed to include in her description.

Criticism, like every other form of inquiry, is open to bias, since, again like every other form of inquiry, it involves selection. Nevertheless, we can control for bias inasmuch as the descriptions that the critic proposes of an artwork are ultimately corrigible, by the critic herself in the first instance and then by others. In this regard, the descriptive procedures of criticism stand on all fours with other intellectual endeavors.

Bias is possible everywhere. Yet that would be a problem only if it was something impossible to remedy. The bias that might infect a critical description, however, is always remediable in principle. For, we can ascertain independently of the critic’s evaluations, interpretations, and so on of works whether everything that strikes most of us as important details in a work have been incorporated in the description of the work, and, if not, we can demand to know why the critic has sublated these details.*

And even where there is no consensus that an overlooked detail is important, a case can be made against its omission, by, for example, showing that its description can be connected to a superior, more encompassing view of the work. Furthermore, these are not only ways in which others can correct the descriptions of the critic. They parallel the strategies by which the critic can interrogate her own descriptions in inner dialogues and debates with herself.

As emphasized, a critical description of a work of art sub-serves the other operations or parts of criticism. This is unproblematic, however, since readers of a piece of criticism are not constrained to attend to the work only through the optic or under the aegis of one piece of criticism. For, of course, we have access to other criticism of the work and, indeed, to the work itself sans any given interpretation and its allegedly privileged or preferred descriptions.

Perhaps the most important service that description performs is to segregate out for attention the parts and relations of the work that the critical analysis or interpretation goes on most often typically to demonstrate as belonging to a functionally organized whole worthy of evaluative commendation for its artistic achievement of unity.

For example, the commentator will include in his description of A Midsummer Night’s Dream mention of all those episodes where, due to Puck’s botanical interventions, the characters awaken to find themselves irresistibly infatuated with the most unlikely partners—as Titania falls for the donkey-headed Bottom. The critic itemizes these subplots descriptively in order to establish interpretively that the play is held together by the theme of the irrationality of romantic love, our capacity to be overcome by desire as the result of virtually physio-chemical forces (Puck’s potions) beyond our understanding—i.e., love as a drug.¹ These parallels, then, can be invoked as grounds for applauding Shakespeare for the surpassing unity of his creative achievement.

Of course, serving as grounds for interpretively organizing and then recommending an artistic achievement for its coherence is not the only service description performs for the other parts of criticism, as we shall see as we examine them at greater length.

III. CLASSIFICATION

Although it is probably obvious, it is always useful to emphasize that artworks come in categories. This is most evident at the level of artforms: painting, sculpture, music, literature, theater, dance, architecture, photography, film, video, and so forth. But then each of these artforms comprises further categories of various sorts—for example, genres, movements, styles, oeuvres, etc. Fundamental to the task of criticism is placing the artwork at hand in its proper category (or categories), because, once we know the category (or categories) to which the artwork belongs, we have a sense of the kind of expectations that it is appropriate to bring to the work—which knowledge, in turn, provides us with a basis for determining whether the work has succeeded or failed, at least on its own terms. That is, situating the work as a certain kind of artwork at the same time implies the type of criticism suitable to bring to bear upon the object.

This appeal to categories may strike some readers as suspiciously reactionary. For, has it not been the imperative of art, since Romanticism or, at least, since Modernism, to break with the past, to initiate a continuous revolution of the new, and to remake everything afresh? “Make it new” was Ezra Pound’s battle cry. Indeed, under extreme versions of the Modernist regime, each artwork, it has been suggested, should be a genre unto itself—which is to say a member of no genre, properly so called. A recent exhibition in France in 2003, entitled Sans commun mesure, for example, presumes that incommensurability is the distinguishing mark of modernity.²

Likewise, it may be urged, new artforms are constantly proliferating—photography, film, radio, video, computer generated imaging—and we can be sure that there are more on the way. When such artforms first burst onto the scene, to what categorical expectations can the critic take recourse? Isn’t the category to which the nascent artform belongs just too new to have any expectations associated with it?

Consequently, although in the olden days critics might have relied upon categories in the way suggested by the opening paragraph of this section, serious art since at least the late nineteenth century has rendered the invocation of categories obsolete. Categories of art have been banished, as the modern artist, brandishing Kant’s patent for genius, yearns to give the rule to nature. Therefore, there is little point for the critic concerned with serious contemporary art to appeal to categories. For presumably the serious art world today is a world without categories of the relevant sort.

But, of course, this picture of the art world is far too extreme. Much mass art, including movies and TV, comes in categories. Are none of them serious? Novels too, even serious ones, often are still written in genres, as are plays. Ditto popular songs; even much advanced music is written in forms, such as opera, of long standing.

Yet perhaps the only “serious” art is avant-garde art. And, of course, there is a great deal of avant-garde art, art of the new, which may attempt to defy utterly any categorization. But, entre nous, it does not. There are clearly genres and even traditions in the originality game, such as those of transgression and reflexivity. It is true that one frequently cannot tell what category a work of visual art belongs to simply by looking, but there is no reason not to use contextual and institutional clues to facilitate classification. Such information is perfectly legitimate when it comes to categorizing artworks. Moreover, most avant-garde art can be sorted into movements, such as Cubism, Photorealism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Postmodernism, and so on.

However brave and stirring, the mandate that every artwork break with its tradition and re-invent its artform was actually never anything more than a wishful fantasy. No one could make a work that completely severs its ties with her tradition, nor could anyone else have understood such a work. On both the reception and the production side of things, the human mind simply does not work that way.* The very ambition to agitate for a perpetual revolution in art is a tradition, the tradition of the new. And the astute critic is quite adept at situating new work into the sub-genres of this nearly century-and-a-half old lineage or tradition, quite often with the help of the manifestoes and interviews that the avant-garde artist and/or his gallery have been generous enough to supply.*

Similarly, we must deny that the new media that become artforms—like photography and cinema—arrive without categorical expectations attached. For, in the earliest stages of these nascent artforms, ambitious practitioners tend to ape the effects of the neighboring, established artforms, as photographers imitated painters and as filmmakers imitated dramatists. In these cases, critics have no trouble fitting such work into already existing categories.

Furthermore, by the time the new artform is ready to declare its independence from the other muses, enough about the new direction the artform is taking is in the air—again in the form of manifestoes and other sorts of institutional or art world chatter—for the savvy critic with her ear to the ground to have a sense of the emerging categories and their associated range of expectations.

Among the major services that the cr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One: Criticism as Evaluation
• Two: The Object of Criticism
• Three: The Parts of Criticism (Minus One)
• Four: Evaluation: Problems and Prospects
• Notes