Why Are Reviews Not Artful?
On Friedrich Schlegel and George Steiner
Here are my 100 tweets on the founding figure of German Romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel:
Schlegel argues that the only suitable way to respond to art is with more art. Reviews should be disqualified unless they are themselves works of art and/or self-conscious reflections on the essence of reviewing. Most reviews fail this test.
Schlegel’s sentiment is echoed by George Steiner, who believes that reviews and secondary literature, generally, occlude our ability to experience art on its own terms. Newspapers should direct us to where new works are to be found, but not impose their evaluations of those works upon us.
The practical counter-argument to Steiner is that the people prefer Yelp to their own devices. Life is too short not to outsource critical judgment. I only want to see things that have been pre-approved by people I trust. I don’t want to waste time going to a bad movie if I can be told it’s bad in advance.
But both positive and negative reviews do tend to turn art into a commodity, a matter of social taste, rather than a thing that can transform us by teaching us something new. Reviewing and explication are a domestication of the wild force of creation. But we can’t seem to live without it.
Perhaps a compromise is to budget some amount of time to consuming art with little care for what reviewers have to say about it, just to maintain an independently critical faculty. On the other hand, you might say that one can maintain independent judgment simply by curating an array of reviews so that no single one dominates (call this a kind of mutual fund approach to art curation).
Clearly, Schlegel and Steiner lost their battle for important reasons. Yet to the extent that you think most artistic and cultural production today is mediocre, you might place some responsibility on reviewing culture, which, for the most part, does not know how to encounter art as art, is more caught up in art’s meaning than its power. No doubt, I am guilty of this, too. But the Schlegelian-Steinerian ideal should remain a compass for anyone who has anything to say about a work of art.
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