Nobody’s A Critic

Crit­i­cism, laments Mar­tin Meis, no longer defines what is good and bad in cul­ture, and he blames new media. “Basi­cally, cul­ture has been democ­ra­tized. It has been flat­tened out and mul­ti­plied. There are no longer real dis­tinc­tions between high and low. There’s just more.” What he laments is not so much the demise of crit­i­cism per se, which is actu­ally quite robust, but rather the demise of the influ­ence of pro­fes­sional crit­ics and the sanc­tity of their domain. But if the rela­tion­ship between ama­teur and pro­fes­sional critic has flat­tened, so too has the rela­tion­ship between critic and artist. Par­tic­i­pa­tion is a two-way street. Mar­tin Weis on the per­sonal impact made by lit­er­ary critic James Wood’s essay, “What Chekhov Meant By Life”:

Or, to put it another way, Chekhov is more Chekhov when you add James Wood. I pre­fer Wood/Chekhov to Chekhov/Chekhov and I sus­pect that there is sim­ply no such thing as the old Chekhov after Wood got to him. By the same token, Wood is the critic that he is in no small mea­sure because of how he was affected and trans­formed by read­ing Chekhov.