air guitar part 2
"Colleagues of mine will tell you that people despise critics because they fear our power. But I know better. People despise critics because people despise weakness, and criticism is the weakest thing you can do in writing. It is the written equivalent of air guitar - flurries of silent, sympathetic gestures with nothing at their heart but the memory of the music." Hickey's essay "Air Guitar" probes into how and why he himself became an art critic, and is sort of a tongue-in-cheek critique on being a critic. The writer says about writing about art, "I see the object. I translate that seeing into vision. I encode that vision into language... The writing gets older with each passing moment while the artifact gets newer." I think Hickey's stance on how most art critics write is a fair one; he says that many critics are too academic and removed from the actual art. At the end of the essay, he talks about the relationship between pleasure and justice, and how they are completely intertwined. This is an argument about how art is evenutally politicized, and how it is an inevitable phenomenon. After reading this essay, which the book takes its title from, I have a better understanding of the author's view of his own profession. I think Hickey's whole reason for being a critic is a bit strange. He says that he was basically afraid that he couldn't adequately capture experience; he felt like he couldn't do it justice. So instead of writing about life, he wanted to write about art. It makes sense I suppose then, since they say that art is an imitation of life already. And isn't writing an imitation of life too? So is art criticism just an imitation of an imitation of life then?
-Julia McAlee
