criticism is cruelty

refusal to engage with the fact that part of what makes critique enjoyable is the cruelty and power embedded in it i think convinces some people that what they do is an unalloyed social behaviour. that they in fact do not get off on the experience of judgement.

i believe that criticism is good, entertaining, enriching to artists and audiences. it’s an inevitable result of making art and the permission for response. a response that exists in the mind even under authoritarian circumstances. WE (this includes artists) will never be presented with things we respond to uncritically. everyone is a critic.

i also know that one of the joys of it is being mean. this is the same joy as being mean to your sibling, and them being mean back to you. one that is not explainable as a ‘moral action’.

attempting to set out rules of engagement for the entirety of human relationships to art is impossible. so, accepting that all criticism is, instead of always being a moral responsibility, an engagement in the joys of cataloguing, that which includes cruelty, the desire to enact punishment, is i think important.

otherwise you delude yourself to your intentions and the impact of your actions. you have to sit with the fact that criticism is a thing that makes people unhappy, and that this isn’t an unrighteous response borne out of a misunderstanding of the rules of the game.

it is in fact a continuation of play. your feelings, of disgust, of anger, are genuine themselves, that’s what has driven your joyous cruelty. that is the game.

(edit: the violent responses to art and critique of the far right, as replicated continuously over the past 15 years are examples of such joyous cruelty being used as fertile, grounds of political power and influence.)

similarly, flip this on its head and see that any response to kindness and adulation will likely play off of similar emotions. i.e. CRITICISM IS NOT AN EMOTIONALLY DISENGAGED ACT. its impacts are to provoke emotion in the same manner as the artform. it is the case however, that often (not always), art is not directly targeted towards a singular person in the fashion that critique is.

but, critique itself here is not simply the traditional relationship between critic and artist, and in fact it never has been. it is a relationship between multiple other people engaging in the same behaviour. your responses to them are also driven by the pleasures of cruelty and the pleasures of kindness. the response to other critics calling them stupid is part of the game! the game is emotional response, driven by your experiences and ideology.

i think, maybe, that critics, (in columns, in youtube videos, in social media posts deriding other critical viewpoints, in reviews on Yelp) but especially those who form part of the neoliberal establishment of ‘good writers’, who place themselves in positions of power over the interpretation of art and the creation of ‘journalism’ STILL, are (edit: removed ‘the most’) susceptible to forgetting that they engage in criticism because they enjoy the sparks of meanness and validation to others that it permits them. Rather they would like to believe anything but, and such, by that token, end up missing not only why Right Wing criticism is so successful in its emotionally heightened, manipulative approaches, but also dull themselves to the reason they are even doing Anything in the first place… content to continue to scratch out dopamine by relitigating the ‘need’ for art criticism that is Free and Open, rather than actually like… doing it.

And that’s me being mean. And cruel. And critiquing other critics. And accepting that i enjoy it. i enjoy shitting on privileged new yorkers and guardian columnists and people who can’t boycott genocidal technology. if you don’t like things i say then good. that’s the point. people need to stop pretending it’s not.