CRITICISM, reading chapter 27

Legislative criticism: treats artistic AW as something up for refined discrimination and a self-conscious education in taste.

Basically it tells you what, it speaks with conviction and assuredness. NOT A PROBLEM GIVEN THESE DAYS OF DUMB DOWN VALUES. 

A bit later, the romantic shift of power from critic or theorist to the artist elicited the need for the interpretation of works of genius, and so the critic now was not so much a judge of quality as a guide to the significance of works of art.

These changes meant that critics became reviewers, reappraisers,and interpreters rather than legislative theorists, although the earlier role lingered on in the imperiously judgemental tone that much early reviewing took.

there is a difference between critique and review. in the second you make descriptive comments about it and withhold evaluation. in the first you evaluate. CALL A SPADE A SPADE, IF YOU'RE WRONG YOU'RE WRONG. AS SIMPLE AS THAT. 

Appreciative description: In appreciative description the critic functions as an intermediary between the work and the audience. The critic is presumed to have better taste, greater sensitivity to meaning, and more extensive relevant knowledge than the audience.

isn't that what one wants from the critic? to get x-tra valuable info?

... we are never absolutely sure we have correctly identified a WA, and, therefore, the rock critic reviewing his favorite band is, in principle, in the same position as the art historian commenting on Greek vases: they must both identify the AW, which gives them the relevant criteria for description and appraisal. In practice, however, the difference between intimacy and remoteness is crucial. If the rock critic had to explain his view to someone unfamiliar with the tradition and current bands, he would be giving a course not writing a review.

when going back, WEAR THE RIGHT GLASSES!

Such criticism can, however, have the paradoxical effect of making the work more distant experientially, even though it may be better understood.

so what, distant is only because it's not understood. if something is understood it's already NEAR. 

The next and most important stage in the critical journey is reached when critics are on intimate terms with performances and can presume that audiences share the relevant contexts.

SURE,

Such criticism does not consist of arguments in support of verdicts, but of efforts of the critic to express through appreciative description the basis upon which a work is judged. Appreciative description is “discourse grounding evaluation,” and evaluation is implicit in the description itself.

this is cool. when the critic finds a word that simultaneously describes and evaluates.

coreggio, the mystical marriage of st. catherine

this is what Nicolas Penny writes:

In the center of the most beautiful painting by Correggio in the Louvre there is a knot of flesh as intricate and lively as a swimming octopus. It consists of the left hand of the Virgin Mary delicately supporting the slightly smaller right hand of Saint Catherine, while the much smaller hand of the infant Christ tenderly picks out the Saint’s ring finger. This is a miniature example of an effect at which Correggio excelled: actions inspired by a sentiment of breathless intensity are somehow endowed with angelic grace and with a formal complexity which is delightfully difficult to disentangle.  

Analytic criticism: Analytic criticism is closely tied to a formalist theory of the arts that takes the underlying organization of works of art as their distinctive value,thus subordinating the mimetic and expressive appearances that are dominant in descriptive criticism. Formal analysis, of which New Criticism is perhaps the best-known school, claims that it can analyze out and reveal the very structure or principle of formal organization in AW.

you take the work and basically deconstruct it. the advantage is analysis, the disadvantage is it tends to disconnect with readers.

Interpretive criticism: The interpretive criticism that produces significance is usually directed to canonical works, and it serves a function similar to that of the re-staging of dramatic works. Both provide continuity not by historical reconstruction, which takes us backward in time, but through the making of meanings that bring them forward to us. For example, this one by Simone Weil:

The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man shrinks away....The cold brutality of the deeds of war is left undisguised; neither victors nor vanquished are admired, scorned, or hated. . .. As for the warriors, victors or vanquished, those comparisons which liken them to beasts or things can inspire neither admiration nor contempt, but only regret that men are capable of being so transformed.

problem here is interpretation itself, 

Cultural criticism: This notion of criticism comes from Marx’s ‘critical criticism’ and Matthew Arnold in “The Study of Criticism at the Present Time,” where he contrasts it to “polemical practical criticism.” Criticism has here almost wholly lost its meaning as discourse grounding the evaluation of performances, and instead uses commentary on art and culture as a basis for social criticism.

what you do is take the AW and put it in a socio-political context and talk about it from that angle. it helps to see it in context, but as you move out of the AW one looses detail.