Jonathan Jones posted an article today on criticism and where it is born. He situates this birthplace in the teenage obsession with pop music and says that “every fan is a critic, and a critic is just someone who never grows out of being a fan.” This is true to an extent. I would consider myself a critic of sorts and a fan. The problem is that Jones places his relationship as a fan with the artist and their work, while I would place myself as a fan of the experience of art.
The difference that arises here is that Jones’s criticism based in adolescent fandom will never be able to establish a distance from what it criticizes. This type of criticism seeks to bridge the distance between the work and the reader. In doing so, it assumes the criticism will flesh out the artist’s intent and that this act of writing is purely subordinate to the actual experience of the piece.
Criticism should maintain a critical distance between itself and the work of art. In this distance, we are given the space necessary to evaluate the work and allow the writing to become more than just the mimetic reproduction of the artist’s intent. For criticism to be truly critical, it needs to be distanced and acknowledge all the multiple distances that are inherent in writing. To be a fan, is often to be uncritically close to the very thing we are a criticizing.
