gatewatching

Update: For those prepared to contemplate the erotic allure of blogspot profile photos in relation to the Henson debate, the NSFW (language) Grodsthink for this week should provide some food for thought.

This week, in the tissues and the blogosphere, there has been a lot of discussion of art, and its “evil twin” pornography, in relation to some photos. A lot of it’s been that simplistic - either Bill Henson’s photos are art or porn, either we should plump for “freedom of expression” or the “protection of children”. In this sense, many responses have amounted to little more than a less-than-helpful jerking of the knees.

For mine, neither one side’s claims to be speaking for common decency and the Law, nor the other side’s gratuitous displays of cultural authority or browbeating dismissals of “philistinism” have been particularly enlightening. The whole debate so far has caused nothing but confusion for some people, not least pollsters in some metropolitan tabloid newspapers.

(Image from Yesterday’s Crikey)

The problem may well be that there is no longer the space in prominent forums to host nuanced criticism that explains the value of these photographs. A justifiable commonsense idea - that the public display of nude photos of underage girls is unnacceptable - has been tapped quite effectively by some right of centre commentators. But responses to moral entrepreneurism that retaliate with name-calling or rank-pulling are worse than useless, they’re polarising, and can only work alienate majority opinion. Another very good piece by Jeff Sparrow on this is locked away in Monday’s Crikey. In part it reads:

The most common liberal defense of Bill Henson involves an assertion that he’s not a sleazy snapper but an artist – and a famous one at that… The unspoken implication is that artists operate in a higher realm than ordinary people, who thus have no right to comment on their work. In the current context, one couldn’t adopt a more disastrous rhetorical strategy.

The correct rhetorical strategy might just be genuine critical effort - making these photos intelligible as something more valuable and interesting than mere pornography; critics accounting for their own, complex responses in an engaging and persuasive fashion; writing that invites discussion and doesn’t try carry the day with bald assertions. Right now, we need criticism that reaches out to people rather than lecturing them. The fact that this hasn’t been done often enough during this debate is precisely what allows folks like Andrew Bolt to write stuff like:

It’s as if the tribe of opening night habitues feel they should stick up for these pictures of budding bare-breasted 13-year-olds without quite knowing why. Their brains can’t justify what mere habit insists they must, and in this collision of reason with prejudice they’ve bruised themselves badly.

It’s crude, stereotypes the audience for art, and unfairly characterises some of the arguments that have been made on this issue. But it will be read with recognition by people who haven’t been persuaded that these are anything other than dirty pictures, and are alienated by the pro-Henson rhetoric. (NB - just saying “they’re artworks, not porn” isn’t especially compelling).

On LP yesterday, Kim posted about a related discussion (principally in Salon.com) about the impact of the blogosphere on literary criticism. There’s some interesting further commentary on the LP thread, but the basic proposition being debated is that the levelling tendencies of the blogosphere have led to a diminishment of the authority of critics, and a lessening of their influence (not that Kim or others necessarily agree with this - read the thread).

Perhaps this conversation arises from the fact that forms like the newspaper, the literary magazine and the academic journal were all part of a certain regularisation of criticism. The confluence of these media forms, the increasing complexity of metropolitan leisure, and the industrial circumstances of journalism (and academia) meant that over time criticism was identified with certain people with a specific occupation - Critics.

But the place of criticism in newspapers, in particular, has been changing lately because of the same pressures that other forms of journalism have been feeling - cost-cutting, marketing crossovers, and a perception that drama and conflict (rather than considered reflection) is what sells. The public for certain cultural forms might also be changing or even diminishing, so that as a result, newspapers come to offer less of a forum for cultural criticism. In these circumstances, the fact that amateurs are doing criticism online (and giving it away for free) looks like a good place to direct blame.

But in part that argument is based on an idealisation of the past - George Orwell’s essay, “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” (written in the 1940s) reminds us that criticism has always tended to be poorly-paid, slap-dash, and distorted by political and commercial considerations, as well as personal rivalries. It also ignores the fact that the bulk of MSM reviewing doesn’t offer many penetrating critical insights.

For mine, like journalism, criticism is not a product of credentialling - it’s a practice. In principle, that practice is widely available. That’s not to say that it’s not something that some people have more talent for than others, and there’s a common suggestion that critical talent is proximate to that of artists themselves. Many people can review, say, a film, but few can make their reader rush back and study every frame with a renewed enthusiasm and curiousity.

My favourite definition of critical work comes from Stanley Cavell, a philosopher whose philosophical sensibilities have been intertwined, throughout his career, with an attention to Hollywood cinema. In an essay, “Music Discomposed” (Collected in Must We Mean What We Say?), he writes:

Criticism has as its impulse and excuse the opening of access between the artist and his audience, giving voice to the legitimate claims of both.

That definition of criticism is the opposite of “criticism-as-elitism”, the definition or identification that is one of the “problems” that criticism is held to be facing in the salon.com debate. It suggests that critical writing about artworks should figure a dialogue, but dialogue is the opposite of most of what has happening in the last week or so, especially in the broadsheets.

Anyway, on this view, criticism shouldn’t be patronising or didactic, shouldn’t gratuitously appeal to the authority of the writer, nor simply invoke convenient or established categories. The kind of criticism that gives voice to contending claims is what’s urgently needed in the current fight about Henson.

The idea that open publishing technologies will somehow snuff out critical talent, or limit space for enlightening criticism, can only be premised on a Keen-like reading of the blogosphere - that it’s all lowbrow, LCD stuff, and it’s remorselessly dragging us all down with it. Most of us know that this just doesn’t reflect the variety of writing (of varying quality) that we find on blogs, and we also know that writing of excellence can come from people who are using open publishing platforms. While it’s best to acknowledge that not all critics find the blogosphere a welcoming or nurturing place for their work, that doesn’t mean that criticism itself doesn’t take place there. It does, in spades.

As proof, I furnish a couple of blogospheric essays on the burning issue we started with: Bill Henson’s photography. Yesterday’s post on Sorrow at Sills Bend is simply the best thing I’ve read so far on the issue - it’s lucid, compelling, and told me something new, way beyond some of the reflexive positions that have been taken on Henson’s images. You should read the whole thing, but here’s a sample:

it is a distortion to say that the pictures are ‘clearly’ pornographic, and equally it’s a distortion to say they’re ‘clearly’ about something laudable and respectable like sympathetic nonsexual ideas about the trauma of adolescent metamorphoses. They just don’t have literal, incontrovertible, specifiable meanings. You might not like their implications or feel happy looking at them, but, thank feck, that in itself does not make them illegal… For me what Henson’s pictures connote is a vulnerability of the flesh that is bigger and more basic than sexuality (yes, some things are more basic than sex.) But I don’t claim this is what they ‘mean’. I recognise the distinction between what the images are in themselves and how I respond to them, how I fill them out and collaborate in their production of meaning.

Rachel’s piece (on a relatively new blog, Mentalization-Positive) gives us not only some sharp criticism, but some context in terms of museological and curatorial practice, and the unintended consuquences that are the collisions between art-world priorities and common sense. Again, the whole post is worth a read. At one point, she writes:

What is profoundly at stake is the ability of this seemingly burgeoning concerned public to hold in its eye and consciousness the naked bodies of its children, to acknowledge sexuality, to think about the ways in which they might do that: look, recognise, think, and deal, and deal in both concepts and images. Most of these public comments both recognise and represent an alarming fear of doing that, and outlining that that might be at stake.

Both of these posts perfectly exemplify criticism as a conversation - the kind that Cavell’s definition calls for - criticism of the kind we haven’t seen on Henson thus far in the MSM.

I’d argue that criticism, like journalism in general, isn’t dying, but as a practice it is moving into different spaces, finding different audiences, and being voiced from different positions. The Henson affair is showing us all over again that criticism matters. But at the moment we’re entitled to wonder whether Critics - credentialled professionals with tenured positions in MSM outlets - matter as much as they used to, especially when bloggers are doing the job of public criticism with more guts, insight and panache.