Only critics on deadline must rush to judgement

People who live near the seashore no longer hear the waves. Our sensed are deadened by the routine and quotidan. Art, though, makes the familiar strange again, so that it can be freshly perceived. This necessary “defamiliarization” or “enstrangement” – to use terms coined in the 1920s by a group of critics called the Russian formalists – explains why true art often appears outlandish, disturbing, grotesque, or very, very puzzling: It is trying to break through the automatization of our dulled response to the world around us. The novelist’s task, as Joseph Conrad famously said, is simply “to make you see.”
Artists have long recognized this need for ambitious work to eschew the cozy and soothing, the expected approach, the conventionally beautiful. This isn’t simply a twentieth-century philosophy of shocking the bourgeoisie. “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion,” said Francis Bacon in the time of Queen Elizabeth I, just as critic Harold Bloom asserted, in the time of Elizabeth II, that “when you read a canonical work for a first time you encounter a stranger, an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfillment of expectations.” Writing halfway between bothy, Goethe observed much the same: “All great excellences in life or art, at ist first recognition, brings with it a certain pain arising from the strongly felt inferiority of the spectator; only at a later period, when we take it into our own culture, and appropriate as much of it as our own capacities allow, do we learn to love and esteem it. Mediocrity, on the other hand, may often give us unqualified pleasure; it does not disturb one’s self-satisfaction, but rather encourages us with the thought that we are as good as another.”
The innovative, then, needs time to be explored and understood. “Great masterpieces,” said Proust, “do not disappoint us by giving us their best first.” And so when you attend a concert or visit a gallery and are confronted by what seems to you ugly or upsetting or incomprehensible, be hesitant about giving it an instant thumbs-down. Yes, the painting may look as if your third grader did it in Day-Glo crayon, the concert sound nothing like Mozart or the Beatles, and yet, just maybe, you are missing the point. The Rite of Spring provoked a riot; Jackson Pollock’s abstractions were dismissed as jokes. Which of us would have immediately recognized their originality and grandeur? Wait awhile. Only critics on deadline must rush to judgement. I like the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s modest advice: “We should comport ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages – stand quietly before them and wait till they speak to us.”

The shock of the new

uit: Book by book : notes on reading and life - Michael Dirda

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