The Value of Critiquing, Bashing, and Disliking

After the bizarre conclusion of Art Guy’s adventure in the old library, I’d like to explore the importance of saying, “This doesn’t appeal to me,” when looking at art. Depending on who you are with, this can take a lot of nerve to say or no nerve at all. If you are unenthused about the Louvre, and you are in the Louvre with a group of other unenthused tourists, it’s not as daring as you think it is to say you don’t like the Mona Lisa. Likely, nobody in your group will disagree. In fact, most people I talk to about the Louvre go out on this very limb to say that they didn’t think much of the Mona Lisa when they saw it. Perhaps it was smaller than they thought it was going to be.

I can’t name a single person in my generation who was jarred or overwhelmed by the Mona Lisa. Appropriately, I am less surprised each time someone rejects it. The complaint about the Louvre is that it is “overwhelming,” while the Mona Lisa is “underwhelming.” Leonardo da Vinci is not around to hear this critique. Nor is Napoleon, whose stolen bounty comprises much of the Louvre’s collection. The only people around to hear the critique is the new hipness-driven generation. In this day and age, the Mona Lisa isn’t as hip as, say, Klimt’s The Kiss. The Louvre isn’t as hip as, say, the MoMA. It’s time to accept that it’s no longer daring to bash Mona; rather, it’s become quite normal. In fact, if I raved about the Mona Lisa, I would reveal myself as a simple-minded dinosaur, a relic of the old days, and I would be doubly bashed for liking something that “everyone likes.”

We should hesitate before we take this trend to heart and conclude that Mona Lisa hasn’t stood the test of time. The “test of time” is a flimsy concept I’ve never really taken to. Victorian art was steadily plummeting towards worthlessness in the 1970’s, but there has been a recent revival in interest. Medieval icons art were out of fashion since the dawn of the Renaissance, until 20^th century scholarship has revealed its genius of color, otherworldly stylization, and religious monumentality. Maybe it’s coming time for someone to say, “Quit bashing the Mona Lisa. It’s a gorgeous painting.”

My Mona Lisa example serves as a foil for the rest of my study. I’m trying to say that the most important critiquing isn’t the easy kind. It’s the kind where the targeted artwork is getting more praise than it deserves for irrational reasons you can pinpoint. It is important to note that every artist can have a bad day. The perfect test is to go through a museum without looking at the labels and pick your 10 favorite paintings. Then look at who painted them. My former roommate, a Michelangelo buff while we studied in Florence, thought the statues in the Medici Chapel were just dreadful.

If you go on praising the artists that are used to praise, you are burying their lesser-known contemporaries. Sometimes these artists deserve praise too, and the curators can’t hang everything. Poor Marsden Hartley, an American Impressionist who doesn’t fit into any of the MoMA’s “movements,” and therefore is absent from America’s great modern art museum. Poor Botticelli, for hundreds of years seen as an underdeveloped stepping stone on the way to Raphael. It took the Pre-Raphaelites, critiquing the style of Raphael, to shed light on the importance of Botticelli. So if you don’t get negative about art you don’t like, you’re ultimately suppressing art that you do like.

If you critique something or someone, and someone says you’re being mean, think about it. I think it’s mean to bash people that everyone bashes, like Britney Spears. I think it’s a lot less mean to bring everyone’s not-so-heroic hero back to Earth. Ultimately you have to ask yourself, do you like it or not? You’ll find that result very hard to negotiate.