"I get a great laugh from artists who ridicule the critics as parasites and artists manqués -- such a horrible joke. I can't imagine a more perfect art form, a more perfect career than criticism. I can't imagine anything more valuable to do."
-- Manny Farber, quoted in Roger Ebert's appreciation of the late, great critic
Painter and critic Manny Farber, whose book "Negative Space" is one of the essential collections of visual-arts criticism, has died at the age of 91. Farber's writing was scrappy, unpretentious and iconoclastic, not unlike the films and filmmakers he favored, from the genre pictures of Sam Fuller, Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah and John Wayne, to the visionary and experimental work of Werner Herzog, R.W. Fassbinder, Andy Warhol and Chantal Akerman. (See pages from the expanded 1998 edition here.)
Unquestionably his most famous and reverently-quoted essay was 1962's "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art." Modern art, he wrote, had become "a yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition: far inside are tiny pillows holding up the artist's signature, now turned into mannerisms by the padding, lechery, faking required to combine today's esthetics with the components of traditional Great Art."
Farber is as much fun to read as he is to agree -- and argue-- with. I can think of no better tribute than to cite a few excerpts from his "termite art" treatise:
A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing it its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.
The most inclusive description of the art is that, termite like, it feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away at the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into the conditions of the next achievement. Laurel and Hardy, in fact, in some of their most dyspeptic and funniest movies, like "Hog Wild," contributed some fine parody of men who had read every "How to Succeed" book available; but, when it came to applying their knowledge, reverted instinctively to termite behavior.
One of the good termite performances (John Wayne's bemused cowboy in an unreal stage town inhabited by pallid repetitious actors whose chief trait is a powdered make-up) occurs in John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance."... Wayne's acting is infected by a kind of hoboish spirit, sitting back on its haunches doing a bitter-amused counterpoint to the pale, neutral film life around him. In an Arizona town that is too placid, where the cactus was planted last night and nostalgically cast actors do a generalized drunkenness, cowardice, voraciousness, Wayne is the termite actor focusing only on a tiny present area, nibbling at it with engaging professionalism and a hipster sense of how to sit in a chair leaned against the wall, eye a flogging overactor (Lee Marvin). As he moves along at the pace of a tapeworm, Wayne leaves a path that is only bits of shrewd intramural acting -- a craggy face filled with bitterness, jealousy, a big body that idles luxuriantly, having long grown tired with roughhouse games played by old wrangler types like John Ford. [...]
"Citizen Kane," in 1941, antedated by several years a crucial change in films from the old flowing naturalistic story, bringing in an iceberg of hidden meanings. Now the revolution wrought by the exciting but hammy Orson Welles film, reaching its zenith in the 1950's, has run its course and been superceded by a new film technique that turns up like an ugly shrub even in the midst of films that are preponderantly old gems. Oddly enough the film that starts the breaking away is a middle-1950's film that seems on the surface to be as traditional as "Greed." Kurosawa's "Ikiru" is a giveaway landmark, suggesting a new self-centering approach. It sums up much of what a termite art aims at: buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim, and, over all, concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has passed; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin.
Farber framed his essay as a "this vs. that" equation in order to prod and provoke. Art doesn't really fall so neatly into one category or the other. (In that respect you could say his argument is of the White Elephant variety.) But he challenges the prevailing rules and rouses you from the habits of tradition, doesn't he?
Be sure to check out David Hudson's round-up of Farber appreciations at GreenCine -- and don't miss those by Girish (from 2006), Jonathan Rosenbaum (from 1993), and Noel King's introduction to a Farber-centric issue of Framework in 1999.
I don't know Farber, but he must have been interesting because I already want to argue with your opening quote. Consider it my paying respects.
How can critics think so highly of what they do? Great art takes a lot of sacrifice. Great criticism doesn't. I think criticism is invaluable, but only as a means to an end - the end being actual art. Artists get up on the stage, critics (who aren't also artists) stay safely in the seats. Criticism is like the Yang to Art's Yin, except it's a slightly less than equal relationship since art can exist without criticism, but criticism can't exist without art.
Eric--
I think your last point is the strongest--that criticism can't exist without art. I've never liked the old "artists put themselves out there, critics don't" line. It's just not true--sure, a film or theater critic isn't putting themselves on film (well, except for Ebert, Siskel, Roeper, et al.), but they are certainly presenting their work for public display. Criticism isn't immune from criticism. Mr. Ebert being the most famous example, many critics probably have a larger audience than some of the films they review.
Criticism, at its best, is just another name for "an expository essay" where the topic happens to be a piece of art. And as expository essays can be art, I don't see why criticism can't if it's done with insight and a respect for language. Maybe very little criticism actually approaches this threshold (we can draw a distinction here, as I believe Jim has in the past, between a "reviewer" and a "critic"), but that doesn't change the potential of the form.
However, as I said, I do think your last point is pretty strong--however great criticism is, it can't exist without the object it is discussing. Maybe that doesn't mean that any particular film is better than any particular criticism (certainly, some of Roger Ebert's reviews are better than the film being reviewed), but it does speak to the fact that a film or other piece of artwork in of itself gives the potential for criticism.
Then again, maybe Farber saw it the other way--that a piece of art was at its most valuable when being criticized. The art is reduced to a means to the end of discussion and understanding. Humans can't exist without oxygen, does that make oxygen more valuable than humans? Of course not, oxygen is just the means. I can see an argument based on this--art is meaningless unless there's someone to appreciate it, and criticism is basically the highest form we have of extending and enhancing appreciation.
I disagree with that idea, of course, but it's not without logical merits. I just happen to think that a really great piece of art will hit you in ways that make words and description impossible, or at least unnecessary.
Art can certainly exist without criticism, but it won't necessarily exist for *me*, the most important of all audiences. Here in the rust belt, I don't exactly stumble over art every time I venture out into the homogenized strip mall world. I have to find it and, you know, the price of gas and all...I don't need a critic to tell me the value of what I'm already looking at but I do need someone I trust to tell me what I should go looking for and I definitely like to find an intelligent discussion of it after the fact. Said discussion rarely changes my mind, but it often orders it or brings something to mind I had failed to note at all. For instance, I never would have known I disagreed with Farber's grand theory if I hadn't come upon it. Critics I trust (Ebert and Emerson) led me to Farber which led me to yet a deeper understanding of what I value in movies. The most important facet of this system is not the disagreement.
I would suggest that if you don't know Manny Farber then you clearly don't know too much about film criticism.
Obviously his line about there not being "anything more valuable to do" is silly and, I suspect, mostly tongue-in-cheek.
Of course criticism can be art; it's writing. Since when is writing not a candidate for art status. One of the qualities of art is that it leads to enlightenment of a sort (this is not a NECESSARY quality or the DEFINING quality of art, of course). And the best criticism leads to enlightenment as well.
Is my film criticism art? No, I'm not that good, at least not yet or maybe ever.
Was Manny Farber or James Agee's film criticism art? You bet. Why? Because they were great writers first of all (and second of all).
Manny Farber has had a soft spot in my heart ever since I read his famed comment on Warner Bros. cartoons: "The good ones are masterpieces, and the bad ones aren't a total loss." Another great critic is gone.
As both an artist (BFA in art, my work is at http://josesinclair.blogspot.com), and a critic of books and films, I can state from personal experience that creating anything I would even attempt to call art is much more self-sacrificing and demanding than any essay on someone else's work ("criticism" if you like). Of course, writing is art, some have even taken journalism to an art form, Hunter S. Thompson comes immediately to mind, and critics are certainly journalists. The best may even be artists on rare occasion.
However, their essay is really not much more than educated opinion, no matter how well written, and until they delve into creative writing, they are rarely baring their souls to us in the manner that a true artist does. I've spent weeks on some of my paintings, rarely more than a day on any review. I've also destroyed much of my art; how many critics would destroy their work rather than bare it to the public?
Let's keep in mind that Manny Farber was also a painter; in fact this occupied much more of his life than film criticism or art criticism. Yet he still felt as strongly as he did about his criticism.
I have spent weeks working on a piece of film criticism, not "film review" style criticism but more academically-oriented material. I still wouldn't call it art but it sure took more than a day's worth of work. I have, on the other hand, dashed off reviews in a couple hours. Some turn out well; others not so much.
I've shredded plenty of essays/reviews without publishing them, but I don't see how that has anything to do with a definition of art.
I strenuously disagree with your suggestion that the essay is a lesser form of writing or that it is not creative writing. There's almost no form of writing I find more compelling then the passionately argued and well-written essay.
I also disagree with the idea that critics "certainly are journalists." It is unfortunate that film criticism has often been conflated with journalism and understandably so since the most widely-read reviews have historically been those published in newspapers. But criticism is not necessarily journalism.
What kind of writing *isn't* creative? Swift's "Modest Proposal" was an essay, is it not creative? Not art? Don't confuse "essay" with "research report". Essays can speak to the nature of the essayist, they can be funny, or tragic, or awe-inspiring. All criticism is is an essay that happens to have another work as its subject.
An essay is an extremely versatile thing--it can have clinical objectivity, or be deeply personal. It can be straightforward or abstract. It has the same potential, in essence, as any book that could be labeled "non-fiction", and there's nothing to prevent a film critic from employing those same tools in responding to a film.
And please note that I use the word "responding", rather than the word "reviewing".
There seems to be a perception about criticism similar to the perception about video games--it can't be art, because I've never seen any that I would call art. As if the limits of a medium (or, in the case of criticism, a *genre*) are set by what has been accomplished with them so far--or what has been accomplished with them *to your knowledge*. That just isn't so.