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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 5791850" data-attributes="member: 177">When I read his works, I don't think he's lying, either.  Not in the, "I know and recognize the truth, but say something else anyway, sense.  I think he frequently gets blinded by his own brilliance, and tends to assume the primacy of his own theories and personal preferences.So, to me, he's not lying.  He's just occasionally wrong, and not very willing to see what he doesn't want to see.  Just like normal folks, really.Ah.  I'm pretty sure it is quite the opposite.  To me, his writing style (and, honestly, focus) screams, "This is how you should look at everyone else," not, "this is how you should look at yourself."Ah.  I think I see what you mean.  The issue we'll have, then, is that I find critical accounts not grounded in popular enjoyment of an art to typically be self-serving, self-referential and often useless.Critics have a habit of turning away from the practical matters of what actually reaches a human heart, and instead start to base their assessment upon a critical framework, developed by critics for critique, with a disconnect from how non-critics perceive the work.If such critics are taken seriously, this leads to artists creating art for the sake of getting positive critique, rather than for sake of communicating something to the rest of the world.  You end up with museums filled with works that cannot be understood except by folks who have first spent time studying the particular critical formulae for the genre in question.Take much of "modern art" as an example.  Your your average person is bored in a modern art museum for this reason - the critical rules for modern art are not strongly associated to base human responses, and the art was created for folks immersed in those rules.  Correct, but... I will use an absurd analogy to demonstrate my point.If I make up an arbitrary rule that says that all written work with more than a specified number of instances of the letter "a" as bad, I am not "wrong" to then say, "By my rules, this work is bad."  That doesn't mean the rule is meaningful in the first place, though.</blockquote>

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