Sunday (6/28) on the Minnesota Orchestra blog Inside the Classics, orchestra violist Sam Bergman responds to Jones’s Guardian article. “I think there’s an angle that Jones is missing here, and it’s that, for most of the history of art, the only real recourse available to an artist whose work had just been trashed by a self-appointed expert was to either hunt him down and punch him in the nose, or write a whiny, self-indulgent Letter To The Editor, which would be read only by other whiny, self-indulgent types looking for their own letters. … If you ask me, the real lesson here is that it’s about time that critics grew some thicker skin and stopped endlessly trying to justify their existence to people who disagree with their perspective. The headline on the Guardian column reads, ‘Art criticism is not a democracy.’ It’s an odd thing to write, since art criticism is, in point of fact, every bit a democracy these days, as the 129 comments appended to Jones’s work attest. And the ‘professionals’ had better figure out a way to stay on top of the pile before someone comes along and knocks them off for good.”
Posted June 29, 2009
