by WILLIAM ANDERSON
WE ARE BUT CRITICS
WE do not, I think, need Senator Proxmire to tell us that at least a few of our government agencies have found some mighty peculiar ways of frittering away our tax money, but we might be moved to thank him for bringing the more exotic examples to our attention--we would very likely not have heard of them otherwise. We are an endlessly curious species, and it cannot be denied that the end results of these fritterings, even when finally boiled down to the arrant horse sense that is often their essence, can make interesting, even useful reading-it is sometimes the only way of reaching those pragmatic minds that will not attend to horse sense unless it is codified in print and supported by the whole paraphernalia of statistical scholarship.
Take, for example, a recent effort called Americans and the Arts: A Survey of Public Opinion. Commissioned (paid for, that is) by Associated Councils of the Arts, which is both publicly and privately funded, and executed by National Research Associates (part of the Harris polling organization) with the assistance of the publicly funded National Endowment for the Arts, it is a fascinating if mind-boggling (92 tables!) 162-page compendium that asks (and answers) more questions on the subject than you might have thought possible. If I did not come away from my two hours or so with it any wiser than when I started, I do know what interested me most: Table 13, "Respect for Different Kinds of Occupations and Professions." It will probably be no more news to you than it was to me to read that doctors rate highest (82 percent of the respondents give them-or did at the time of the survey--a "great deal of respect") or that next in line, descending, are scientists, schoolteachers, policemen, master carpenters (!), and lawyers. It is satisfying to note that professional musicians rate higher than bankers or businessmen in general, and not at all surprising that the "art or theatre critic" is at the very bottom of the list (20 percent), after baseball players, sanitation workers, and gas-station attendants (neither politicians nor editors made the list).
Now that, I submit, is, if not surprising, at least interesting enough to inspire a little thought: just how has the critic managed to make it to the bottom of the heap? How has he contrived to secure a near-monopoly on the public repugnance? Well, first of all, he had a little help, for he has gotten nothing but the worst possible notices from critics of critics over the years. It was most likely the Romantics (novelist Disraeli, poets Coleridge and Shelley) who invented that old saw about critics being failed artists (horse sense tells me it's not true-let's conduct a survey). But there is more to it than that, I suspect, something basic about critics or, more likely, about us that makes this antagonism inevitable. Could it be, for example, that: (1) we have been (news)paper trained to expect "objectivity" and the subjective critic disappoints us? Is it that (2) those we disagree with are simply disagreeable people even (especially?) when they are right? (3) Do we resent those who threaten our prejudices and make us rethink our old-shoe biases? (4) Do we feel intimidated when someone undemocratically demonstrates that he knows more than we do-and worse, phrases it well? (5) We are all paupers in respect to available time; do we therefore resent being on the receiving end of someone else's intellectual charity, especially when he appears to have lots of enviable time (and money) to spend with the frivolous arts? (6) Are critics always "wrong," not only historically but now? Or, finally, (7) are we expressing some measure of nasty self-contempt when we revile the critic, are we not all of us "but critics ready made" (I both telescope and wrench out of context a line each from critics Yeats and Byron)? To answer my own question, I rather like No. 7: the critic as Everyman. I therefore plan to put Jan Sibelius' famous line permanently to rest one of these days by erecting a Statue to the Unknown Critic. The pedestal will be suitably inscribed "Critics All."
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