ABSTRACT
Everyone’s a critic. Everyone has responses to and opinions about particular works of art. It is part of what makes us human to notice differences, to categorize those differences in order to function in the world, and to evaluate new experience in the context of past experience. For most people, these evaluations are personal and immediate — one thing is beautiful, another is boring, a third is ugly, a fourth is thrilling — and they let it go with that fundamental classification. A few of us, though, wonder why a work connects with our imaginations to make us feel the way we do, how it uses the human and technical resources at its disposal to produce its memorable passages or moments, or whether our responses are similar to those of other audiences in different locales or eras. We become interested in the work in its particulars, in the conditions that would have led its authors and fabricators to produce it, in its changes over time. If it is a work from the performing arts, we become fascinated with the way the theatrical effects and their significance may shift according to different performers and directors. Our m otivation is still personal response; however, the more engrossed we become in the means whereby that response is provoked and in the different ways that others have responded, the less absorbed we are in ourselves and the more we focus instead on the provocateurs and their manipulation of their materials. We step away from our own lives, with its joys and turmoil, to give ourselves over to something other than ourselves. This is the secret garden of the arts: the bliss of
forgetting oneself in order to learn about something else. If our interest primarily concerns the past, we become historians; if it is the present in relation to the past, we become critics.
