I just read a great little article. In it, Cristy Lange, assistant editor of Frieze Magazine, touches on her initial feelings about blogging and her role as a critic. There’s a bit of a focus on “snark” (a word I’ve never gotten much use out of) and negative commentary.
Here’s an excerpt:
There’s a difference however between a thoughtful argument and wilfully anti- intellectual invective. So as art critics, especially in the forum of the blog, we are presented with a dilemma: presumably our love of art is what makes us critics, but we also want to point out what we see as its flaws and faults without dissecting what we love too cruelly. It’s as if art were a friend we cared deeply about, but who’d made a horrible mistake, and we at least try to temper the way we tell them, as a sign of respect.
Check out the rest here. It’s a quick read.
She also mentions a review of the book ‘Snark’ by David Denby. You can find that article here: Snark Attack by Adam Sternbergh at New York Magazine. Here’s a snippet of the review.
The first difficulty of writing about snark is that you have to define snark. This proves consistently tricky, no less so for Denby. His definition is a tap dance on hot coals, as he mostly tells us what snark is not. It’s not irreverence or spoof or satire. It’s not Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert or Keith Olbermann. It’s not irony, at least not irony as exemplified by “the sharpened blade of Swift.” “Snark is like a schoolyard taunt without the schoolyard,” he writes. “Snark is hazing on the page.” Basically, Denby argues that snark is humor as a vehicle for cruelty. Of course, a book titled Cruelty: It’s Ruining Our Conversation hardly jazzes the reader, as it might have been published at any time in the last 400 years. Snark, as a term, feels current, modern: a viral killer for our cacophonous age.
…
Charges against snark are valid, especially when backed up with cherry-picked evidence. But you could make the same accusations against all strains of humor, throughout history, when misapplied. In targeting snark, Denby sights a trendy straw man, but he misses the important point that snark is not an idea; it’s a conduit—an outrage delivery device. He claims that snark is the favored voice of a generation “who know, by the time they are 12, the mechanics of hype, spin, and big money,” and about this, he’s exactly right. But instead of moving on to denounce the toxic pervasiveness of hype, spin, and big money, he blames the refuseniks who rail against it, claiming that everything seems “lifeless and unreal to them.”
You know how you can go years without hearing a word like “refusenik” and then suddenly you hear it many times in quick succession? Is there a word for when that happens?