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WD_126/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 2 | | Medium: | oil pastel and wax crayon on paper | | Size (inches): | 25 x 19.9 | | Size (mm): | 640 x 510 | | Catalog #: | WD_0126 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
Cultural critic:
A cultural critic is a critic of a given culture, usually as a whole and typically on a radical basis. Cultural criticism is normally understood to deal with some fundamental perceived problems, rather than minor improvements: it is asserted that things are heading in the wrong direction, or that values are wrongly placed.
A cultural critic therefore stands, in relation to intellectual or artistic life, or certain social arrangements or educational practices, roughly where a prophet would in respect of religious life. Cultural critics came to the fore in the nineteenth century. Matthew Arnold is a leading example of a cultural critic of the Victorian age; in him there is also a concern for religion. John Ruskin was another — because of an equation made between ugliness of material surroundings and an impoverished life, aesthetes and others might be considered implicitly to be engaging in cultural criticism, but the actual articulation is what makes a critic.
In the twentieth century Irving Babbitt on the right, and Walter Benjamin on the left, might be considered major cultural critics. The field of play has changed considerably, in that the humanities have broadened to include cultural studies of all kinds. A cultural critic might still be distinguished by being firmly judgemental, rather than concentrating on the role of objective scholar.
-Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia/ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_criticism
~ important critical essays by six key critics:
* Matthew Arnold, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time"
* Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist"
* George Bernard Shaw, "Little Eyolf," "Henry James and Oscar Wilde," and "The Classes and Musical Culture"
* Mark Twain, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"
* Henry Adams, "The Virgin and the Dynamo"
* H. L. Mencken, "The National Letters"
-ci.columbia.edu/ci/eseminars/0221_detail.html
The Function of Criticism:
*Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), the Victorian poet and critic, was 'the first modern critic', and could be called 'the critic's critic' ~
It is in his* "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864)" that Arnold says that criticism should be a 'dissemination of ideas, a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world'. He says that when evaluating a work the aim is 'to see the object as in itself it really is'. Psychological, historical and sociological background are irrelevant, and to dwell on such aspects is mere dilettantism. This stance was very influential with later critics.
Arnold also believed that in his quest for the best a critic should not confine himself to the literature of his own country, but should draw substantially on foreign literature and ideas, because the propagation of ideas should be an objective endeavour.
-www.english-literature.org/essays/arnold.html
The 1860s witnessed the publication of Arnold's most important cultural criticism, for which he is now best known. Established at Oxford (his chair lasted until 1867) and still very involved in public education policy (he spent 7 months in Europe in 1865 as a member of the Schools Inquiry Commission), he was able to draw together his literary, social and political experience into a unique cultural vision. Essays in Criticism was published in 1865 and included the essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”. Here Arnold pressed for the “disinterested” nature of criticism; criticism should “try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics and everything of the kind”. Arnold was campaigning for a socially accountable criticism, which was not tied to partisan political interests but committed to national regeneration: “make the best ideas prevail; presently these new ideas reach society, the touch of truth is the touch of life”. Paradoxically, however, he is frequently criticised for supposedly exhibiting an excluding aestheticism, particularly in a notorious passage in this essay:
“A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.” ... Wragg! If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of “the best in the whole world”, has anyone reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names - Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! In Ionia and Attica they were luckier in this respect than the “best race in the world” by the Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor thing!
Although this writing seems harsh, Arnold was marshalling his characteristic satiric wit to target not the workhouse poor but what he considered middle-class, factory-owning complacency and cultural narrowness. His criticism of this social group continued in his next important work, Culture and Anarchy, published in 1869. Here he described the middle class as “philistines”, divided culture into Hellenic and Hebraic traditions and famously called for more Hellenic “sweetness and light” to prevail in mid-Victorian England. Arnold is deliberately imprecise about his terms and definitions of “culture” – culture, he simply says, is the “study of perfection” – but the book continues to provoke thought, from T. S. Eliot's essay on “Arnold and Pater” to Terry Eagleton's The Idea of Culture.
-www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5103
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