The 2010s gave us two major developments in criticism. The first is the “let people enjoy things” meme pictured above. The second is the tendency, among critics, to discuss not their own assessments of a work but rather the assessment of an imagined audience who likes it better. Taken together, these two developments represent a shift in the relation between the individual critic and popular art. If the 1990s embraced the idea that what is popular is bad by definition, and the 2000s softened this position to accept that popular works could also be good, the last decade settled on popularity as the only measure of merit we have left.
I can think of a lot of possible reasons for that—for example, that the shift to digital distribution has made it easier to quantify consumption and harder to defend the need for cultural gatekeepers—but they do not interest me much. I am more interested in how criticism operates in the last days of 2019, here at the intersection of populism and the imagined other.
Last week in the New Republic, Rumaan Alam declared the poet Rupi Kaur the “writer of the decade.” He does not mean that he likes her poetry himself. The very next sentence after his writer-of-the-decade claim is “Kaur’s writing is not itself to my taste.” He goes on to argue that Kaur deserves the title because the form of her work reflects the influence of phones and social media, and because her books have sold millions of copies. “Readers who know about poetry might think Kaur’s work is dumb,” he writes, but “those for whom Kaur is their first exposure to the medium think it profound.”
That’s a strange way to talk about a poet’s work. Criticism as we have known it for the last few centuries has rested on the authority of the critic, but Alam’s approach explicitly subordinates his own judgment to the taste of the 3.5 million or so people who bought Kaur’s books. “It is easy for some readers (snobs like me) to dismiss Kaur’s self-representation as posture, or performance,” he writes. “I think this reflects a mostly generational divide.” This approach to criticism expresses a lot of anxiety—anxiety about the critic’s position relative to the public he imagines, and anxiety about whether his own aesthetic judgment is, for lack of a better word, correct.
How could it be? De gustibus non est disputandum, the Latin saying goes: in matters of taste, there can be no argument. Whether a poem is good or not is subjective, and in our lifetimes—a period we have given the conceited name “postmodern”— the word “correct” only applies to objective claims. You can be right or wrong about who made Uncut Gems, but you cannot be right or wrong about whether it is good. Hence our tendency, in critical writing, to treat popularity as the only available fact. Subjective claims do not have the same authority.
I submit that this widely-held belief is wrong. Subjective claims can have authority, and that authority derives from their methods. For example, Pitchfork editor Jeremy Gordon’s claims about music have more authority than those of my 12 year-old son. Of course Jeremy can be wrong—as he is, in my opinion, when he waxes rhapsodic about Steely Dan—just as my son can be wrong when he says that Panic! at the Disco is the only music worth listening to. But Jeremy is more likely to convince me than the boy is, because I have more confidence in his methods. More of his subjective claims about music are right, because they proceed from a better approach. And certain approaches are objectively better than others, as I will demonstrate by comparing a poem by Kaur to a poem by William Carlos Williams.
Here is an untitled poem by Kaur:
sometimes
the apology
never comes
when it is wanted
and when it comes
it is neither wanted
nor needed
you are too late
And here is a well-known poem of similar length and form, “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Both of these poems make use of enjambment (line breaks) and the absence of capitalization and punctuation. Both are aphoristic, in that they make claims about life in general. Both are eight lines. One difference, however, is that Williams’s poem is interesting and good, while Kaur’s is fatuous and bad.
Kaur is right about apologies: sometimes people don’t apologize when you want them to, and by the time they do, you don’t want to hear from them. This meaning is totally congruent with the literal statement of the poem. There is no implied meaning behind what has been said that unfolds on further consideration.
If you remove the line breaks and apply standard usage, the poem reads “Sometimes the apology never comes when it is wanted, and when it comes, it is neither wanted nor needed. You are too late.” In this form, it sounds less like a profound statement and more like a self-important text message. The “you are too late” seems redundant, since only a stubborn reader could miss the implication that the speaker does not welcome whatever particular apology has prompted this musing on apologies in general. Also the word “never” seems wrong, since the apology that never comes arrives in the next clause.
Most importantly, though, this poem does not encourage the reader to think. If “you are too late” serves any purpose, it is insurance against the reader who doesn’t get it. Kaur’s poem is the opposite of thought-provoking. It contains all possible thought about itself in the words on the page, offering us no opportunity for reflection beyond “damn, it do be like that sometimes.” Compare to “The Red Wheelbarrow,” a poem whose simplicity demands that we think about it more.
The speaker in Williams’s poem is also making a claim about life in general, but it’s harder to say what it is. “So much depends on a red wheelbarrow, glazed with water, beside the white chickens” asks a question: What depends? The enjambment here does more than make this statement look poetic; the breaks within the compound words “wheel/barrow” and “rain/water” emphasize the grounding of the abstract in the concrete: we are talking about rain in the moment of this particular rainwater, the wheel in this particular wheelbarrow. These jarring enjambments draw attention to the relationship between the aphoristic and the experiential, and the way that broad truths about life arrive only in specific events and things. By showing us these images, Williams makes us feel the experience of the speaker musing about life in a discrete moment—unlike Kaur, who simply tells us the conclusion of the musings.
Also unlike Kaur’s poem, Williams’s poem can read more than one way. The phrase “beside / the white chickens” can mean the wheelbarrow next to the chickens or mean that so much more than the chickens depends on the wheelbarrow. This sense of so much more depending on the simple images in the poem implies that the speaker is in a precarious position. He has what he needs, but he is also on the edge of something: an insight, a change, or a failure to continue finding meaning in this scene.
That quality—the sense of profound meaning in ordinary images but also the fear of losing that sense—allows these eight lines to suggest a whole world. Kaur does so much less with the same amount of material. That’s why “The Red Wheelbarrow” is better than her poem, even if it did not sell 3.5 million copies this decade. And that’s why critics who pretend there’s no saying which poem is better have lost faith in their methods or, worse, aren’t being honest about why art matters.
When Halam says that Kaur’s work is not to his taste and goes on to say she is the writer of the decade, he abdicates the individual’s relationship to the world that is the essence of art, the thing that makes our experience as readers different from that of a Google crawler. Or, if you want to be a jerk about it, the thing that makes critics different from people who treat poems as stocking stuffers. The critic who makes her own judgment less important than what we know about the popularity of the work does the reader a disservice. This tendency to approach art from the perspective of the soulless aggregate of everyone who bought it leads people who defend Kaur’s poems to do so, invariably, in terms of an imagined reader dumber than themselves. For example:
Note the assumption that saying Kaur’s work sucks will somehow prevent other people from enjoying it, which I don’t think is true. More importantly, both these tweeters aren’t saying they like Kaur’s poems; they’re saying other people do, and that to disagree with those people’s taste is classist. There are several problems with this argument, not least among them the presumption that bad poetry is popular with the working class. My guess is that the people who paid $10 for Kaur’s books are closer to the bourgeoisie, but whatever: classism is bad, so saying that some popular thing is bad is harmful to the people who like it—people who are, economically or educationally or just aesthetically, beneath the person who has stepped up to defend them.
This approach to criticism is not good. If popularity is more important than aesthetic judgment, or if the tastes of laymen are just as good as the taste of people who have devoted time and resources to appreciating art, why do we need critics at all? The short answer is we don’t. That can be a reasonable position, but it’s one I don’t agree with, and it’s disingenuous to take it up as you criticize. You can’t coherently argue that other people’s opinions on art are harmful and that art you don’t like is good because all opinions about art are equally valid. If you don’t think any opinion about art is right or wrong, maybe don’t take to the internet to disagree with people.
There is plenty of art that I think is great and other people regard as low, generic, or popular, in the sense that “popular” can be lazily deployed as an antonym for “artistic.” I love Conan the Barbarian and The Last Good Kiss, and I will argue their superiority to Requiem For a Dream and Atonement until you agree with me or run. What I will not do is say that I don’t like them myself, being more sophisticated than those who do, and then try to make you feel bad for holding yourself above such people. That’s a false move, and I hope the next decade will reject it.
