Clever of me to become a critic. We critics scrutinize and show off to a higher end. For a greater good. Our manners, our tastes, our declarations are welcomed. Superior for life. Except when we're not. Except when we're dismissed or denounced as envious or petty, as derivatives and dependents by nature. Second class for life.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the dual nature of being a critic, both celebrated and marginalized.
Margo Jefferson's quote captures the complex identity of critics, who operate in a space of privilege and admiration yet are also vulnerable to dismissal and critique themselves. It highlights the irony of being in a position of influence where one's insights and judgments are valued, but simultaneously acknowledges the potential for critics to be viewed as lesser beings when their views are met with contempt or accusations of jealousy. This duality presents a commentary on the paradox of creativity and validation in the world of arts and critiques.
In practice
This quote can be used in a lecture on the role of critics in the art world.
We talk about how we think, believe, suspect Michael Jackson treats children. We don't talk about how WE treat child stars. Child stars are abused by the culture. And what's more treacherous than when the rewards of child stardom issue from the abuse?_x000D_ Child stars are performers above all else. Whenever their triumps, they are going to make sure we see everyone of their scars. That's the final price of admission.
I think it's too easy to recount your unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.
So much of what blacks and women contend with is centered in how we view, and how the world views, our bodies. Gestures, voices, affect.
Depression is so treacherous - it can be so alluring as well as punishing. After all, it's yours and yours alone - no one else can interfere with it.
I found literary idols in Adrienne Kennedy, Nella Larsen, and Ntozake Shange, writers who'd dared to locate a sanctioned, forbidden space between white vulnerability and black invincibility.
Black Power was really a major challenge to the social privileges and structures of the kind of privilege that I had grown up with. That whole belief... that you will only be able to advance if you are perfectly behaved, if you present yourself as what white people would consider an ideal of whiteness... all of that just began to burst open.
There is something that always will be true about painting and sculpture - that in order to really get it, you have to show up. That is something that is both sad and kind of beautiful about it. It remains analog. It remains special and irreducible.
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions.
This is an evening of wonders, indeed!
First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page till you can't see or hear or smell or taste, you have something.
To appropriate an invention, be it artistic or technical, you have to have at least a part of your spirit embracing it so radically that you somehow change.
The function of a book or a poem or a story is to delight, to enchant, to beguile.
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