Too Close to Criticize

A.O. Scott’s novel Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth contains some valuable insights on what the function of criticism is in today’s modern world, however while reading the novel one begins to doubt if Scott can truly criticise criticism.

Scott is too close to the work of cultural criticism to fairly examine it for all that it is. He has done some great criticism work for the New York Times however his novel about criticism comes across pretentious which makes it difficult for readers, myself included, to take his novel seriously.

Better Living Through Criticism does manage to transcend the average person’s typical understanding of the relationship between art and criticism. I rarely bother to examine art in my life, I always felt like it was too distant and unrelatable. However, Scott explains it in a different way that makes art understandable.

Scott says that “Every made thing answers to — which is to say that it struggles against, and sometimes transcends — aesthetic norms and cultural purposes that are implicit within it even as they may be inscrutable to late-arriving or alien eyes. A work of art is itself a piece of criticism.”

Criticism is a way that we attempt to understand and relate to the world around us. Art and criticism in this way have the same function. They both comment on their surroundings.

Scott attempts to criticize the average person’s understanding of the critic but because he is so close to this work he comes across too pretentious and it can feel like he is lecturing his readers. However, he does make some valuable points about art and criticism.