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20 April 2005: Today, a grumble about another halfwitted writer's complaint about critics. In the latest issue of The New Criterion a composer (Wolfgang Rihm) wanting to hide his art from scrutiny to protect his mystique, and/or avoid having to justify his work, quotes John Updike--or, more probably, a character of Updike's, saying, "Interviewers and critics are the enemies of mystery, the indeterminancy that gives art life." Crap. Bad criticism diminishes its subject by forcing it into constricted explanations. It does not oppose mystery; any mystery will remain, if only for those intelligent enough to see beyond whatever scheme the critic is pushing.
Not that there is, ultimately, any genuine mystery. What there is, is increased complexity, which is not mysterious because it has paths leading out of it that a genuine mystery would not. It is the complexity of any artwork, and the paths leading out of it, that the good critic reveals, in great part by dispersing the mystifications clogging the work, or--more likely--the babble of anti-critical appreciators of the work about it.
The universe exists. That is the sole true mystery. All other alleged mysteries are inventions of airheads to absolve themselves of cerebration.
Indeterminancy does not give art life, complexity--glitteringly free of encumbering confusednesses that fools call "mystery"--and freshness of expression and outlook, and involvement with the Final Archetypal Essences of human existence, are what give art life.
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