Contribution to the Critique

Criticism.

You hear it from your mother. You hear it from your mate. But why criticize anything? And, in particular, why criticize art?

A panel of seven professors yesterday morning told a packed Sanders Theater audience their reasons for criticizing art in a symposium titled "Judging Art Now: Artistic Values in Contemporary Society."

Professor of English and American Literature and Language Helen H. Vendler reminisced about when she was a child and her family did not have a television or records. But she would go to the ballet and the opera, about which she would form judgements.

"There was a right way to do things, even though I couldn't tell what the right way was," Vendler said. "But I would know when something was wrong."

It is the job of the critic to describe the art work first and then judge it, she said.

Professor of Fine Arts Neil Levine, an expert in the history of modern architecture, also recalled his youth. "I always thought you had to make an effort to open a book or go to a ballet," he said. "Looking at buildings takes almost no effort."

Poet Seamus Heaney, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, recited a poem and discussed different means of judging literature, including politically and aesthetically.

"Some of my fiercest critics are writers who judge my work and say, 'Oh, there's nothing there,'" Heaney said.

The other participants in the panel were Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value Stanley Cavell, Professor of Fine Arts Timothy J. Clark, Senior Lecturer on English Monroe Engel, and Rosen Professor of Music Leon Kirchner.