I think that taste hierarchies do exist and
they're almost always the kind of the representation
of other sorts of hierarchies and assumptions.
And that's why I really think that part of
the job of criticism is to be against them,
is to refuse, at least the categorization
of things as high and low.
I think it was Duke Ellington who's often
quoted as saying, "There are two kinds of
music; good music and bad in music."
And everything else is kind of sociology and
politics and prejudice and snobbery kind of
sneaking in.
And we're none of us immune to those things.
We live in the world we associate with, who
we associate with; we identify ourselves as
we identify ourselves.
But I think that the job of critics and of
criticism is to kind of to push against that.
And it has just even historically been the
job of critics very often or of criticism
to insist on the value and the dignity and
the importance of works of art and types of
works of art that had been neglected or ignored
or disrespected.
And it's in fact the rise of criticism, within
any of those arts, that gets it to be taken
seriously.
Movies are a great example.
I mean movies, you know, nobody took movies
seriously except like maybe in Germany in
the '20s as an art form.
And it was critics first in France and then
in the United States after the Second World
War who said well look no, this junk that's
been coming out of Hollywood actually this
is a significant modern art form.
These people whose names you just see in the
credits, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, John
Ford, Orson Welles, these are artists.
This is art.
And it was critics who were able to do that
and I think jazz critics and rock critics
and people who have written about hip-hop
and television have done that work too of
recategorizing and redefining and challenging
the hierarchical assumptions about what is
high art and what is low.
The thing that's great about movies is that
they are high and low and that they run, you
know, there's a very wide spectrum from the
most crassly commercial genre of products
and the most refined and difficult works of
art.
And the thing that you discover when you write
about criticism is that sometimes the ones
that are very low are actually, you know,
fantastic works of art and the ones that are
very high can be just as terrible and a hacky
and stupid as anything else.
