ALL FILLING AND NO PIE

Among other things, criticism serves to analyze someone’s creativeness, simultaneously categorizing it in a certain manner, entering it in either of the existing registers or starting a new one if a hitherto unknown phenomenon is encountered. Such classification makes the task of future art historians easier, allowing them to fit any such phenomena into a simple pattern of understanding (which, more often than not has very little to do with reality). It was perhaps thanks to critics that notions like genre, style, trend, technique, etc., appeared. However, now that many more people are involved in the arts or pretend to be experts on them than ever before in recorded history, these notions are interpreted somewhat differently.

Primarily, this applies to mass-cult where genre is regarded as a kind of brand name using which the “consumer” can easily distinguish among “products.” Even without critics a “producer” states his credo, saying he work in such-and-such genre. Romance, science fiction or fantasy, detective story or gothic novel - every such book has its place on a certain bookstore shelf, just like cassettes with thrillers, erotic or comedy movies at a video cassette rental club. In a music store one finds stands with classical, jazz, rock, and pop audio cassettes and CDs. Consumer society demands convenience, which is understandable since one does not have to spend time digging through catalogs. True, critics also try to keep pace with the times, keeping us supplied with new brand names, which often looks funny if not ridiculous. For example, only a handful of experts can pick their way among the countless trends and styles of hard rock which, to an academic music lover, sounds like one endless deafening note. A person first hearing an MTV rock video will not understand why the host announces different performers, with the tune sounding exactly the same.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with his Sherlock Holmes never suspected that a hundred years later master sleuths would come off the conveyer line by the thousand, and that readers would consume countless products of this “serious literature” and ask for more, even though it would be hard to tell one such book from the next. Of course, a detective story can also turn out a literary masterpiece and we know a lot of examples, but a masterpiece never fits the Procrustean bed known as genre. In reality, there are only two types of creative work: good and junk. Using “genres” like the proverbial fig leaf one can produce exactly such junk and expect acclaim. Someone like our local pop star Harik Krychevsky (a very cultured man, by the way) can perform port-side tavern or prison “ballads,” which is precisely junk, saying people are interested in “urban romance.” Or a film director, a man of sound mind and good judgment, can come up with a film about cannibalistic zombies, just because he is now working in the “horror genre.” Or take Stephen King who, after several good novels, started serial output of what can only be described as pulp fiction, because he is firmly established in the mystery genre.

Remarkably, all these artificial style-genre boundaries result in people’s self-isolation from true cultural values; the latter seem to them too out of the ordinary. They are scary. People raised on soap operas will not buy a story without passion, betrayal, found or abandoned children, amnesia, stolen heritage, etc. A trash lover will never listen to rap, just as he will never change his sweatshirt with a skull for a safari jacket. No one reads books in which melodrama, mystery, and history are combined in a single harmonious whole. Instead, each will snatch from the big pie of general human culture only choice bits - berries, nuts, poppy seed filling...

So what all this amounts to? What criteria is one to apply trying to digest and assess all this? Maybe something from the Enlightenment, KulturtrКggerism, Messianism, sociology or futurology, or even something Demiurge-Rosenkreutz? Suppose I just use the two good old criteria: good and junk. Would not this mean that I, too, am entrapped by restrictions, if not of genre then perhaps of evaluation?