How to Be a Cultural Critic

—Alternate Between Being the Last Person Who Understands the Rules and Being the Destroyer of Calcified Orthodoxies. Art objects are supposed to be as various as natural objects, or more so, or so I think. Some art objects are meant to be a little awkward and to seem a little mismatched with themselves, like the duck-billed platypus. A silly example: during the director’s commentary for the original Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven comments that Ronnee Blakely, who plays the heroine’s mother, is “in her own movie.” This sounds like a criticism but it’s exactly why her performance works: she seems a little hypnotized, like she’s in Herzog’s Heart of Glass, dreaming her way through this movie about how dreams are dangerous.

However, if you write as though you believe in the necessary messiness of art, you won’t be strident enough, and you sure as hell will never lead a school or movement.