The Guardian on Loudmouthing

Lolinator screengrab

“Are critics just loud mouths”, asks Jonathan Jones at the Guardian, after telling artists last week to resist the urge to explain themselves. Leaving no stone unturned in the arena of fine art discourse, Jones describes current methods of criticism as follows,

What happens now in professional criticism is that you start where you like, write about the object under study in any order and at any depth you fancy, and perhaps don’t even give a single material fact about it. In other words, the idea of the critic today is not more modest but more arrogant – almost messianic – in its freewheeling claim to subjective authority. No wonder people don’t like us! We’re just loudmouths giving our opinions, at least unless we escape this arid play of free critical expression.

Writers who don’t cite examples backing their assertions are loudmouths, the rest of us are critics. Jones once again provides no support for his opinions.