When he saw something he didn’t like, he had to say so. That was how he became a critic. Nothing else mattered to him. He loved his wife, sure, and he had a few cheap restaurants that satisfied him, but what really got him going was gulping down someone else’s artwork and then belching out an appraisal. The metaphor was his: the crudity of it didn’t bother him. Rather, he accepted it. “We are all, all the time, judging,” he told an auditorium of college students who had been assigned his Selected Takes and Fancies, a compendium of his best-known if not always best-loved pieces. “To deny it is cowardly. People say that criticism is not creative and yet it is creating a perspective—an observation deck if you will.” A woman in the front row raised her hand. “What?” he said, expertly balancing impatience and humor. “What if we are defined not by what we create but what we refuse to destroy?” she said. “Of course,” he said, “and yet,” and he went on from there, but the woman’s words were banging in his soul like a clapper against a bell that would never again be the same.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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