Word: criticism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...official censorship was greeted with rejoicing by the London theater; last week there was a mock-serious funeral service for the royal censor in Chelsea. Meanwhile, Hair's actors executed what one critic called "a triumphal dance over the grave of the Lord Chamberlain." High time. With offices in the Palace of St. James's, the Lord Chamberlain is the senior officer of the royal household. Yet he and his four readers have also played the role of arbiters of public taste, passing judgment on some 800 new scripts each year. Their esthetic qualifications have been uncertain...
...author, an able freelance book reviewer, has obviously read a lot of fiction. That alone, however, is no guarantee of success when the critic turns novelist. Greenfeld's hero is a Jewish boy from Brooklyn becalmed on the long voyage to a Ph.D. He marries a Japanese painter, and they go to live near her parents in Japan. Like so many young men in novels these days, he pokes and prods his identity obsessively; after a few months in Japan he worries that he still feels like a New Yorker...
...high-brow way of manifesting fear is for the critic to become moralistic, as if such art were not a personal affront, no, but an affront to the Western Tradition, frivolous, you see, considering the Nature of the Times We Live...
Perhaps the critic is honestly angry at the artist, or perhaps this is just another way of showing the old anxiety and confusion, an uncertainty as to what he's expected to say in the face of this...this genius?...this prank...this outrage! For every time the critic becomes serious the artist giggles, and when our critic laughs along with him the artist suddenly turns spooky, funeral. The critic feels like a bug and strikes back with "if we should dignify it by the name of art at all in poor taste unwashed ill mannered self-indulgent...adolescent...childish...
...force almost continually since 1926. The secret police, P.I.D.E., have banned books by such seemingly noncontroversial writers as Will Durant and Paul Claudel. Political opponents of the regime are regularly put into preventive detention for up to six months. The P.I.D.E. jailed Mario Scares, a lawyer and leading critic of the Salazar regime, a total of 13 times before exiling him without trial last March to the tiny island of Sao Tome in the Gulf of Guinea. The number of legal emigrants and clandestinos voting against Salazar with their feet rose dramatically from 34,000 in 1961 to some...