An eccentric, thin-skinned, ill-tempered screed.
Henderson’s anti-intellectual manifesto unmasks the malign influence of art critics and their ideologies.
Ever since cavemen first carved reindeer antlers, according to this muddled j’accuse, art has been a happily inchoate project of self-expression by painters and sculptors with no other agenda than “making their own personal magic.” Then came the critics—egotistical writers who usually cannot make art but nonetheless want to control it by framing it in intellectual terms that saddle real artists with invidious value-judgments of what is good and bad art. Henderson surveys a rogue’s gallery of these over-reaching critics, from the Renaissance writers Alberti and Vassari to Modernist guru Clement Greenberg and contemporary tastemakers Arthur C. Danto and Peter Schjeldahl. He denounces specific critical approaches—aesthetic canons, distinctions between fine and decorative art, the championing of abstraction over representation—in detail, but his iconoclasm is all-encompassing: “all ideas about art have to be jettisoned” as pernicious infringements on artistic autonomy. Henderson knows a lot about art, especially Euro-American art of the last two centuries, and his interpretations of its history, and of individual artists, are often engaging and insightful. Unfortunately, he knows little about good criticism, which he equates with the notion that you shouldn’t say anything if you can’t say anything nice. His pensées on the critical enterprise are snide (“Since the French generally had no love of art, [critics] had no difficulty brainwashing them”), or bizarre (“Music critics…are excellent because they stick to the music and have no need for ideas”) or crudely philistine in their own right. (Blind to the art of writing, he finds the metaphor “painting is silent poetry” to be “factually wrong.”) Henderson’s indictment of critics who disparage what they don’t understand sometimes hits home, but he could easily be brought up on the same charge.
An eccentric, thin-skinned, ill-tempered screed.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2011
ISBN: 978-1432768799
Page Count: 202
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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