Issue144 重写版 请狂拍！

showkidUID: 2427308

I144："It is the artist, not the critic,* who gives society something of lasting value."
*a person who evaluates works of art, such as novels, films, music, paintings, etc.

Is it really the artist, rather than critic, who gives society something of lasting value? In response to this issue, I think both artist and critic are contributing to create lasting valuable things in our society.

Admittedly, the artist becomes very popular and important in our society for their considerable works which are full of lasting social value. Looking back on history, it is easy to figure out significant artworks and find how much spiritual enlightenment we have got from them. Van Gogh’s most famous painting, Sunflowers exhibits the eternal love to life and promotes the thoughts about complex relationship between life and death; One of the masterpieces of Jules Verne, a celebrated France novelist being called “the father of science fiction”, named From the Earth To the Moon shows the original desire to travel space, air, underwater and anywhere human wants to go and helps us to image what the picture of the future of world will be; W.A Mozart’s famous symphony, symphony NO.41 “Jupiter” delivers a spirit and eternal theme about confronting frustration and fight the fate for one’s dream and hope, thus convulsing the whole world with its spirit and humanity.

However, we cannot overlook the critic’s efforts about providing something valuable. When a new style of art comes out, the creators always don’t know how they finished it and what its value is, for themselves being already a part of the whole process of creating the artwork. The personal explanations of their own artwork involve too many subjective factors to be a basis of judgment, which can be regarded as a reference at best. While the readers or audiences, who are outside of the area of expertise, can only express the vague but maybe intense feelings according to commonsense, and can’t give a convincing judgment of the value of the new style. Then, the attention usually focused on the critics, who always have an acute sense of finding inside beauty concealed behind the artworks, and always hold their own criterion, which is formed from their profound observations of their life and from a long term accumulation of knowledge on a certain area. The critic’s evaluation and explanation of the artworks’ value would be more comprehensive, more professional and more convincing. As a result, their words play a key role in determining whether the new style of art can exist or not, and how much the value of the art is. In short, in some circumstances, it is the critics that make the readers or audiences know what is valuable and decide what should be reserved, that is something of lasting value.

In fact, these contributions of the artists and the critics are close connected. Not only do critics evaluate the artists’ artworks after the completion of these works, but also they take part in the process of creating the artworks and help the artists think about what they should do. Starting from a scientific system of knowledge, the critics can tell the artists how the extent of a certain kind of art has been developed, and what the directions and strategies of its development are, and criticize them. With these advises from critics, the artists will reevaluate their style and understanding of art, then make some changes and improvements, eventually provide more and more valuable artworks to our society.

In sum, the artist does have a role to play in giving something of lasting value to our society. And yet this truth must exist with another that the critic has its special and indispensable function on offering lasting valuable things.