Issue143 临阵19天，菜鸟三磨枪

mumujiUID: 2199417

TOPIC: ISSUE143 - "Artists should pay little attention to their critics.* Criticism tends to undermine and constrain the artist's creativity."
*those who evaluate works of art, such as novels, films, music, paintings, etc.
提纲：
1，        艺术评论难免带有流行特征和共性，抹杀艺术家个性。
2，        艺术评论百家争鸣，艺术家容易无所适从，创造力受到影响。

For the past hundreds of years, art criticism has emerged as an indispensable part of the entire art world, where all mass media including newspapers, magazines, broadcast stations and television channels have been used to publishing articles of art critics or interviews with them in fixed pages or programs. The reputation of critics that a media organization can invite is frequently regarded as the reputation of art evaluation capability that the organization has. However，despite this prosperity of art criticism, some artists and intellectuals commenced arguing in recent decades that since the art criticism system might undermine and constrains artist' creativity, artists should not take their critics for serious. Fundamentally, I deem that this point of view is well-grounded.

First of all, as a production of social culture, art criticism inevitably demonstrates popular critical views of certain society in certain era. Common popularity, however, is doomed to be an enemy of individual characteristics and innovations, which are the crucial energy of art creativity. A paragon case could be Chinese Cultural Revolution, when the media and the entire country were fled with extreme-left-wing art criticism. The forcible power generated by those unanimous criticisms left Chinese art history merely blank from 1966 to 1976. Admittedly, cases like Chinese Cultural Revolution are rare in contemporary society, while they do occur from time to time in the long river of human history. And consider a less egregious example, when the global movie reviewers are obsessed with those Oscar winning productions mainly from Hollywood, some traditional movie directors in other countries may also feel frustrated.

Secondly, precluding factors of common popularity, the widely different views with manifested individual styles from different critics may also make an artist not know how to behave. The critics are only responsible for freely expressing themselves, sometimes even with deliberately unjustified views. The artists, however, if take all the critics’ suggestions as reference, may feel difficult to cater to every one and even lose self-confidence and their precious personalities. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the Austria composer, arrived in Vienna in 1781, receiving numerous sorts of reviews from musical critics for his long, elaborately written works far beyond the usual limits of the tradition. Some critics were with compliment while others not. Mozart persist to his own style and ultimately became one of the most famous and creative composers in art history.

Finally, in this era of pragmatism leading to a world where the significance of money and benefit is often over-exaggerated, some profitable organizations have wide implications in critics’ area. As a journalist working for a local newspaper, I regard it a common phenomenon that entertainment or publishing companies hire critics as tools for their commercial promotion. Criticism with promotion aims merely provide misleading views to artists, whose creation will be impeded because even they writes most ordinary novels, the pieces may still be described as one of the most innovated ones over decades.

In the final analysis, art emerged in human history far before art criticism did; and art enjoys brilliant achievements all the time even without the existence of critics. If an artist pays too much attention to their critics, who may only go with stream or tend to be captious, or even be tools for profitable companies, may waste their precious time and constrain their creativity.