Criticism, in the moneyed wake of marketing, seems less autonomous than ever, and more worthy of suspicion. Our biases are not what is most interesting about us. Without a personal bias criticism acts merely as theory, and is not very useful to the average reader. What is more interesting is the mediation between our biases and beauty. If art realizes the utility of beauty, criticism returns it to the uncertainty of aesthetics.
Good art invites a grasping, a jealousy, a desire, a perversion, from the reader.
The meagerness of this image depressed me. My own room is littered with the objects of my criticism. Beneath my bed, Saramago's The Stone Raft and Simone de Beauvoir's letters to Nelson Algren. On my nightstand, Patrick Chamoiseau's Childhood and Quentin Bell's biography of Virginia Woolf. There are books blocking the mirror behind my dresser and some that I have stumbled over at the corner of the staircase.