What is The Great Stage?

"A review of the reviewers might at long last yield an idea or two about art and writing. For wouldn't such a meta-review make clear one or two authentic feelings of distress about Art's pitiful condition in this an-aesthetic era of artistic over-production? The poetry, novels, essays and anthologies themselves have nothing to say. They refer, if they refer to anything, to a lost time in which these forms of literary art had form, when Time itself had time and made a present of it to Art, which can manifestly not arise in a world that no longer believes in Eternity, when no one with the ability to write could have faith that the future would grant him readers that are any different from those he sees around him: those infernal writer-readers who are all just about to drop the pose of readerly attention and begin to shout into the latest digitised megaphone of egotism. You seek in vain amid the literature of today for world-views. You look up from your book and find tvs and billboards and inadvertently come across the closest you can get to Weltanschauungen nowadays: Anschauungen, which is to say – rapaciously multiplying percepts."

- or so I thought three years ago.

The Great Stage is turning out to be something more than than the open-ended exercise in criticism it was originally intended as. Still, for the sake of partial self-definition, here's a draft of the answer to the question "What is the Great Stage?" that dates from the early days.

"The Great Stage is a response to a three-fold critical malaise:

1. Print media in Australia is visibly faltering. At present the only dynamic aspect of Australian newspaper culture would seem to be the interaction between the business models of the supermarket managers in command and the tabloid-cum-glossy fare they judge can be sold to the largest number of readers. Under such conditions, the public function of revieweing and criticism is becoming harder to sustain as the culture pages of major broadsheets fill up with monster-sized pictures, interview-pieces, endless food and wine tips and the diary-like musings of celebrity columnists. The 800-word book review – already of limited use for the purposes of the critic – is itself coming to seem a luxury; for a long time it has formed part of the penumbra of a life-style journalism with most of the qualities of advertising (even if it appears above the line separating paid publicity from what claims the reader's attention on other grounds).

2. Universities have ceased to offer critics meaningful points of intellectual contact, much less places of refuge. Our educational institutions were once one of two indispensable reference points of critical activity: in the person of the critic, the relatively heady world of academic scholarship remained connected with the everyday reality of the theatre, the studio and the writer’s corner. By contrast, today universities’ very intellectual function is under threat as "serious scholarship is replaced by an entrepreneurial striving for research money and media attention." (Harry Redner) In short, criticism and academic life until recently belonged together as part of the same cultural manifold – both offered something to the artist, because both sought to give shape to free intellectual perspectives. In an era like our own when university education is subject to the equally sterile logic of bureaucratic control and free market economics, that ceases to be the case in a radical sense. Free critical activity and routinised academic life have come to mutually exclude each other; the social sciences and humanities in particular have increasingly become the haunt of radical academic conformists who dish up their sensibilities for the book market, shuffle their specialities between journals and conferences, deliver up their mechanical models of mind and society to a passively assenting public or join the ranks of administrative power-brokers and let fly with that disgraceful mixture of bombast and blandness with which our universities are expected to procedurally justify themselves.

3. The net poses a range of very different problems, though as the social domain freest of political constraints it remains the obvious place to launch a venture in general criticism. Yet the dilemmas of specialisation which present an obstacle to general criticism in the world-beyond-the-net are often reproduced online at a higher level of complexity; the generalism required to interpret art in relation to the social and cultural problematics of our day is even less likely to emerge in a virtual world where every fragment of an idea generates its own authoritative-looking pronouncements within its own teeming online enclosure. And that’s not even getting started on the raft of further problems the web generates for the critic. Foremost among them is the problem of.taking critical responsibility: in a medium where too many writers let fly with their opinions from behind a veil of anonymity, criticism either fails to develop or degenerates into self-important snark; where speech acts take on the quality of sound-bites for quasi-technical reasons – where the sheer volume of speech determines the speaker’s visibility – two essential aspects of criticism, analysis and interpretation, fall away and a third, evaluation, is radically abbreviated. . . So if yours truly is going to get a spot of criticism going, he might have to take evasive action against all sorts of things – against the purveyors of cheap ironies – against the army of sub-commentators for whom being online means first and foremost giving up on self-control - against all who spare themselves the labour of the concept, in order to be ready with the snappiest instantaneous assessments of everything the world of art and writing have to offer." 

Truly,

CS