The Groundlings' Argument

Terry Teachout takes a break from his seemingly ceaseless self-promotion on his blog, About Last Night, to quote the money grafs rather than a teaser from one of his Wall Street Journal articles:

Is it possible for a critic to know too much? Not a chance. The unhappy truth is that it’s far more common for us not to know nearly enough about the art forms we review. (If you doubt it, ask any artist.) But I’ve also discovered that the accumulation of knowledge can inhibit our ability to appreciate an artistic experience. I know middle-aged opera buffs who never seem to enjoy the performances they attend. Whenever they go to “La Traviata,” they always end up spending the whole intermission grousing about how the soprano wasn’t as good as some half-forgotten diva they heard in Milan 37 years ago. They’ve lost the knack of enjoying the performances they’re seeing — not to mention the piercing beauty of the music they’re hearing....

[T]he more you learn about an art form, the harder it becomes to enjoy it in a straightforward, uncomplicated way. The literary critic R.P. Blackmur had this phenomenon in mind when he observed that “knowledge itself is a fall from the paradise of undifferentiated sensation.” Go to “Swan Lake” for the first time and you’ll be blown away by the flood of gorgeous new sights and sounds that spills over you. Go 20 times and you’re more likely to notice that the orchestra played out of tune and the ballerina did 31 fouettés instead of 32.

That’s not snobbishness. It’s connoisseurship, and it’s a good thing — unless it gets between you and the immediate experience of art. Gratuitous pickiness is a soul-killing trap against which the critic must always be on guard....

Yes, connoisseurship is indeed a good thing. The argument — if I may dignify it by so calling it — that those well-informed in matters of art know too much for their own good, and that displays of their well-informed-ness are a mark of their snobbishness or elitism, is an argument that's been mounted perennially and from time out of mind by groundlings and philistines everywhere to justify their own abject ignorance and paucity of understanding in matters of art. That the argument still holds weight today says more about our pop-culture-infested, grotesquely equalitarian culture than it does about those it attempts to denigrate.