Know hope (A variation on an Obama theme)

Know hope.
“Art is the greatest game,
the supreme entertainment,
because you discover the game as you play it....

We want to see,
to feel, to understand,
to respond in a new way.
Why should pedants be allowed to spoil the game?”

—Pauline Kael, film critic, in her essay "Is there a cure for film criticism?" (1962)
in her book I lost it at the movies (1965).

Know hope.

“By the mid-eighties,
21-year-old art-history majors would be writing papers on 26-year-old graffitists.
The modernist ethos was no longer a side issue in art history;
it had become an industry...
For every ounce of fresh thinking,
this overload produced a ton of incantatory jargon,
art writing in which a fear of missing the bus mingled with
the desire to find historical heroes and heroines under every shrub.”

“Being a critic is weird.
All you can really do is write what your own individual reaction is,
and hope it has a little bit of resonance with a reader or two.
I think if you try to anticipate the reader’s response—
by either deliberately going with the flow,
or going against it—
you turn into either the worst kind of shill,
or the worst kind of scold.

So I guess I’m writing for people who are interested in
expanding their own listening technique
by eavesdropping on how someone else does it.”

Know hope.

“We’re in transition.
We’re in the foothills of a revolution.
We don’t quite know where that’s going to work out.
What we do know is that
a new form of journalism is gradually emerging.
A much more collaborative and participatory journalism.

We previously treated journalists like secular priests.
“We told you what the news was,
and you accepted that was the case.”
Now we find people are constantly saying,
“That’s not news. That’s old news. Why don’t you do this?”
Or “That was interesting,
but I think I can help you with that.”

KNOW HOPE!