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bottom-up fervor spontaneously aroused in the proletariat. Other modernists viewed the problem on the level of the individual; they warned of a "dissociation of sensibility" exacerbated by professionalism and over-specialization, which rendered people incapable of amalgamating experience, of feeling thoughts and thinking through feelings. Such worries plagued Clement Greenberg, for instance: "Instead of fulfilling yourself through work," he sighed in 1945, "you mutilate and narrow yourself."

Modern society recognizes the artist as most capable of working in as humane a manner as this society will allow. What privileges artists is not some innate gift with which they were born. Rather, the work done by artists is privileged and humane because artists retain a larger degree of responsibility and say in decision making (for which the downside is usually zero monetary compensation and thus subhuman living conditions). The artist is mercifully more able to work as a whole person, less as a specialized cog in machine, or under a boss and for the bottom line. The absorption of art into the academy paradoxically threatens this, by splitting artists between two realms - private making and public discussion - each with its separate protocols, specialized knowledges and skills, etc.

Question: Has marketing specialization into competencies and apparatuses made
criticism irrelevant?

Relyea: Sadly yes. And I hate to say this because it means I agree with the complaint repeated over the last 100 years by people like T.S. Eliot and Greenberg - people whose conservatism I'm uncomfortable with. These people were always complaining about criticism becoming too academic. This is something I talk about in an article from a few years back called "Allover and At Once" (http://www.x-traonline.org/vo l6_1/all_over.html). For these modernists, culture meant cultivation, the development of the faculties, passage from intuition to understanding, balance between feeling and thought. The threat to this developing body, whether the culture's or the individual's, was the discontinuity, the splintering, stunting and decentering brought on by too much specialization and the collapse of any over-arching belief system. Hence all the early 20th-century hand wringing over "the two cultures" or "the dissociation of sensibility." To snap sensibility back into alert unison, one exercised judgment. Greenbergian criticism was about that absolute value, the subjective feeing of quality, and the historical,

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