72. The Critic Problem: Why Great Art Resists Easy Explanations

In 1903 Rainer Maria Rilke answered a young poet who had sent him verses to judge, and began by saying that criticism is the thing least able to reach a work of art. Then he told him to stop looking outward and ask himself, alone at night, whether he truly had to write. One of us reads it still frustrated by opening night at the Joslyn Art Museum, where a show of photographs from the Amon Carter Museum began with a talk neither of us liked. One of us found it narrow, the other underprepared, ...