THIS IS NOT ART - Friday / NYWF Panels:-
Waking from my slumber as the sun rose at half past five, freezing in the chill and subsequently putting on more clothes and falling back asleep, until finally waking once more a few hours later coated in my own sweat - oh, the luxuries of sleeping in a tent! Rise, change, clean, eat, prepare, move out, buy sunglasses, make way to event one; and TINA Day 2 was ready for a proper start. You know, the kind of start that values intelligent discussion over sweaty situations. Unless we can create a sweaty/intelligent 2-hit combo for early morning TINA 2011, that is. Library Athletics, anyone?
Critical Animals, the self-criticising (yet not-quite-self-loathing) arm of TINA held a housewarming party to give Friday a jovial start, but I decided to be fashionably late, hence buying those
sunglasses. I arrived in time for the majority of the first panel of the day, “Critiquing Criticism: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better”. The topic of criticism and the critic came up a few times across several panels throughout days 2 and 3 of TINA (I’m actually from the future, don’t tell anyone), so as the introduction to all panels to come, it was quite relevant. The panel discussion focused around various mediums of criticism, but I mainly picked up on that of music criticism, particularly the idea that reviews and music criticism can be viewed as two separate entities. Are they? Of course, a review can (and should) encompass criticism and under that thought they might be considered one in the same, but if a review is designed for a particular audience in mind (fans of the artist, people who have never heard of the artist, musicians, other writers), does it lack an integral element of criticism which occurs from writing without constraint of ‘audience’ or the demographic of your publication?
