Response to MartinL on Anatomy of criticism

I was confused by Frye’s statements such as “The only way to forestall the work of criticism is through censorship, which as the same relation to criticism that lynching has to justice” and “Shakespeare’s own account of what he was trying to do in Hamlet would not be a definitive criticism, nor would a performance of the play under his direction be a definitive performance” too. Right above that first quote in the handout, Frye writes “A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory”. I think Frye is arguing that criticism is a necessity because, as he states, “art for art’s sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself”, if that makes sense. Think of it this way, if there was no one around, i.e. a critic, to say with aptitude, “This poem is awful because X, Y and Z” or “This painting is not very good because of this and that”, then more people would be making art just because they could. So without criticism, which is a “structure of thought and knowledge existing in its own right”, according to Frye, without criticism, more bad art would be produced. If critics didn’t tell Spielberg how bad Indiana Jones 4 was, he might have made part five. It’s that kind of relationship that criticism has to art. For me, Frye had one line in this handout that really summed it up, “Criticism can talk, and all the arts are dumb”.