Know Your Enemy
"[He] gets so excited by the sound of his own opinions that his voice rises to a childish squeak. For me, he has an unwavering cloth ear, glass eye and polythene soul for culture, a flat-pack intellect of received truisms and committee-correct cliches, but is carried along by an innocent and meritless belief that his views are spring rain to a parched wasteland."
A A Gill on 'Newsnight Review' regular Ekow Eshun, director of "that zoo of onanistic, worthless pretension" the ICA.
Gill may know how to be entertainingly spiteful - I'll give him that - but he's a complete tosser and seems to have no sense of irony or self-awareness. His tirade against 'Newsnight Review' concludes with his admission that he "simply can't abide culture consumers who think criticism is point-scoring in an argument. It's not. That's a dinner party. THIS is criticism". But what is all the above if not public point-scoring of a particularly vindictive kind?
Friday, April 25, 2008
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2 comments:
Very true. It's far easier to come with clever put-downs, and verbose dismissals (Gill has made a career of it) than to actually engage in real criticism which Gill has forsaken. Gill's smugness is overwhelming and tempers everything he writes now. Shame.
Tis true. And Newsnight Review is immensely entertaining precisely because the different critics are so different. I often find Ekow's opinions counter mine, often in an annoying fashion, but that's half the fun!
It's frustrating when someone who is clearly as witty as Gill is (or at least was, way back when) stoops to such a level. He has in many ways become a parody of himself. It's a fine line that the wittily offensive must tread (I'm thinking of Charlie Brooker at this point...)
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