As in politics, so in art: The National Review does not like "The Velvet Underground" and they aren't saying why

On Armond White's review of Todd Haynes's film "Velvet Underground" in the current National Review:

The author, critic Armond White, does not seem to distinguish between the VU's music and lyrics saying something he doesn't like and saying nothing at all. He wants to erase the 60s because like the rest of the right wing with its 'culture wars' he wishes the culture of opposition that was so strong then can just be paved over and forgotten. And so here the VU is the scapegoat for what has long been marketed as a singular decade in our history. Critics like White are handmaidens of censorship. But the key to all this is that he says nothing about the meaning of their lyrics and music. Surely if you want to argue against something, you make a more consequential case if you first represent it on its own terms, so that you at least know what you are talking about -- and the readers who sympathize with your polemic may be substantively persuaded rather than just told not to look into this particular box because critics with the right politics think it's Pandora's and they want to remind us that the prevailing majority opinion in subsequent political culture has done an imperfect but excellent job in keeping it shut. When it feels unchallenged, people on the right tend to operate with the critical tactics of scorn and erasure: that's horrible, isn't it obvious?, or, they aren't saying anything (and that's why it annoys you so much?). The truth is the VU's lyrics and music are interesting and worth talking about. The National Review is contemptuous enough of its readers to expect them to trust its critics rather than make arguments. Here their reader doesn't even know why the critic doesn't like the music of one of rock and roll's most interesting and influential bands. Without the VU, there would probably not have been the Talking Heads, the Boomtown Rats, and lots of other bands. They also were critical (call it self-criticism if you want, since it is ironic yet more sympathetic than moralistically condemning) if the so-called counterculture. Among other things, as Haynes brings out, they hated the hippies and their flower power culture. Pop music is like any other art form: You can choose to like or not like any particular artist. But if you are a critic, why denounce something you don't even care to try to understand? White's review insults cinemagoers, music lovers, and the general public. The question is not who cares about the Velvet Underground and why, but who cares about the National Review and its critics who don't care to try to understand what they are so eager to denounce. God save us from political commentators who operate similarly. The only thing that should be cancelled in response to the film and Armond White's review of it is the subscriptions to the National Review on the part of curious and thoughtful curious members of the public. I guess it is the magazine for conservative Americans who want to be told how to vote, but not why.

The National Review follows the logic of social media, which just takes further the commodification of opinion, in a society that broadly holds to a sophistical understanding of democracy, where the liberty of all is upheld by holding there are no truths, only opinions. Then the marketplace of opinion works by people making unargued declarations, which then will provoke a 'debate' that is not one. The NR counts, with White's following their direction, on their being only a pseudo-debate in our deformed public sphere. Reactions, positive or negative, sell by conferring the authority of attention. Hence also trolling as a tactic of political rhetoric, as in Donald Trump.

Those of us who are critics, whether discussing politics, theory, or art, should resist the gravitational pull of such a dense void. If every opinion gets justified or criticized (or both) by a critic making public use of reason, working by not only factual evidence that is disputable but also those interpretive and other claims that can and should be given reasons, with the critic's conferral of value as well as his or her unfolding of the meaning of the art work, on the grounds that the things that matter most in art and in understanding the world generally, are enigmas with a density that rewards attention, - if we do our job properly in this regard, each film review will be like every film made during the Vietnam War that also criticized and denounced it - in this way, by resisting the evil that results from stupidity in the process of making sense of our shared experience, we can help fight the right even when doing so is not part of the topic of the discussion.