Everyone loves it when two women in the public eye have a public fight. After about two weeks of standing on the sidelines, pelting them with mud and shouting, "get her!" (metaphorically, you understand), someone in the media will always start on about cat fights and misogyny, and that shuts us up. But two very public fights recently - one man-on-man, one woman-on-man - highlight an eternal truism. It's not women fighting that we like so very much. It's anyone at all fighting. Anger, experienced as a spectator, is comic, exhilarating and utterly engaging. The question is, does it have any place in reasoned criticism, and does it have any justification, coming from the criticised?
OK, I'm talking about Martin Amis v Tibor Fischer, and Philip Hensher v Tracey Emin. Just to recap - Fischer has reviewed Amis's latest book, Yellow Dog, really pretty badly, and I quote: "Yellow Dog is not bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad". Amis has yet to respond. Hensher, meanwhile, called Tracey Emin a half-witted dullard a while back, and she claimed to have responded, but would not elucidate. Since then, he has received unsolicited incontinence pads and small figurines, addressed to Phyllis Henshaw. He thinks they're from Emin, and furthermore, that in calling him Phyllis, she is manifesting homophobia as well as malice. He has no evidence for this, and Emin hotly denies it - only a fool would speculate on whether he's right or not, since in all the shades of grey about what counts as defamation, that one certainly leans towards the "of course it bloody is".
Both Amis and Emin have a line that they trot out quite a lot about newspaper critics. Amis believes that, alone in the critical arts, book reviewing - since it writes about a written form - is more loaded and competitive than any other kind of review (you'd never make a short film about what you thought of Reservoir Dogs, for instance; you'd never respond to modern dance in the form of dance). Emin says "I get completely slagged off by people whose mortgage I'm paying. They write 500 words about me, they pay their mortgage that week." They're both saying roughly the same thing, which is: "You miserable worms! Who are you to judge me?" I would say Emin's was the less intelligent opinion, since it implies that if someone is paying your mortgage, they are above you in the food chain, and you therefore have some serf-like responsibility to be nice about them. By this rationale, she has to be nice about everyone who has ever paid to get into the Tate Modern, which I'm sure she'd find pretty tough going. But then, by the end of this piece, she won't have paid my mortgage, but she will have certainly covered the council tax and got me good and drunk a couple of times, so what do I know?
You can see the problem here - criticism in the media is very different from academic criticism, since the latter takes as given that the work in question is of value, proceeding from there into a study of where its value resides. Papers, conversely, return to first principles - is this any good? If not, why not? Artists of all stamps, naturally, would prefer to be judged by academics, and make the mistake of thinking that this is because academia is de facto more sophisticated than the media.
This isn't true, they just serve different functions. I would balk rather at calling Emin stupid in the name of criticism - conceptual art is nothing if not mysterious, and cannot, rightly, be taken as an IQ test. Beyond that, all you've got is what she actually says, and visual artists tend not to be famous for their logical and verbal rigour. But all that aside, Emin's work clearly angered Hensher, just as Amis's angered Fischer. Furthermore there is nothing wrong with a critic getting angry. The creation of art is by definition the circulation of ideas. Should the critic find these ideas lazy, or odious, or pernicious, then I don't see how he or she could fail to be angry. These things inform our culture, which we all have to live with. The artist obviously has a right to defend or refine or reinterpret these ideas, but doesn't have the right to attack the critic for the very fact of having criticised. It is infinitely better for everyone to be at the angry-critic end of the scale than at the other, which is the critic who was in the pub with the artist the other night, and wouldn't dream of offending her, and besides that, has a book of his own on the way and doesn't want to queer his pitch.
Having said that, critics have to obey a few basic rules if they are not to give the whole business a bad name. Creating a stir just before your own book comes out is underhand. Prosecuting a grudge is in bad faith. Levelling unsubstantiated personal slurs is pointless. These rules are not for the protection of the artists, who are all adults, and usually pretty bolshie ones at that - they are for the protection of the art. When criticism gets too steamy, it deflects attention from the work and turns the whole business into a tawdry scrap, an ill-scripted soap opera - that's worse for the culture than all the bad ideas anyone's ever had, all rolled together.
