Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

“The Art of Responding to Value” is about the thrilling way Aesthetic Realism understands this subject: What does it mean to be a good critic? Do we attach a value to some things that they don’t truly have—while not seeing the real value, the goodness, the beauty in other things, including other people? Is the way we find (and don’t find) value in the world the best for us—and what interferes with our seeing of value? You’ll be surprised and greatly encouraged reading “The Art of Responding to Value,” the exciting new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We begin here to serialize the important, greatly kind lecture Criticism Is the Art of Responding to Value, which Eli Siegel gave in 1970.

Often, when people hear the word criticism they think of two things. Take someone we’ll call Greg Foster: he associates the word criticism with persons telling him, quite unpleasantly, what they dislike about him. Then he remembers that the word also has something to do with art, and with some people trying to say what’s good and bad in the various arts. Well, criticism can include these, but it’s much bigger, includes much more. It can be horribly wrong—and magnificently, warmly right.

Each of us, Aesthetic Realism explains, is a critic all the time, of everything we meet. As the title of this lecture states, “criticism is the art of responding to value.” And we constantly have a feeling (which may be right or wrong), about the value of what we meet. If we buy one product rather than another, we’re responding to what we consider their value. When we leave our house on a spring day and happily unbutton a jacket we’d put on, we’re responding to the value of April warmth for us. In another field: many a woman who had seen a man as a hero of love, later came to see him as a complete heel: she was likely wrong in both instances, but in both she was “responding to value.”

So we are critics always. And Aesthetic Realism shows that the first thing necessary to be a good critic is to have a desire—real and big—to know….Read more