Ben Davis on the fallout from his critical review of Devon Rodriguez's "Underground," and what it says about "parasocial aesthetics."

Learn the difference between feedback and criticism. Feedback is primarily for you; criticism (in the sense of "a movie critic" or "an arts critic") is primarily not. Criticism is part of an ongoing cultural conversation that's designed to make everybody smarter and better and more thoughtful and to advance the art form itself; it's done even when the creator of a piece is long dead. It's not really for you. Feedback, on the other hand, is aimed at you to make you better, and that's the only kind of feedback worth paying attention to. If you can't listen to it and take it in without your hackles rising, you will never become good. Period, boom, g'bye.

“Criticism is only useful when it helps us see something we are having difficulty seeing on our own; it’s not helpful when it tells us to stop looking. ‘But what if everyone pays attention to the wrong things? We have to guide them to the right things!’ Well, eventually everyone stops paying attention to everything: time is pretty effective that way. With that in mind, we should only worry about pointing the good out, and not worrying about the bad. And in the age of the Internet, this dictum takes on added force. Think of it as the Paris Hilton effect: talking about the bad just encourages the bad. No one has ever cured a celebrity of anorexia by posting photographs of her on the Internet, or has helped Charlie Sheen get off alcohol by getting exasperated at his stupidity. Trashing bad people and bad art does not make you a good person.”

Another ‘response album’ from Marc Weidenaum's blog minions, this a collection of recordings that use a human sigh as their source material. The response is to the grumpy, narrow-minded art critic Richard Dorment, who questioned the integrity and quality of artist Susan Philipsz’ Turner Prize-winning ‘Lowlands‘, as well as a number of other artistic endeavors that he considers unworthy of anything more than a ‘long low collective sigh’.

"An artist is Advanced when they do something that is neither expected of them nor the opposite of what is expected of them." Tongue-in-cheek, but the article lives on. Note the notes on Val Kilmer and C-Murder.

On Advancement Theory: it's not bad; you just don't get it. "The most Advanced figure of all time is Lou Reed [who in] 1986 released the song 'The Original Wrapper,' in which he raps about AIDS, Louis Farrakhan, and waffles."

"Your guide to understanding Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and other highly Advanced musicians." If a genius does something you don't understand, it's probably even more genius.