Ron Silliman on Andrew Keen
July 26, 2007
It’s not all that often that I wholeheartedly agree with Ron Silliman… and on a topic of wider import than poetics too!
Says Ron addressing the happily infamous Andrew Keen (link added):
“Andrew Keen is getting a lot of play these days for his book, The Cult of the Amateur, which argues that the web has opened the floodgates to “non-professional†critics who will run their various fields of inquiry into the ground because they lack the “standards†& discipline of, say, NYTBR or The New Criterion. My own sense is that Keen is 100 percent wrong. Critical sites have grown on the web precisely because the institutional critical apparatus in this country is so sclerotic & inept. This is true of not just of newspapers, but of many academic journals as well. Nothing breeds mediocrity faster than the “consensus building†process of any refereed journal. I may not agree with the likes and dislikes of SoQ bloggers like C. Dale Young or Joseph Duemer, but there is no question that their blogs have far more integrity as critical sites than, say, The New York Times or the NBCC in general. And I trust readers to be able to discern the difference. Which I think is just what Mr. Keen fears most.”
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