Airing out

"[Criticism] neither saves the things we love (as we would wish them saved) nor ruins the things we hate. Edinburgh Review could not destroy John Keats, nor Diderot Boucher, nor Ruskin Whistler; and I like that about it. It's a loser's game, and everybody knows it. Even ordinary citizens, when they discover you're a critic, respond as they would to a mortuary cosmetician -- vaguely repelled by what you do yet infinitely curious as to how you came to be doing it. So when asked, I always confess that I am an art critic today because, as a very young person, I set out to become a writer -- and did so with a profoundly defective idea of what writing does and what it entails."
-- from "Air Guitar" by Dave Hickey.
Mr. Hickey's recent appearance in the pages of Harper's inspired me to re-read several favorite essays in Air Guitar. This is the first in what will probably be a series of quotations from those essays.