Teachout on Pinter

Terry Teachout, a critic wotj whom I have only recently (and sadly, not well enough) become acquainted, has written an excellent defense of Pinter’s Nobel. A Corner reader has added a useful sidenote to the debate, which suggests that the left, far from being bastions of artistic evenhandedness, are just as willing to shun art for political reasons as the right. But as Teachout makes so eloquently clear, good art is good art, and whether it or its author advocates a particularly disagreeable political position is relevant to discussion (discussion which I have been known, from time to time, to engage in myself), but it is no way to judge the artistic merits of a work. Too many political wonks have been raised parsing newspapers for bias and skimming op-eds for distortion. In that world, good writing is often determined by the positions one advocates more than the flair with which one does so. But one does not have to accept the values of either a piece of art or its artist in order to appreciate the craft with which it was made. Terry Teachout understands this, and that is just one reason why he is a fantastic critic.