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Snark is a gun whose barrel is open at both ends. If not used in scrupulous moderation, it’s bad for the soul. As I’ve said on my own blog, every morally serious critic should stencil on the insides of his eyelids this couplet from Pope: “Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see/Men not afraid of God, afraid of me.” That’s the bottomless pit into which the critic who indulges heedlessly in snark may fall.
When to be snarky? When you’re writing about something pretentious, especially when other critics have been taken in by its pretensions. In art, pretentiousness is all the deadly sins rolled into one. Or when you’re writing about something that’s unserious by definition, especially when its creators are rolling in dough–like, say, the makers of Dracula: The Musical, to which I happily gave both barrels and then some in The Wall Street Journal. Such folk are fair game: they have their cash to keep them warm. In most other circumstances, I think snark is usually contraindicated. What’s more, it should never be used on somebody who isn’t in a position to snark right back at you. Fair’s fair.
Naturally, I’m not talking about dead people. If you’ve got to flush some excess snark out of your system, it’s probably better to spray it all over a famous corpse than on some poor little debutante novelist–unless, of course, she’s twenty years old and just sold the movie rights to her novel for a staggering sum. In that case, she’s on her own.
- terry teachout, "interview with terry teachout," maud newton: blog november 1, 2004
posted November 01, 2004 in art, print. 2000