On The Media: Transcript of "Not So Innocent" (October 5, 2007) RICHARD HALPERN: Right. There's often a kind of loss of innocence that takes place in the paintings themselves, which reflect on a potential loss of innocence on the part of the viewer. I think an interesting example of that is Rockwell's painting called The Art Critic. That's a painting of a young man, a young art student in a museum, who's studying a painting on the wall of a kind of amply-endowed Rubenesque lady. And he's peering at it closely through a magnifying glass, looking at a brooch on the woman's breast. He doesn't notice that he's actually looking at her chest at the same time, but the woman in the painting does notice and leers back at him.

You have a young man, a kind of innocent, who doesn't see what he's looking at, but the painting does see. The painting isn't innocent. And, in a way, that seems to me to spell out the relation between Rockwell's viewers and the paintings themselves. The viewers may be innocent or may be in a state of denial or disavowal but the paintings themselves are very knowing and sophisticated. And they're, they’re looking at us, in a way, more intently than we are at them.

There's a strange certainty about most art and literary criticism. The discourse of the genre dictates that statements about artifacts are to be made in a particular manner that positions the audience into a place of inevitability of perspective. It is the object (painting, book, song...) that always tells of something and shows us something. Sometimes it's the author, sometimes the audience 'can' see something. But it is rarely the critic who has any agency. S/he is always describing what is never what s/he perceives.

The above example of 'activist' criticism shows very clearly how the multiple mental spaces set up by the text interact. There is the space of people in the painting, there's the space of the painting as painting, space of the viewers. Earlier the space of the painter was also established. However, it isn't always clear which space is being referred to at any particular moment or rather what the boundaries of these spaces are. For instance, in the text in bold it isn't clear whether the paintings stand metonymically for their author or speak directly of themselves. This indeterminacy of framing is not dissimilar to the indeterminacy that is the hallmark of art itself. Criticism is then a sort of meta-art (art here includes music, drama and literature) and similar standards can be applied to it.

Criticism is only one example of socially ritualized frame negotiation. It doesn't stand apart from the work, artist, audience or the interaction the work, artist, audience has with the discursive space of the day. Criticism is an integral part of the artistic process at all levels. Creators and audiences take it into account (even if they ignore particular artifacts of criticism) and actively engage in it themselves (reminiscent of folk etymologies). The same applies to the political process, processes of language change. In all these instances, there is a ritualized parallel to the natural frame negotiation that goes on. The extent of how deep this frame negotiation can go is not quite clear yet but it may be guided to a large extent by the availability of given phenomena to introspection (as described well by Len Talmy).