These two schools could have strengthened one another, uniting the force and originality of Vorticism with the Bloomsbury brand of sophisticated Frenchifizing. That is how I suspect you get really excellent cultural experiments like Periclean Athens, where more and more people agree on just a few things together, and suddenly you have a culture that is working hard to do worthwhile things together, rather than trying to figure out how to complain about one another. To find and praise worth strengthens it; to praise the praiseworthy aspects of someone’s work doesn’t mean you are co-signing his defects.
When finding fault becomes a widespread habit, that is a catastrophe. Because here are the most able people we’ve got and they are all depressed and bilious and full of hate. Surely we can find the stuff that is good, and to join together to promote that? We can (we must, even) still dismiss the bad, at the same time. It’s possible to use the power of your mind to create the culture in this way. Aesthetic bipartisanship, you could call this. The Fine Art of the Possible.
” This is the conclusion of a piece by Maria Bustillos on the Awl that you should go check out, even if you skip all the stuff about art at the beginning and just look at the “table of Google searches using the phrase “I hate _________,” and put in a lot of divisive-seeming haute-literary names”