The Independent - London, January 8th, 1995
WHO COMES first, the artist or the critic?
Until relatively recently there was no doubt about the answer to that question: artists had precedence, critics were followers and latecomers, the humble if sometimes pretentious servants of the work of art. Writers created beautiful poems, fictions, plays, while critics extracted a few of their favourite quotations, added some prose commentary and called the result, say, Early Modernism or Mrs Oliphant: The Last Phase. So critics were merely opinionated and belated shadows, totally dependent on the works they discussed.
Oscar Wilde disagreed, and i...
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