Me on Denby on Snark

OK, David Denby. I wanted his indictment of snark to be good. I read a screed -- an "agony", if you please -- against quirk that ran in the Atlantic about two years ago, and I thought it was good, which is to say well-argued, and it made me kind of mad because I loved all of the things that it was slightly dismissive of (Royal Tenenbaums, Flight of the Conchords, Ira Glass). I thought that it was all wrong, but I liked that it formulated intelligently a position that I viewed as incorrect. It thought that there was too much quirk, that quirk was overdeployed, &c. I thought that all it was really doing was lumping some common things together that were, for their own reasons, bad, and announcing them as a bad form of quirk while salvaging the things they liked. As such, it was ultimately unsatisfying on its own, but at least it articulated a position that made my own, pro-quirk position more easily defensible.

Snark does the same sort of thing -- it rattles off about forty things that annoy David Denby, says that they are making everyone mean, and then says that they ought to stop. His problem is a harder one, though, to tackle than the Great Quirk Issue of Aught Seven, because snark is wider ranging and more insidious than quirk, which, when it is bad, is just kind of annoying. It's an evasion of art, is bad quirk, while snark suffocates art. Indeed, according to David Denby, "contemporary art is post-aesthetic." The snarkers don't make art; he seems to suggest that they are artistically impotent; all they do is make wisecracks. And of course, that is true of some of the scenarios that Denby describes. He mentions Penn Jillette saying that, during the 2008 presidential primaries, Obama outperformed Hillary Clinton in February, that being Black History Month, and that Clinton should do better in March beause that is "White Bitch Month". All of the volume of Denby's pique against Snark ought to be directed at such stupid things as that. But this is where, again, his scope outpaces the Quirk issue, and goes too far. He wants to say that all vicious bitchiness is of a piece with that shockingly unfunny thing that Penn Jillette. And of course, other named snarkers, including betes noires like gawker, wonkette, and Spy Magazine, do nothing of the kind.

Denby is particularly insistent about two issues. First, he is constantly invoking his love of the Colbert Report as evidence that he appreciates vituperation when it is properly aimed. And secondly, he is constantly calling upon a notion of "knowingness" as the element of snark that is particularly galling. Neither of these points, unfortunately, make any sense when stacked against his actual complaints. The kinds of nasty humor to which Denby pays lip service as valuable public goods are, of course, as dependent on knowingness as anything put up in the dreaded blogosphere, only the knowledge to which they appeal is largely to be found in the New York Times. The knowledge to which snark appeals is apparently unacceptable for its being found elsewhere, in all sorts of low culture media. And the biggest mistake that Denby makes here is his assumption that the sort of knowingness he derides is sought, that it is something that the snickering snarkers have gone out of their way to achieve. It is in fact quite the opposite.

What Denby spectacularly fails to consider is that everyone today can be appealed to as in a position of knowingness, because everyone is told things constantly, and all of the time. The things that he decries as snark (besides the obvious straw men like that Penn Jillette quote, which I guess he thinks trades on knowing that March is women's history month) are almost always commentary about commentary, more information about how much damn information we are always having thrown at us. I know way more than I want to about all of the actors, writers, athletes about whom I care, and the supposedly destructive snark is not a gleefully wicked celebration of that fact, but a lament. Snark is so sick of supposedly earnest information that, even as it itself presents more information, it rails against the whole damn thing. And that's what Denby, somewhat surprisingly, fails to see: this form of communication that so outrages him is itself a form of outrage, an exhaustion itself rather than an exhilaration.