Between the two classes, we were.
standing with our plastic cups around Reza Seyed Hosseini, our master of Literary Criticism course, in a limited period in the late 80s that Niavaran Cultural Center was used as the university of art. I don’t remember now who wrote a critique about what movie and where it was published that made lots of noises. We asked his opinion about it. He answered with his eyebrows that were raised all the time and the natural state of his face that was making him look like a man adjusting to a subject, with a half-Azari and half-French accent of Farsi: “Now you can go and tell anyone that Reza is rude, but art criticism has to be like a healthy man’s stool. A healthy man’s stomach digests everything well, and its acids and enzymes work in a way that the necessary substances are absorbed and what it excretes is a mixture that is hard and smooth as much as he would not understand what he had eaten. You can find tomato peel and split pea and vegetables in the stool of a person whose stomach doesn’t work well. Writing literary and art criticism are also the same. A literate critic who has read and seen well, has the ability to digest his knowledge and combine them and then analyze the work without constantly showing his literacy to the reader in the text.”
Over all these years, I have sometimes replaced the word “critique” with “artwork” and this humorous advice has helped me a lot that how a text or work of art should not brag about literacy and knowledge and be able to make an inseparable combination with the individual and social life and cognition.
