Will We Be Arguing Forever What Makes Good Art?

Reading Andrea Long Chu’s new book, ‘Authority’

Photograph by Tucker Lieberman. Black dog with white paws on a green bed. What makes a photo good, who decides, and how?

“Why do we ask the critic to have authority?” This is the opening question of Andrea Long Chu’s essay, “Authority,” published for the first time last week in her book of the same name. She’s talking about literary criticism and other forms of art criticism — that is, an academic specialty or profession of giving informed opinions about someone else’s creative work. She herself is a critic, and she wants us to ask: What’s authority?

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It probably means knowing your material, convincing everyone else that you know it, and producing something that adds to “the treasury of human knowledge,” yeah? On the other hand, we don’t always want writers to exude authority. Sometimes we prefer that they admit their incomplete knowledge as a form of humility.

Any authority should be based “in some kind of good reason”; we should be wary of someone who “answers ‘Why?’ with ‘Because I said so’.”

A few days ago, I wrote about Nikki Stern’s 2010 book Because I Say So: Moral Authority’s Dangerous Appeal. Stern objected to the reverence with which, for a time, U.S…