Critics? You need us some-more than ever Jonathan Jones Art and pattern

Great ... or merely good? … Lady Gaga. Photograph: Sarah Lee

It is the pursuit of a censor to reject the relativism and pluralism of complicated life. All the time, from a million sources, we are bombarded with informative information. A new movie or the song of the impulse can come in the minds in any case of peculiarity and in any case of the interest. In fact, in this age of overload, insusceptibility is the majority expected outcome of so most competing images. If we do have an cultured preference it is expected to be a consumerist one, a flitting ambience to be lost and transposed in a moment. You think I"m joking? A Single Man, Lady Gaga, Avatar, Invictus, David Mitchell"s new ask show and Martin Amis"s new novel are swimming in my mind to one side Gordon Brown"s tantrums even though I haven"t seen, review or consciously listened to any of them. In this inaudible sensorium we call a culture, critique is some-more required than ever. Don"t attend to the voices that discuss it you critique is dead: they are sent by the devil. The alternative day I wrote that Michael Haneke is not only a great film-maker, but a great one. Apparently, not everybody agrees. But if we can"t mount behind for dual seconds from the pour out of new drive-in theatre and new stars, to admit the honestly inestimable and demand on the specialness, where will we be? I contend it again: Haneke is a � la mode great, and a investigate of his drive-in theatre is value 50 trips to the cinema. I hold this to be the really duty of criticism. Real critique is not about specifying great from bad; it is about specifying great from great. There"s copiousness of distressing art around, but it customarily finds the turn in the end. The abuse of the time, in the arts, is sameness and ordinariness: the utterly great movie that gets an Oscar, the OK artist who becomes a megastar. Truly conspicuous art is singular and to see it when it comes, to quarrel for it, to hold it up as an e.g. for the rest – that is the critic"s loyal task.