A Review of This Piece by Yonza the Barbarian

Probably the most dissapointing part about the essay "A Review of This Piece" is its very instantiation, that is, the very fact that it ever crossed the line from a funny little idea for a post-modern, meta, self-referential piece to a written-out realization of the idea on a GoogleDoc document. It would have been enough had the author done something like, say, write a story where an aspiring author has an idea for a piece conceptually identical to "A Review of This Piece." This would have been sufficent. This is the same critique I have for works like Duchamp's "The Fountain" which is a sculpture that is actually just a urinal with Duchamp's signature on it. Yeah, yeah, Duchamp makes a funny point with this piece, but do we actually have to see the urinal for the point to hit us? No. We don't. We get it -- it's a subversive challenge to thought about what makes art art. I don't need to look at a toilet to get his point. Just tell me the idea and spare the actual ripping-a-urinal-from-a-wall process.

And it is the same with "A Review of This Piece." Just by telling someone the idea you could sort of glean everything there is to be gleaned about the concept. Just like seeing the urinal won't provoke any additional thought once you already "get" the concept, reading "A Review of This Piece" does not provoke any more thought than reading a sentence or two about the concept would have.

Furthermore, the meta and the self-refferential are, in the humble opinion of this author, both a tired and a limited artistic playground. We've seen it all already: the circle of stairs that seem to go forever upward, stories within stories, realities within dreams, this in that and that in this. The whole post-modern self-reference game was vivified and exhausted with Valesquez's Las Meninas. Any kick we get out of seeing the twists of a meta-piece, well, it is no more fulfilling than seeing a magician show you your card. It is superficial and overdone, is what it is.

But the essay also lacks in its formative aspects. The author's prose are uneven: sometimes they show the ambivalance of a child and sometimes they show the self-righteous authority of a spoiled monarch. As for the former voice, we see it in the opening sentence, "Probably the most dissapointing..." where the "probably" functions as an unecessary qualifier and leaves readers doubting the authors competance. The highhandendness crops up in the middle of the essay, "The author's prose are uneven: sometimes they show the ambivilance of a child and sometimes they show the self-righteous authority of a spoiled monarch." A "spoiled monarch"? Not only is this simile distastefully extreme and hypocritical, but it is out of place. Why "monarch"? Why not something more topical like wall street bigwig or CEO. Also -- and this is inevitable when you undertake "meta" pieces -- the text often becomes too cerebral and dense. Take the following: "if a given piece can reference itself --e.g. if it could draw a quote from the end of itself in the beginning of itself -- then it would have to be atemporal because a nod to the end already exists in the beginning." If I wanted a tongue twister, I'd recite "she sells sea shells."

But for all its flaws, "A Review of This Piece" makes a modest effort in redeeming itself because, admittedly, it is a moderately interesting concept. It touches on certain issues of aesthetics -- questions about whether the written word is really an art that is temporal (like music) or if it is atemporal (like paintings). The thought experiment goes that if a given piece can reference itself --e.g. if it could draw a quote from the end of itself in the beginning of itself -- then it would have to be atemporal because a nod to the end already exists in the beginning. Music, on the other hand, only exists through time since the end of a piece is never really certain at the beginning of that piece (even if all the notes are written, any given performance of a piece can vary, so you never know, for example, how loud the flutist will play the last note, or if the man playing the cello will sneeze and play an E instead of an A etc.).

The most important fact that this concept brings out, however, is a bit more broad and a bit more profound. "A Review of This Piece," more than anything else, is a demonstration of, specifically the creative process, but less specifically of human thought and judgment in general. In this sense the piece is not unique in its self-referential criticism, it is just unique in that it sifts out everything but the self-referential criticism. We are all self-critics. We are constantly creating something, whether it is a word or gesture, a thought or a decision, an interjection or an objection, whether it is going in for the kiss or a sending the e-mail or taking the job or quitting the job. And just as we create them and they are in our purview, it is then bound to be critiqued, mulled over, scrutinized, and it is often difficult to see when or if the distinction between impulse and scrutiny is there. Self-doubt. Self-aggrandizement. A knock of the palm on the forhead. A shit-eating grin. A clutch of our hair in regret or in guilt. A million deicisions to look back upon and to count and compile and to do this only as the list of decisions grows.

All-in-all, what is redeeming about the essay, its more poetic moments, its more insigtful moments, are outweighed by the fact that it could never stand on its own, and even if it could, this could never be admitted lest the entire purpose of it remain unrealized. I would suggest that you spend your time doing better things, and not read "A Review of This Piece" by Yonza the Barbarian.