Andrea Long Chu was once one of Brittany's favorite Sex and the City bloggers, and she's now a Pulitzer-winning critic. Andrea lends her critical eye to everything from the TV show Yellowstone to the work of Sally Rooney to pro-Palestinian protests and free speech. And she does it with wit, style, and fearlessness. Brittany chats with Andrea about her new book, Authority - a collection of some of Andrea's best work, along with two new essays. They discuss why art is a "fossil record" of desire, what kind of authority critics have, and why we might need to rethink what criticism should do for us.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who is Andrea Long Chu and what is her significance?
I loved it. I loved it. That's Andrea Long Chu. Once one of my favorite Sex and the City bloggers, now a Pulitzer Prize winning critic. And you know what? I wasn't surprised by the news of her win in 2023. She lends her critical eye to everything from the TV show Yellowstone to the work of Sally Rooney to pro-Palestinian protests and free speech. And she does it with wit, style, and fearlessness.
Chapter 2: What does criticism mean in the context of art?
Like, if you've ever read Andrea Longchu, you know she is eviscerating people in some of these pages. Andrea is here today because some of her best writing has been collected into a book called Authority. It's a lot of her published essays and two new ones. In this book and our conversation, she has given me so many new ways to look at art, from highbrow literature to lowbrow TV.
But she also asks, what kind of authority do critics have? And do we need to rethink what criticism should do for us? All right, here's my conversation with Andrea. Let's get critical. To get right into it, you say art can exist for art's sake, but criticism has a job to do.
And in one of your essays, you write that the job of criticism is to give art context rather than art providing the context for itself. I'm really interested in how you do that job. I know that you do a pretty exhaustive deep dive into your subjects. You know, that for book reviews, you read the book you're reviewing and pretty much
everything else that the author has written plus all their interviews about their work. So how do you look past what people might say about their own writing to understand what they're really saying with their writing?
Well, I think it's an excellent question because sometimes artists have no idea what they're doing. I do try and find, you know, absolutely everything I can to a kind of absurd degree. And I really enjoy that, just one, because I... I have that kind of archival impulse.
And because I like finding, you know, little hidden gems where it feels like someone has exactly said the thing that I was suspecting they thought but that they hadn't said yet. Or places where you can see it clearly, you know, bleeding into the work. To some extent, the work of the essay is for them, right?
Say more about that. What do you mean it's for them?
Well, what I mean is that not that they would like it necessarily or even that they would benefit from it, but just that I think that I can show them what it is that they are actually up to because I don't think they're, for the most part, aware of it.
Yeah, when you say that you feel like artists or writers may not be aware of what they're doing, is it that they're too close to the subject? Yeah.
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Chapter 3: How does desire influence art and criticism?
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So I want to turn now from your art criticism to your political criticism and your criticism of criticism itself. It's all kind of bound up together. But let's talk about one of the new essays you wrote for this book called Criticism in a Crisis. And you go back into history and look at all the ways there's always some crisis or another in criticism. And there's a lot of hand-wringing.
I wonder what quote-unquote crisis are we in now? And why has criticism sort of always been in crisis?
Yeah.
So, you know, one of the things I try to do in the book is distinguish between the actual crises that may be facing us today, which I would first of all always say are material ones, from a kind of like existential crisis where periodically throughout history and really from the beginning of criticism, there is this fear that the critic is not going to have the authority to make the claims that he wants to make.
Of course, he
Oh, of course, because critics, like the ones whose writing made it to the papers, those were historically mostly men.
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Chapter 4: What authority do critics really have?
Chapter 5: Why is the relationship between art and desire important?
Chapter 6: How do critics give context to art?
Well, what I mean is that not that they would like it necessarily or even that they would benefit from it, but just that I think that I can show them what it is that they are actually up to because I don't think they're, for the most part, aware of it.
Yeah, when you say that you feel like artists or writers may not be aware of what they're doing, is it that they're too close to the subject? Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, they're doing all kinds of stuff unconsciously that they don't have awareness of. That's the sort of psychological level. There is also a level that is material. One of the chapters in the book is a piece about the television show Yellowstone.
And for me, like, the most consequential thing about that piece is that this guy, Taylor Sheridan, who created Yellowstone and is, you know, making all of these shows for Paramount+, he signed this, like, whatever, nine series deal with them so that he could...
finance buying a ranch that is featured in Yellowstone and which he, you know, even taking away some level of sort of judgment, which, you know, I would not ultimately, but even taking that away, it's like, oh, like it's so interesting to think of a show as essentially a down payment on a property. That's not a metaphor, right?
If I say, oh, the show's a meditation on American masculinity, might be true, but it's like, these things just like exist. Like that to me is very interesting. Like that moment where there is just like pieces of just like mundane reality are kind of like poking out of the text because actual pieces of reality do end up in these works.
And so I like to try to find them and see if they can kind of lead me back out of the text.
You spend a lot of time, as I said, trying to get like really deep into what they think they're doing. But also one of the threads that really comes through is desire, not just in the romantic sense or in the sexual sense, but basically like what people want, why they want it and how that shapes both art and politics.
You wrote an essay about a bunch of recent books that use mixed race Asian characters to kind of talk about what makes them. I'm an Asian American person, Asian American or not. And you come to the conclusion that for Asian Americans, including mixed ones, the identity isn't made totally of genetics or food or upbringing. You write that it's also about choosing to be part of Asian America.
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