As we have seen, many forms of music criticism that either reject the above-andbeyond or seek it outside of human agency have the quality of a distillation. Refining art to its simpler elements is said to liberate criticism from theologies of transcendence by showing music in its natural state. In its strongest, most rationalistic forms, the ambition to secure art from false promises of escape prompts a questioning of the work of culture itself. The core of the problem with art and its criticism is, finally, that it is made, not begotten. Intention, idea, sentiment—this traditional nomenclature for art is understood as something that the mind has fabricated, and that very status undercuts its authority.

There have been other ways of relating made things to given things, and without resorting to metaphysics. The philosopher and historian Giambattista Vico, for his part, inverted their authority. The very fact that humans are the authors of concepts means that concepts should be more intelligible to us than the givens of nature, whose author is God: “For the first indubitable principle above posited is that this world of nations has certainly been made by men, and its guise must therefore be found within the modifications of our own human mind. And history cannot be more certain than when he who creates the things also describes them.” By this view, it is false to distinguish what is true (verum) from what is made (factum). “‘The true is precisely what is made’ (Verum esse ipsum factum),” as Vico describes the learning of the first Italians. Yet the strong modernist skeptic views made things as unstable and accidental things.

And thus also corrosive. So fundamental a distrust of the mind leaves a deromanticized art criticism in a tricky spot. It is undeniably true that concepts as well as social norms are fabrications. The problem is not with that fact, but with the implication that some measure of certitude is available against which norms and rules can be seen as corruptions—which begs the question, corruptions of what?