An 'old chestnut' (or just something time-fritterers talk about)?

Angela Bennie's essay in the SMH (Spectrum, Jul 29-30) challenges the idea that 'it is a critic's right to be subjective'. She asks:

... what happens to a work of art in a culture that sees criticism as nothing more than a democracy of free-falling, free-floating subjectivities?

And answers:

Within such a culture the work of art loses any possibility of, or claim to, aesthetic distinction, or difference. It would be just one more commodity in a culture that reduces everything towards the mean, that thrives on the exaltation of the average, to use Patrick White's unforgettable, spine-tingling description of Australian culture.

I'm tempted to brush this 'old chestnut' aside as forever philosophically impenetrable, but then I'm a fairly simple man when it comes to these issues and I know that on many occasions I've come to value a work of art more after learning something of its history, religious significance or technical detail, for example, all delivered (and I'm feeling a tad self-conscious here) ... objectively. (And very often by a critic -- in the broad sense of the term.)

Yet it turns out I might not be receiving the best customer service in this regard. Bennie highlights the ominous possibility that far from 'analysing the evidence in the work' or steering intelligently around such things as 'the sway of opinion over judgement', the use of 'banal' critical language' or 'the promotion of the ideological status quo' (a collection of perceptions of Australian critics from abroad (!)), 'the [Australian] critic's fundamental critical task is to give opinion, the stronger the better, especially opinion clotted with bile'.

They'll be copping an email from me in the morning, that's for sure!

She also provides a couple of lovely lines from Rebecca West's 1914 essay The Duty of Harsh Criticism. Forgive the third-handedness of this, but I'm going to transcribe these lines as they appear in Bennie's piece before tracking down the primary source myself - assuming I don't get distracted or become disinterested. West warned:

Decidedly, we shall not be safe if we forget the things of the mind. Indeed, if we want to save our souls, the mind must lead a more athletic life than it has ever done before and must more passionately than ever practise and rejoice in art. For only through art do we cultivate annoyance with inessentials, powerful and exasperated reactions against ugliness, a ravenous appetite for beauty. These are true guardians of the soul.

There's a book or two in that paragraph but it certainly won't be mine. I'd get too hung up on the definitions for a start. And while I like the idea that through art 'we cultivate annoyance with inessentials', I'm not sure I agree with the 'only'.